Reading
Story Stream
'White Lotus' and the Pain of Desire April 09, 2025
This weekend, HBO aired the finale third season of White Lotus. From what I’ve read, it’s one that that left many disappointed. What happened to skewering the rich? Why’d we spend six episodes essentially just watching Timothy Ratliff eating lorazepa...
Paul Ricoeur and the Crisis of Atheism April 09, 2025
Twentieth-century French philosophy continues to inflame the passions of American readers in the 21st. While Anglo-American philosophy can seem impossibly dry and technical, the great French masters still speak to our most urgent concerns. What they ...
The Literary Man Isn’t Dead April 09, 2025
“The decline and fall of literary men should worry everyone.” That’s how The New York Times framed the glaring absence of men from modern literary culture, warning that young men will soon be lost to the misogynistic vortex of the “manosphere”....
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, ...
Rising Up and Rising Down (Vol. I) by William T. Vollmann April 08, 2025
I'd been looking for it for twenty-one years. Every time I browsed a used bookstore, I scoured the shelves in hopes of finding it. It became a Holy Grail, an object whose simple existence proved to me the goodness of the whole damned ordeal: of writi...
The Dangers of “Sensitivity Reading” April 07, 2025
The recent rise of sensitivity readers in publishing raises two fundamental questions: first, what kind of "sensitivity"? And second, what kind of "reader"? ...
On Roy Campbell April 07, 2025
As the acknowledged inspiration for Tolkien’s Aragorn, with a life as adventurous as Chesterton’s Innocent Smith, Roy Campbell is one of the most colorful and extraordinary men of the twentieth-century literary scene....
The Prehistoric Psychopath April 07, 2025
We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore,...
Searching for Bigger April 02, 2025
A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels ...
The Average College Student Is Illiterate April 01, 2025
I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been a while since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be....
The Legend of Mitch "Blood" Green by Charles Farrell March 31, 2025
Mitch ‘Blood’ Green had more things going for him to make big money in boxing than nearly any fighter in history. A six-foot-six, 225-pound heavyweight with a chiseled physique and a traffic-stopping look, Green had street credibility for days—he was...
Bluesky Blues: A New Investigatory Series March 31, 2025
Remember the pre-Elon Twitter days? When you didn’t have to read comments from AryanButtholeGroyper69 about Jewish physiognomy, but still had to deal with the equally offensive prospect of reading takes from Mark Cuban? Whatever happened to idiots li...
Are Books Finished? March 31, 2025
Fairly regularly, I read political science-type books looking for something to excerpt and, again and again, I have the same reaction: that whatever it is I’m reading is an article stretched out to a book....
The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far) March 28, 2025
Poetry in the 21st century is both ubiquitous and oddly peripheral. Verses are displayed on subway walls, recited on momentous occasions, and served up in giant fonts on social media, but rarely do they merit a book review or a position on end-of-yea...
Requeering Wilde March 27, 2025
The Oscar Wilde Temple first opened in 2017, in the basement of the Church of the Village in Greenwich, New York. Wilde is glorified on a plinth: a creamy statue dressed as a dandy, his prison number from his time served in Reading Gaol, C.3.3, on a ...
The Patron Saint of Forgetting March 26, 2025
For years, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience has sat on my bookshelf reproaching me for my laziness and ignorance. It was one of a handful of “great books” in my modest library that I hadn’t yet got around to reading. Few people d...
What the “Abundance Agenda” Leaves Out March 25, 2025
I spent the last few days digesting Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and then reading twelve recent pieces commenting on the book, with the goal of getting a handle on this particular area of discourse and trying to determine what exactly t...
Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes March 25, 2025
The award-winning Black feminist author Toni Morrison converted to Roman Catholicism in her teens, taking Anthony as her baptismal name and using Toni as a pen name. She wrote fiction featuring slavery, racism, sexuality, rape, profanity, police brut...
My Vanity Fair Hazing March 24, 2025
In 1991, I was named the editor of the New York Observer, a desperately sleepy Upper East Side weekly broadsheet that I hoped to turn into a must-read. About a half-year in, the paper was where I wanted it to be, it was getting noticed, and so I star...
It is Not Good to Read (Only) Alone March 24, 2025
Over the past few years, I have seen a number of debates and research studies critically evaluating the different mediums in which people consume books in the twenty-first century: Reading on paper versus reading on screens (e.g., iPad or Kindle) ver...
It's Time for a Serious Adaptation of ‘Starship Troopers’ March 24, 2025
Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoev...
On Ogden Nash’s Poetry March 24, 2025
Spring has sprung at last. My mind turns to the playful poetry of Ogden Nash, who in “Spring Song” penned “Twang the cheerful lute and zither! Spring is absolutely hither!” Yet reading on, my vernal spirits that so recently were soaring suddenly drop...
The Fated Family March 21, 2025
I first learned of Sophie Madeline Dess’s work when a friend sent me her story “Unfathomably Deep,” then just published in The Drift. It was sent without comment, though with the implication, I think, that here was something striking and original, th...
The Unbearable Weight of the Literary Canon March 21, 2025
Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the ...
Barry Ritholtz's Excellent 'How Not to Invest' March 21, 2025
Recently a prominent member of the libertarian community died. Notable about the individual’s death is what he left behind.Though he earned good money over the decades, the pay was in no way astronomical. Yet as you’re reading this review of the very...
