Rooted in Place April 23, 2025
Even though American economic growth continues to beat out the competition, most Americans report being unhappy with their lives as well as the direction of the country. While the United States is richer than its peers, it does worse on a slew of ind...
Tiki’s Tide Crests Again April 18, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO—On the sidewalk in front of a nondescript building on an unremarkable street in a nameless neighborhood one recent Tuesday afternoon, a small crowd begins queuing up. The array of aloha shirts and a large bouncer pleasantly chatting wit...
Indie, Please April 15, 2025
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to many rock shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick. The neighborhoods, like me, were a bit scruffier then. The glass monoliths had not yet swallowed up the waterfront....
Bad Ghibli April 03, 2025
To slop or not to slop. It was one of those days on the internet. Last week, after the introduction of Open AI’s 4o model enabled advanced image generation in ChatGPT, users quickly discovered they could generate a picture of… well, almost anything t...
There’s Nothing Righteous About Vandalizing Teslas April 03, 2025
In my neighborhood just outside of Washington, D.C., most Tesla owners I come across now have a bumper sticker with the words “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” What was once a symbol of middle-class eco-consciousness has turned into a toxic bad...
How the Suburbs Became a Trap April 22, 2024
How do the suburbs feel? Does climbing the stairs of your split-level ranch amid other, similar homes and neighbors create comfort and hope, a feeling of possibility? Or does that home contain a quiet, persistent threat, a feeling of dread?...
A Salon for ‘Nones’ April 12, 2024
In the Hayes Valley neighborhood in the heart of San Francisco, a group of young tech workers, artists, and thinkers are taking part in a revival of the intellectual salon, the 18th- and 19th-century tradition where the beau monde mixed with the thou...
Keeping the Republic April 04, 2024
“The Constitution Is Broken And Should Not Be Reclaimed.” This headline from a New York Times editorial written by two law professors (from Harvard and Yale), is simply a more hyperbolic expression of a point of view that has become increasingly prom...
Back Home Again April 01, 2024
The story begins in a hotel or motel, where the narrator, a twenty-something only child, has had a disturbing dream involving his or her mother. The novel, introduced by this scene and ending with what follows it, consists otherwise in a long analeps...
The Quiet Revolution of Place December 14, 2023
Sociologist Robert Nisbet declared our era to be “singularly weak” in social inventiveness. In a new book on local solutions to America’s social ills, author Seth Kaplan agrees—with some exceptions. “Our modern era is not the first one in which the U...
The Tired, Old Master December 05, 2023
Paul Auster’s new and short novel Baumgartner, which portrays the grief of an aging philosopher, is mediocre: cliched and predictable at every level of its construction. It reads as if Auster told himself that it was time to write an austere, “late” ...
When “Sideways” Is a Good Way November 24, 2023
It’s been nearly a quarter-century since the sociologist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, a book that documented the falling enrollment of American “chapter” organizations that had long bonded people together, such as the Knights of Columbus an...