One-Hit Wonders
Story Stream
Michael Lewis on the Magic of One-Hit Wonders February 28, 2025
Michael Lewis is the award-winning author behind numerous best-sellers, including “Moneyball,” “The Big Short,” and “Going Infinite.” Still, he approaches each new project as if it’s his first, and last. “When I’m at my best as a writer, I’m starting...
Grad School Is in Trouble February 28, 2025
Jennie Bromberg was somehow still exuberant last weekend about her future career in public health. In January, she interviewed for a competitive Ph.D. program in epidemiology at the University of Washington, one of several to which she has applied. “...
San Francisco, Beautiful Lie February 28, 2025
SAN FRANCISCO – EARLY JANUARYThe question of where Northern California begins is a famously contentious question among Californians. Here there is a dispute between the Bay Area people and my people, the Southern Californians. Southern Californians b...
Shame, Sex, and the Female Body February 28, 2025
“The particular greatness of movies,” Pauline Kael once wrote, is the power to connect with us “emotionally … in spite of our thinking selves.”I’m never going to be swept away by films that are treatises, feminist or otherwise. Tell me a good story w...
Why Are We So Obsessed With Blue? February 28, 2025
“SUPPOSE I WERE to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color,” reads the first line of Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets,” her 2009 book-length lyric essay about the color blue. “Bluets” — the title refers to the delicate, diminutive wildflower bu...
The Best Hate-Watch of All Time February 27, 2025
Rewind to 2012: Glee was one of the most-talked-about shows in America, and scarves were being manipulated in infinite ways. That’s the environment into which Smash debuted on NBC that February. The musical series, about the making of a Marilyn Monro...
The Power of American Originals February 26, 2025
“In the US, voters just loosed a genuine bull into the china shop of the ruling class.”Karl Zinsmeister, 2025BACKBONE: Maverick Essays in Middle America: Why American Populism Should be Welcomed, Not Feared is a collection of short essays about Ameri...
The Vice President Has an X Habit February 26, 2025
Before his second cup of coffee, Jonathan Liedl discovered he was going viral. The academic did not understand. His niche Catholic conversations had attracted a small following over the years, but most days, his corner of the Internet remained a quie...
The Novelist of Apocalypse February 26, 2025
The last time I saw László Krasznahorkai, he declared his love for me. Admittedly, he was making a rhetorical point about his singular prose style, and we were speaking in front of an audience at an art gallery, but it still felt good. Krasznahorkai ...
Would You Rather Have Married Young? February 25, 2025
In an iconic episode of Girls, “One Man’s Trash,” Hannah spontaneously spends a weekend with a hot, respectful doctor in his expensive brownstone. After a couple of sublime days in his house she suffers a moment of shameful envy. ...
The Singular Charm of Parker Posey February 25, 2025
One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I fou...
The Most English Man in the World February 25, 2025
I went to England for the first time last week, and in the run-up to the trip, it became very clear that I am one of those Americans.Whenever anyone suggested doing something nice in London—a “roast”? a trip to Piccadilly?—I tortured them with my Coc...
George Orwell’s Doublethink February 25, 2025
Craig and I are at our son’s third-grade parent-teacher interview. We sit on the miniature chairs, our knees just fitting under the laminex desks. The classroom is festooned with pictures, paintings, geography and maths projects, hanging from every w...
The Banty, Blustering Genius of Earl Weaver February 25, 2025
The greatest sight in Major League Baseball during the 1970s was almost certainly this one: the Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver storming out of the dugout to remonstrate over some perceived injustice to his players. He would be so incensed at t...
Lorne’s Prime Time February 24, 2025
In a season five episode of the estimable sitcom 30 Rock, itself based on the goings-on of a network television show closely modeled on Saturday Night Live, the writer and producer Aaron Sorkin makes a cameo as himself. Introduced to Tina Fey’s ever-...
How the ‘Manosphere’ Became Mainstream Entertainment February 24, 2025
Whenever Bill Belichick, the 72-year-old former head coach of the New England Patriots, goes out in public with his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, who is exactly one-third his age, they tend to draw attention. It was no different at the 2025 N.F.L. Honor...
Interstellar Ineptitude February 24, 2025
The customary Booker Prize winner is, like the MFA novels battling for the laurel, a product of many compromises. On the one hand, the legacy institutions cling desperately to the remnants of their prestige during an era in which the very notion of p...
The MJ Lenderman Story You Haven't Heard February 24, 2025
When Jake Lenderman was a rock-and-roll-obsessed kid in Asheville, North Carolina, he never dared to dream about selling out two nights at the Orange Peel, the biggest club in his cozy mountain hometown. “One, maybe,” he tells me with a sheepish chuc...
Down and Out in Hollywood February 21, 2025
LOU MATHEWS’S NEW NOVEL Hollywoodski demonstrates that the Hollywood novel is alive and well in the 21st century, albeit as a kind of zombie genre lacking any real sense of direction—a perfect description of the career trajectory of protagonist Dale ...
The Rise of the New Romanticism February 21, 2025
There is a new Marvel movie out and no one seems to care. No one, of course, is an exaggeration, a provocation, since there are obviously human beings buying tickets to Captain America: Brave New World and a good number who are discussing or even lik...
The Superiority of Western Culture February 21, 2025
I’m not sure how it happened, but recently I found myself watching a Canadian musician on YouTube named Peter Pringle as he conducted a lament for Gilgamesh, the titular hero of the ancient epic. Wearing a yellow mock turtleneck, Pringle delivered th...
The Painter of Thought February 20, 2025
Michel de Montaigne is often upheld as a model of the examined life. In her introduction to What Do I Know? (the latest selection of Montaigne’s essays, translated by David Coward and published in 2023 by Pushkin Press), Yiyun Li writes: “For me, his...
Reader, I Divorced Him February 20, 2025
YEARS AGO, not long after ending a marriage, I was having coffee with two women, new acquaintances, when we discovered that we were all divorced. “Yay!” one cried. “Hot Divorcées Club!” Something shrank and recoiled in me. Why must we be hot? Couldn’...
Father of the Originalist Legal Revolution February 20, 2025
Many books have been written about the presidency of Ronald Reagan or the “Reagan Revolution,” but far fewer have been written about the role that one of his most trusted appointees, Attorney General Edwin Meese, played in transforming American law. ...
The Future Childless Cat Guys February 20, 2025
Biology has afforded men certain existential comforts. We are obsessed with women’s reproductive clocks, the idea that if they get married and have children when they’re still young they’ll be relegated to Cat Lady status forever. And in truth, we do...
