Tradition
Story Stream
The Eternal Spring of Spring Training February 13, 2025
One of the greatest things about annual traditions is how eagerly they are anticipated by those who celebrate them. Each November, there emerges a great debate about how early Christmas music or decorations should be enjoyed. For American sports fans...
Tradition and the Individual Talent February 13, 2025
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “tradi...
The Toxic Male Is Ready for His Close-up February 12, 2025
Between the first presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the arrival of the #MeToo movement in 2017, progressive activists and social critics increasingly warned us about something called toxic masculinity. The term, vaguely academic in nature, re...
The Downfall of Ibram X. Kendi February 07, 2025
Every era has its grifters, gurus, quacks, and frauds. This is an American tradition, from the snake oil salesmen to the pyramid-schemers to the New Age prophets of the twentieth century. One might be tempted to dismiss them as ethically compromised ...
How the Oscar Race Got as Messy as “Conclave” February 07, 2025
Stop me if you’ve seen this one. A committee of august personages convenes, with much pomp and circumstance, to choose the best of their lot. Time-honored rituals are observed. Fancy outfits are donned. The ogling public is kept at bay. The contender...
Trump Is Right: America’s New Buildings Are Ugly February 04, 2025
President Donald Trump has made it clear that the aesthetics of government buildings will be a priority in his second presidency. His memorandum planted the flag: “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” The memo directs the head of the Gene...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
A Society That Has Forgotten How to Sing April 16, 2024
For the last two years, my wife Debra and I have been publishing an online magazine called Word and Song. It is devoted to introducing or recalling people to some of the fine things from our cultural heritage, by way of language, poetry, classic film...
A Conversation with John Pistelli April 15, 2024
One of the unexpected pleasures of the last six months has been discovering self-published novels. I was never a snob about such things, but I had assumed, for a long time, the cream usually rose to the top. It’s not that the novels getting pumped ou...
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...
Maggie Rogers’s Journey from Viral Fame to Religion April 10, 2024
In the fall of 2021, the singer and songwriter Maggie Rogers entered the graduate program at Harvard Divinity School. For anyone unacquainted with the particulars of the degree Rogers was pursuing—a master’s in religion and public life—it might have ...
The Influencers With as Much Access as the Press April 05, 2024
Campaigns and politicians have experimented with influencer marketing over the past four years. But recruiting content creators to reach voters is already happening more than ever in 2024. The Biden campaign has built out a powerful digital operation...
Gateway to Statesmanship April 03, 2024
In Gateway to Statesmanship, John A. Burtka IV, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, seeks to revive the tradition of mirror-for-princes literature, a project both timely and timeless. Criticism and distrust of political leaders are no...
Is There a Widening Rift Between Men and Women? April 03, 2024
It has been suggested recently that men and women are drifting apart. Women are said to be more likely to lean left and to reject traditional ideas of (heterosexual) male-female relationships than men are. Men, on the other hand, are allegedly dissat...
Online Gambling Is Changing Sports for the Worse April 01, 2024
For the past twenty or so years, my friend Chad and I have gone to Las Vegas for the first weekend of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament. Memory often fails when it comes to gambling, but I believe the only year we’ve skipped was 2020, when COVID-19 ...
Twitter Is Almost Worthless for New Writers April 01, 2024
When I launched my pseudonymous writing career in the summer of 2023, one of the things I was most looking forward to was creating my Twitter account and interacting with other interesting writers and intellectuals on the platform.I’d been lurking fo...
Jimmy Kelly’s Steakhouse Keeps Going March 24, 2023
I have written before in these pages about declining standards in the restaurant world, which has less to do with the food than with the whole “experience” of dining out: the lack of tablecloths, the napkin-wrapped silverware, the to-go boxes, the sl...
T. S. Eliot’s Still Point March 23, 2023
Addressing the Friends of the Irish Academy on the subject of W. B. Yeats in 1939, the year after the Irish poet’s death, T. S. Eliot proclaimed that Yeats “was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the co...
On Emily Hilliard’s 'Making Our Future' March 22, 2023
Turns out the taunting discourse of pro wrestling in Appalachia—which flourishes there in community centers as in no other part of the country—is rooted in a mountain tradition of stylish insult that goes back more than a century. There is even a for...
Let’s Debate the Real Melting Pot March 21, 2023
In a recent viral video hosted by VICE, a panel of young Asian Americans debated the notions of “model minorities” and “Asian Hate.” During the back-and-forth, one of the progressive panelists vigorously denounced assimilation in the US, linking it w...
Of Course Fetishes Are Political March 14, 2023
One recent examples of the limits of viewing sex and fetishes as apolitical is in the case of the tradwife TikToker. A few weeks ago, a video from a woman named Estee Williams bombarded timelines. In the video, Estee, a beautiful young woman with Mar...
Stuck in the Labyrinth March 13, 2023
Crises in Mexico have a way of taking on their own unique expression. Indeed, many in Mexico have come to believe that, rather than marking a sharp turning point, crisis is the permanent state of affairs.There is a long tradition in Mexican literatur...
Recalling Santayana’s Genteel Tradition March 13, 2023
Afew years ago, I had occasion to supply an essay for Yale’s new edition of Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States and “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy.” Looking at the display of petulance that is our political life tod...
Planned Obsolescence March 10, 2023
A recent article about the sad state of our commercial movie theaters read to me like a parable about media work in the digital age.The problem is not simply that no one goes to the theater anymore for movies. It’s that commercial theaters no longer ...
The Most Overrated Movie of This Oscars Season March 08, 2023
A war story is perfect bait for the Academy Awards. Sixteen such films have won Best Picture, dozens more have been nominated in major categories over the years, and war movies are among the genres most famously associated with the prestige of the Os...
