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A graduate school colleague told me that her subfield of linguistics was more valid as science than the subfield some other students were... Read More

Reaching from beyond the grave, something she seemed capable of doing even while alive, Joan Didion retains a stony grip on readers’... Read More

Memoir, as it exists today, is formless. There is no singular formula for transforming life and experience into a narrative. Instead, the... Read More

On November 6, 2024, the day after Donald Trump’s election victory, “the term ‘darkest timeline’ trended in Google... Read More

In the recent film The Critic, adapted from Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call, the eponymous theatre reviewer Jimmy Erskine,... Read More

On Iowa City’s Market Street stands a low-slung, trailer-like red building. This is Dave’s Fox Head Tavern, one of the sites... Read More

GEO Prep Mid-City Academy, located in one of the poorest sections of Louisiana, did something almost unheard of in public education –... Read More

For decades, the American beer industry helped forge a singular national male identity with buxom, bikini-clad models, strapping pro... Read More

I still remember the first time I read Bernhard––before, I think, he really hit among American writers of my generation and... Read More

How could he be other than a figure of fascination? Alexandre Kojève, born Alexandre Kojevnikoff to a wealthy merchant family in... Read More

In Peter Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber (1994), the titular dummy, Harry Dunne, relates a still-raw heartache to his similarly... Read More

Imagine this scenario. The interior minister of a country that considers itself a democracy reports scores of citizens to the police for... Read More

The school choice revolution just scored its most historic victory yet. The Texas House passed Senate Bill 2 by a... Read More

The video starts with bold red letters blaring: “2016 Democrat Primary Voter Fraud CAUGHT ON TAPE.” A series of blurry security... Read More

In the winter of 1957-58, 20 years after the gangster fugitives of the ‘30s and their Hollywood counterparts and two years before In... Read More

In 2017, during the first wave of #MeToo, I was reluctantly noncompliant. On several occasions, I was approached by journalists to... Read More

Most 21st century novels don’t matter much. They matter, of course, to the people who write them, and to whatever dwindling subset... Read More

At this point the problem, if it really is a problem, is more or less agreed upon: that sometime in the past ten years, it became... Read More

Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a... Read More

A BARELY PERCEPTIBLE WHIFF OF CONTEMPT laces Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. This slim, elegant novel was originally published in... Read More

Joan Didion, Thomas Powers observed after she died aged 87 in 2021, is “almost brutally direct, but it’s never entirely clear... Read More

I can’t remember the first Raymond Carver story I read. “Cathedral” is a safe bet, but I can’t be sure. I only... Read More

About ten years ago, during a season of great freedom, I went for a hike in the Scottish Highlands. I had been living for some months in... Read More

The working-class girl who reinvents herself as a star is a classic, aspirational figure in the greater American mythos. After all, before... Read More

HALF A MILLENNIUM AGO, a German scholar created a map that represented for the first time a landmass Europeans had just come... Read More

In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, seven varied speeches are made on the meaning of love at an all-male drinking party set in ancient... Read More

The decline of Western culture is most easily perceived not in our galleries and museums, or even on our stages and screens, but in the... Read More

Not only is April 23 Saint George’s Day, the national feast of England, it is also the anniversary of both the birth and death of... Read More

During the Houston Rockets’ practice a day before Game 1 of their first-round series against the Golden State Warriors, Ime Udoka... Read More

People often use the words “diabolical” or “demonic” when speaking of something that is corrupt or immoral. Mostly,... Read More