The West
Story Stream
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...
What’s The Point Of Bill Gates? February 18, 2025
I started reading Bill Gates’s new memoir Source Code the day after David Lynch died. In between learning about his pioneering BASIC coding language, I struggled to grasp what Laura Dern was saying in Inland Empire. In many respects, the two couldn’t...
Why Voice Notes Are a Small Act of Love February 13, 2025
Somewhere in the blur of 2020, as I slipped outside with a mask and running shoes in the early morning to walk around the block, the lilting drawl of a friend’s “hiiiiii” nearly stopped me in my tracks. It was the first voice note I remember clicking...
Kanye Needs a Conservatorship February 13, 2025
Just a week after trotting his clearly uncomfortable wife onto the Grammys’ red carpet in a completely see-through dress, rapper Kanye West went on an unhinged antisemitic online posting spree. How bad? He started by declaring himself a Nazi and post...
A Western About Cowboys, Indians … and Mormons February 13, 2025
Overall, American Primeval, the new Western on Netflix which takes place in the early days of Utah’s settlement, is a good show—in a directional sense. That is, it is enjoyable because it represents a step in the right direction. On the one hand it a...
Is This What Cancel Culture Achieved? February 12, 2025
Over the weekend, the artist and entrepreneur Kanye West, now known as Ye, let loose a blitzkrieg of appalling screeds to his 33 million followers on X. “IM A NAZI,” he proclaimed. He reiterated his position that “SLAVERY WAS A CHOICE,” contended tha...
My Afternoon With the ‘Normal Gay Guys’ Who Voted Trump February 11, 2025
Not long ago I went to a party at a penthouse on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A young man in a tuxedo greeted me at the door and ushered me into a well-appointed living room, where a fire glowed in a corner and prints of ancient Greek temples overloo...
Skip ‘Yellowstone’ for This Rawer Version of the West February 11, 2025
Any reader seeking a refreshing corrective to the soap opera version of the American West offered by Paramount’s TV hit “Yellowstone” would be well advised to pick up Callan Wink’s new novel, “Beartooth.” Although both are set in Montana, their persp...
The New Coke Revisited February 06, 2025
When I’m behind the wheel, no road trip is complete without a country-fried steak from Cracker Barrel, preferably served with turnip greens and fried okra. I’ve become a total sucker for their wholesome nostalgic Americana vibe, being marooned on the...
The West Is Still Alive in Nevada January 09, 2025
We’re at the Silver Dollar Club in Elko, Nevada. Neon gleams against the old mahogany walls, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke. Heavy metal plays on the speakers, and gangs of burly, bearded gold miners do shots of whiskey. A rowdy drunk guy ...
There’s No Place Like Home January 09, 2025
The blockbuster film Wicked was recently released in theatres. It’s creating a sensation among older children and teens—my big kids are obsessively playing the soundtrack and demanding to see the movie as soon as it is released on a streaming service...
Bang the World January 08, 2025
One in a thousand people has six toes or fingers. Twenty-six percent of young people lack a gag reflex. And about two in seven dudes, according to my own research as a participant observer, will say something skeevy about women in exclusively male co...
Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’ July 05, 2024
In a recent essay for the New York Times, David Brooks lamented what he sees as the deficiencies of liberalism. Unlike religion, which Brooks believes has long satisfied the need for meaning and purpose in human life, liberalism has proven incapable ...
A Great Film that Reminds Us Why the Western Died July 03, 2024
Kevin Costner returns to the genre that won him his Best Director and Best Picture Oscars (1991, Dances with Wolves) with an insanely ambitious passion project in which he directs, produces, and stars—and into which he poured $50 million of his own m...
Kevin Costner’s “Horizon” Goes West but Gets Nowhere July 01, 2024
Westerns are an inherently political genre, for the obvious reason that they depict (or distort or interrogate) American history. But they are also political in that they show the birth of the polis itself—the institutions of modern urban society, wi...
