Magazine
Story Stream
Is It Moral to Watch Football? September 28, 2023
One sports topic that has come up time and again in these pages is the violence of American football. When Cleveland Browns running back Nick Chubb’s season was ruined after he was hit in the leg on “Monday Night Football” last week, the image was so...
The First Cover of Ms. Magazine September 28, 2023
In December 1971, an unusual issue of New York appeared on newsstands nationwide. Readers flipping through its pages would have stumbled upon a forty-page insert, a preview of a forthcoming women’s magazine called Ms. Its tagline was “The New Magazin...
Lan Samantha Chang Revisits ‘Hunger,’ 25 Years Later September 27, 2023
Lan Samantha Chang was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when she wrote many of the stories in her luminous debut collection, Hunger. Published in 1998, Hunger comprises a titular novella and five stories, all filled with exiles and immigrants....
How Elites Ruined the American Left September 26, 2023
Back in the summer of 2020, amid a pandemic and widespread closures, tens of millions of Americans protested police violence and racism in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. The demonstrations for racial justice that year under the banner of Black L...
A Wolfe in Chic Clothing September 26, 2023
Radical Wolfe, an upcoming documentary about my late father, the author Tom Wolfe, covers Dad’s upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, his pioneering New Journalism, his second act as a best-selling novelist, and, not least, his many literary feuds.Dad, a...
Cancel Culture Grows Up September 25, 2023
My favorite social-media controversy of recent vintage was a September 15 post on X (the rebranded Twitter) by the esteemed Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami that read, “As a writer, you can write as much as you want until forty or so, while youth is...
We Should Still Love Kojak September 21, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "We Should Still Love Kojak" by Casey Chalk, published at Law & Liberty.NYPD detective Lieutenant Theodopolis "Theo" Kojak’s eponymous CBS series represented something new in police dramas when it debuted fifty...
Jann Wenner vs. Tokenism September 21, 2023
The long-time cultural partisanship of Rolling Stone magazine was confirmed by its founder Jann Wenner’s recent assertions of race and gender bias. To promote his latest memoir, The Masters, Wenner gave an interview to fawning New York Times writer D...
Substack Can Redeem Online Journalism September 20, 2023
The popular newsletter platform Substack launched its short-form content feature, Notes, in April. Meta rolled out Threads via Instagram in July. Predating these was Mastodon, which had for years already provided the more technically inclined with a ...
The Undoing of a Great American Band September 20, 2023
Is there a way to look at Sly Stone—a musical genius and, for a couple of years, an avatar of spiritual freedom—that isn’t dualistic, split-brained, one thing in opposition to another? That isn’t about light versus darkness, up versus down, Logos ver...
Enemy Territory: Fear and Desire September 20, 2023
Stanley Kubrick was 24 years old when he made Fear and Desire in 1952. He was an autodidact who barely graduated high school and never went to college and, by this time, a former staff photographer for Look magazine with a few documentary shorts to h...
Bari Weiss Derangement Syndrome Is Real September 20, 2023
I hadn’t planned on writing anything about A Clash of the Female Titans, last week’s debate in Los Angeles put on by The Free Press, co-sponsored by FIRE, and featuring author Louise Perry, Red Scare podcaster Anna Khachiyan, technopop star Grimes, a...
How Larry McMurtry Defined the Idea of Texas September 19, 2023
As a boy, Larry McMurtry rode Polecat, a Shetland pony with a mean streak and a habit of dragging him through mesquite thickets. The family ranch occupied a hard, dry, largely featureless corner of north-central Texas, and was perched on a rise known...
Tom Wolfe’s Worldview Came Into Focus In 'New York' September 18, 2023
Too many book critics, when writing about Tom Wolfe, attempted to echo his style. Zowie! Bam! Hrrrrmph!!!! And by failing, they all inadvertently showed why Wolfe was Wolfe. The only one who came close to matching him at the sentence-by-sentence leve...
Malleable Identities September 15, 2023
In our age, it has become a widely accepted truism that identity is self-determined. And yet, few have been willing to tread into the menacing waters of transracialism. While the gender transitions of Caitlyn Jenner and Elliot Paige are celebrated wi...
Everybody Hates Marty September 14, 2023
Look closely at any political project—an electoral campaign, an advocacy group, a small journal of ideas—and more often than not you’ll find that someone very rich is paying the bills. Such endeavors typically claim to represent a popular movement wi...
How Emily Wilson Made Homer Modern September 13, 2023
Some three millennia ago, a blind bard whose name in ancient Greek means “hostage” is said to have composed two masterpieces of oral poetry that still speak to us. The Iliad’s subject is death, and the Odyssey’s is survival. Both plumb the male psych...
This Might Be the End of Aaron Rodgers September 13, 2023
On Monday morning, ESPN and Charter Communications settled a two-week stalemate over carriage fees, which some had postulated could change cable television, and sports along with it, for years to come. One clear factor forced the two sides to the tab...
Romy’s Exuberant Eurodance Revival September 12, 2023
In the opening moments of Romy Madley Croft’s début solo album, “Mid Air,” the British singer makes a request: “Can you turn it up a bit more?” It’s an entreaty often heard from musicians, usually either onstage, as a rallying cry, or in the studio, ...
The Journalist and the Billionaire September 12, 2023
It’s a Saturday night in August, and Walter Isaacson is sitting in the back of Lilette, a restaurant on Magazine Street in his hometown of New Orleans, swizzling a Sazerac. “The question for a biographer,” he tells me, holding forth a little, “is to ...
The Babysitter Who Inspired the ‘Virgin Suicides' September 12, 2023
Although I’d decided to be a writer at the age of 16, I was never in a rush to get published. Virginia Woolf said that no one should publish a novel before he or she turns 30, and that seemed about right to me. Skip the callow, autobiographical comin...
Nabokov, Religion, and the Holocaust September 12, 2023
In the interview with Vladimir Nabokov, conducted in March 1963 for Playboy magazine, the writer Alvin Toffler asked: “As a final question, do you believe in God?” “To be quite candid,” Nabokov replied, “—and what I am going to say now is something n...
Box Office Ben Has Arrived September 08, 2023
On Tuesday night, down set point in the third set tiebreak of his U.S. Open quarterfinal match against Frances Tiafoe, Ben Shelton was in trouble. The 20-year-old, six-foot-four American, making only his fifth Grand Slam main draw appearance, had jus...
On Whit Stillman: The End Is the Beginning Is the End September 08, 2023
In 1989, with a budget of a quarter-million dollars, Whit Stillman couldn’t afford to make a true period piece, which is why Metropolitan is vaguely set “not so long ago.” This phrase, tinged with the melancholy that imbues the film, also serves as t...
Taking the Measure of Man September 07, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "Taking the Measure of Man" by Rachel Lu, published at Law & Liberty. Sometimes, a book manages to impress simply by exceeding low expectations. Senator Josh Hawley’s Manhood was, for me, such a book. I flipped...
