Interview
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The Unusual Life of Quarterback Caleb Williams April 16, 2025
Caleb Williams, the number-one pick in last year’s NFL draft, has almost blocked out the trauma of his rookie season. The Chicago Bears—the team for which he is the starting quarterback—finished at the very bottom of their division. After a promising...
The World Porn Made April 16, 2025
In 1999, the year I turned 16, there were three cultural events that seemed to define what it meant to be a young woman—a girl—facing down the new millennium. In April, Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone lying on a pink bed wearing...
Marcy Dermansky Is In Your Head April 16, 2025
Like the titular hot air balloon, Marcy Dermansky’s sixth novel doesn’t pop on impact — it floats and careens through two lightly dramatic days of the lives of four deliciously unlikeable capital-A Adults....
Can Everyone Be Religious? April 15, 2025
The sharpest and best insight at the core of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, is that religious disaffiliation is effectively the new norm, in practice if not in profession. In other word...
Meet Usha Vance: MAGA’s Enigmatic Second Lady April 10, 2025
When Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Second Lady Usha Vance, went to The Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., on March 13 they were hoping, like all parents of three young children, to have a night out. They didn’t expect to get heckled.“I do...
Why Aren’t You Listening to Jon Pardi? April 09, 2025
Jon Pardi has made his bones on straight-down-the-middle, old-school country. With his brawny twang, clever (but not afraid to be corny) wordplay, and fiddle-forward arrangements, he’s had six number-one country hits across the past decade—including ...
Criticism as Apologetics April 08, 2025
CHIEVING A STAFF writer position is nearly every critic’s dream. Yet not everyone who gets such a coveted role deserves it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Andrea Long Chu undoubtedly does. Her criticism, which has appeared in n+1, The New Yorker, ...
The Epic Grandeur of Vanity Fair April 07, 2025
In a 1974 Paris Review interview, an elderly Archibald MacLeish was asked about “the special pull of the Murphys,” the couple, Gerald and Sara, who personified the 1920s literary scene of American expatriates in Paris. “There was a shine to life wher...
Leslie Bibb Is Having the Time of Her Life April 03, 2025
Leslie Bibb stops herself midway through a long and beautiful rumination about season 3 of The White Lotus to exclaim, “I’m like a babbling brook!” As part of the trio of lifelong friends (alongside Carrie Coon and Michelle Monaghan) reuniting in Tha...
The Art Life March 26, 2025
1. How does Art Arrive on Earth?In the months since filmmaker David Lynch left the planet, under the deep freeze and then the toxic thaw here by the Great Lakes, where they've reinforced the disused industrial roads to truck in heavy equipment for th...
How to Write a Post–Me Too Memoir March 26, 2025
Jamie Hood’s new book, Trauma Plot, flips the confessional memoir on its head. In her piercing account of learning to live in a world defined by sexual violence, Hood weaves her personal story with analysis of the way the “rape survivor” has been fla...
The Ubiquitous Lara Trump March 25, 2025
“Sorry, super busy,” replies someone from Lara Trump’s media team, after I texted to ask for an interview. “I’m working on her music stuff.” The Trumps love to multitask and, in the President’s first 100 days, King Donald’s favorite (that is, only) d...
The Time George Foreman Sang Me Bob Dylan March 25, 2025
Back when I was a young reporter, I needed to interview former heavyweight champion, boxing legend, and grill impresario George Foreman. It would have been the third sports interview of my life. The first was with 1968 Mexico City Olympic medalist an...
TCR Talks with Elizabeth Ellen March 24, 2025
Elizabeth Ellen’s dazzling and darkly funny novel, American Thighs, follows Tatum Grant, a former child actor who steals her daughter’s identity to start her life over as a high school cheerleader. Tatum’s troubled upbringing is the catalyst for her ...
How Business Metrics Broke the University March 19, 2025
In a recent interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo pivoted from his usual focus on the ideological biases of higher education—the prevalence of “critical race theory and gender ideology and li...
The Bill Burr–naissance March 19, 2025
If you’re looking for a snapshot of Bill Burr’s worldview, I recommend listening to the comedian’s wide-ranging interview he sat for on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. Burr was promoting his latest stand-up special, Drop Dead Years, which premiered on Hul...
The Not-So-Discreet Charm of Graydon Carter March 17, 2025
After our interview, Graydon Carter emailed me.“Oh God, did I do okay yesterday? Too boring? Too indiscreet? Drank too much? Didn’t drink enough?”...
Sarah Snook’s Wilde Adventure March 17, 2025
For almost fifteen minutes, we sit looking at a vertical screen on a seemingly empty stage. In the projection, the Australian actress Sarah Snook, in tight closeup, speaks the rapid, bantering prose of Oscar Wilde’s 1890 masterpiece, “The Picture of ...
The Best Sports Movie of the Decade March 14, 2025
Eephus, the new film directed by Carson Lund and cowritten by Lund, Michael Basta, and Nate Fisher, sits perfectly in the middle of the baseball movie and hang-out movie Venn diagram. The movie follows two amateur baseball teams in suburban Massachus...
Belt Talks to John Pistelli, Author of Major Arcana March 13, 2025
Initially, you self-published Major Arcana in a serialized way on your Substack. Tell me about that decision and experience. It didn't start out high-mindedly; I was looking for a way to monetize my Substack since many writers were starting to do rea...
Christina Ricci On Hollywood March 12, 2025
A veteran actress and ambitious future ghost, Christina Ricci already has plans to haunt her star on the Walk of Fame. “It’s a really good corner,” Ricci told IndieWire, standing at the intersection between Hollywood and Argyle....
Lady Gaga Sounds Like Herself Again March 12, 2025
The anxiety of influence, a phrase that the literary critic Harold Bloom coined in 1973 to describe the struggle to write innovative poetry, lives on today in the form of reheated nachos. In internet slang, to reheat someone else’s nachos is to take ...
The Necessity of Nussbaum March 11, 2025
I first encountered Martha C Nussbaum in 1987. She was a guest on Bryan Magee’s BBC television series The Great Philosophers. In each programme, Magee would interview a leading contemporary philosopher about the ideas of a great philosopher of the pa...
Chimamanda Adichie Is a Hopeless Romantic March 10, 2025
One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimananda Ngozie Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published the best seller Americanah, about a young Nigerian woman’s confrontation with race and identity, which quickly...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
