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When he was four years old, my middle son taught himself to read. It was pandemic shutdown spring, so I was too busy homeschooling my oldest... Read More

Like any self-appointed highest honour, the Nobel Prize in Literature often fails to satisfy demand. Not because those who receive it are... Read More

Every film is a portrait of the community that made it. No artist works alone, of course. Yet even  the smallest no-budget movies... Read More

Not long ago, Louis Menand, the essayist and longtime New Yorker contributor, wrote a paragraph about artificial intelligence that, a number... Read More

After the documentarian Alex Gibney opened his four-hour film about Elon Musk at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Elon nailed his... Read More

Harold Bloom (1930-2019), with his preternaturally expansive intellect, stocked with countless poems and passages of prose, and his dramatic... Read More

“I hope that our votes still matter in November.” That was my dad, back in May, when I was in my home state of South Carolina on... Read More

Because literary journals tend to have small circulations, few readers are likely to have come across “The Whistleblower,” a... Read More

When I taught poetry, I always arrived with pencils, pieces of paper, and a printed out poem by Frank O’Hara. If my students, middle... Read More

The French philosopher Guy Debord and Danish painter Asger Jorn built their book Mémoires (1959) out of a collage of purloined... Read More

In 2003, the United States attacked Iraq, ostensibly to rid the country of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The war... Read More

On October 3rd I gave a talk: “Global Security, Risk & Resilience in an Era of Hybrid Threats,” at the 2026 Annual Meeting of... Read More

Watching Casablanca has become a tradition during freshman orientation at my college. Most incoming students at the University of Dallas have... Read More

What are you doing when you’re at school? You may not have thought about it in depth. After all, it’s just learning facts and... Read More

The phrase “no strings attached” often carries an unsavory connotation today, but the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur... Read More

Every journalist wants to claim Janet Malcolm as her own. A journalist’s journalist whose work is almost universally admired today, she... Read More

On TikTok, there are dozens and dozens of videos of men and women, many of them young, staring into the camera to talk earnestly about an... Read More

Three pieces of news came out in the last week that, taken together, demonstrate the immediate need for U.S. lawmakers, both state and... Read More

There’s a certain wistfulness that permeates the disposition of millennials and Generation X regarding the overly digitized world of... Read More

It’s hard to write a case for reading. The challenge for writers who try it isn’t that reading is more abstruse than other... Read More

High-school students in New York have for nearly 150 years taken exit exams to graduate. While the Empire State is phasing out these Regents... Read More

During last month’s remembrances for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, many Americans reflected on the lingering... Read More

Tucked into the press kit for Amazon’s new “Carrie” series is a three-page memo from showrunner Mike Flanagan titled... Read More

If you are a writer it is hard to escape it. If you are a writer it is nearly impossible not to use it. Read More

Three months ago I published a long essay on Bob Dylan’s late career, as well as a brief follow-up. Usually, when I spend a few months... Read More

Why do so many Americans assume that kids don’t like to eat most foods? The offspring of the species Homo sapiens are not naturally... Read More

Last year I met with an elected official frequently described in the press as friendly to the business community. The politician suggested... Read More

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, my wife and I—not particularly worried about supposed “outdoor... Read More

For…a very long time, I have been writing an essay about what Rachel Cusk did to realism. This required a lot of reading... Read More

Anne Carson has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a college freshman I loved If Not, Winter, her translation of Sappho with fragments... Read More

THE PASSEL OF LARGELY MADE-FOR-TELEVISION historical films that Roberto Rossellini oversaw in his later life can, like all films, be... Read More

I HAVE FOUR ISSUES of Unmuzzled OX—numbers 10, 13, 14, and 15. They were published between 1975 and 1978, at the rate of about one per... Read More

THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY is in the business of manufacturing stories. Not just the ones that live between the covers of the books it sells but... Read More

For the last decade-plus, the answer to seemingly every question about American politics was “polarization.” AI appears poised to... Read More