News
Story Stream
The Age of the News Influencer February 28, 2024
Just a few hours into my Tik Tok News experiment I realised everything was going wrong. I had pitched an idea that would surely interest readers of this magazine: young people were engaging in a form of intellectual castration by bingeing on 1 minute...
Lord Byron Was More Than Just Byronic February 28, 2024
It is almost two hundred years since the death of Lord Byron. He succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six. As was far from unusual at the time, medical professionals did...
Are We Treating Gen Z’s Mental Health Crisis All Wrong? February 28, 2024
A few months ago, a high school teacher casually mentioned to me that at his school, students with diagnosed anxiety weren’t called on in class.What struck me as insanity is apparently mainstream in America’s schools now.In her gripping new book “Bad...
Meet Me at the Melting Pot? February 28, 2024
If you have been to the Melting Pot before, it was likely on a date. Maybe it was a first date, where dipping bread cubes and apple chunks into a pot of burbling cheese, cooked right at your table, offered a welcome distraction from the awkwardness o...
New Samizdat Prize Makes Good Journalism Real Clear February 28, 2024
The publisher and president of RealClear Foundation, David DesRosiers, first started asking himself over a year ago if the news media really needed a rival to the Pulitzer Prize, and when he started asking others, the answer was a resounding yes.The ...
Do I Really Need to Op-Ed to Sell Books? February 28, 2024
In the months leading up to the April 2022 hardcover release of my book, Some of My Best Friends, I tended dutifully to the rituals of prepublication. I sent a gamely cheerful email blast to my contacts asking them to please preorder copies. I plaste...
The Battle for Twitter’s Soul February 28, 2024
In his new book, Battle for the Bird, which comes out today, Kurt Wagner tells the story of the platform that he’s been covering for a decade. As a social media reporter, currently at Bloomberg, Wagner has covered Twitter from its days with a 140-cha...
Critique of Artificial Reason February 28, 2024
When the literary scholar Dennis Yi Tenen was a child, his father brought home a reel-to-reel recording by the British prog metal band Uriah Heep. Tenen, who now teaches at Columbia, was born in Moldavia; in a recent interview with Douglas Rushkoff, ...
Essay #2: Words, Words, Words February 28, 2024
In his fascinating book on moral intuition, The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells the fictional story of what he calls a “harmless taboo violation.” A sister and brother, Julie and Mark, are traveling together. While staying at a beac...
Keep Uniforms Uniform February 27, 2024
Perhaps you’ve heard of the little situation Major League Baseball got itself into after leaning on Fanatics and Nike to revamp their uniforms. From the WSJ:The lettering on the nameplates was disproportionately small. The lack of actual embroidery s...
An Arthurian Brit in the Land of the Free February 27, 2024
In a scene from his one-man-play, An Evening With C. S. Lewis, actor David Payne performs a curious limerick while impersonating the famous Christian apologist. An English author, the pseudo-Lewis opines, can produce beautiful works of literature, ba...
The Arrested Development of Carson McCullers February 27, 2024
Throughout her life, the novelist Carson McCullers struck observers as preternaturally young. The biographer Leon Edel, who met her when she was thirty-seven, remarked on her “childish wonder.” The French novelist Françoise Sagan wrote that she had t...
‘Office Space’ at 25 February 27, 2024
Office Space is celebrating its 25th anniversary following its delayed path to success, although hopefully no one would get their ass kicked for saying something like that....
The New 'Dune' Will Turn Even Skeptics Into Believers February 27, 2024
Theocratic authoritarianism, colonial violence, the pitiless economics of resource extraction: These subjects are present in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies, not as vague allegories gestured at between action sequences to add some thematic heft, but a...
Miles Davis and the Recording of a Jazz Masterpiece February 27, 2024
Jazz was at the apex of its artistic power and commercial popularity when, in 1959, some of the music's greatest innovators gathered to record in New York City. In this excerpt from the new book 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evan...
A New Voice in Fiction With a Mean Left Hook February 27, 2024
It takes focus and discipline and a certain single-mindedness to become a good prize fighter. It takes those same qualities to write a book as fresh and strong and sinuous as “Headshot,” Rita Bullwinkel’s first novel, which is set in the world of you...
When I Quit Drinking, Shirley Temples Made Going Out Fun February 27, 2024
You probably last drank a Shirley Temple at your third-grade classmate’s laser tag birthday party with a slice of bad pizza on a plastic Toy Story–branded tablecloth. Or maybe you had it “dirty” with a shot of vodka back in 2022, when everyone from t...
The Novelist as Information Machine February 27, 2024
Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle s...
The Prime of Their Lives February 26, 2024
“Time to Pretend” is the rock star Iliad and Odyssey, nestled in a four-minute pop song. Say yes to models, Paris, and heroin; no to jobs with offices and morning commutes. After its major-label release in 2007, the song oozed out of teenage bedrooms...
Living in Arendt’s World February 26, 2024
Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently publishe...
History on the Bluff February 26, 2024
When I first moved onto Council Bluff in 2005, I didn’t quite realize my new home’s proximity to some of Missoula’s most interesting foundational lore. At the time, I was simply trying to get out of the city limits and into a more rural setting, and ...
'Dune: Part Two' Unleashes the Terrible Power of Paul February 26, 2024
David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel Dune is best described as an interesting failure. Much of the failure was Lynch’s—he didn’t really understand the source material, and he made some questionable artistic calls—bu...
Refuse To Be a Human Billboard February 26, 2024
I had my first fancy job with healthcare and a salary. I was the creative director and brand ambassador of a program called Revolution of One, funded by its parent organization, the Foundation for Economic Education, a well-respected libertarian non-...
The Weirdest Night in Pop February 23, 2024
If you’ve heard “We Are the World,” the 1985 charity single by the American super-duper group U.S.A. for Africa, you might be forgiven for wondering why a documentary about it, recently released on Netflix, is called “The Greatest Night in Pop.” Musi...
Want a Better Society? Try Better Buildings February 23, 2024
When my family moved to Washington so that I could cover the Trump administration, I wanted to live in an apartment building. My wife objected, ascribing the desire to my Soviet childhood spent in a communal flat. I conceded the point: If the desire ...
