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That liberal democracy is in a state of terminal decline I take to be beyond dispute. Like Alice in the rabbit hole, those of us who dwell in... Read More

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to think a lot about generational differences. I know this is annoying, because people (mostly... Read More

After five years in Washington, D.C., I’m returning to the foothills of the southern Adirondacks in New York. It’s the place I... Read More

Reflecting on the historic federal Welfare Reform Act three decades after its signing, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich recently... Read More

There are two books before me, which, if I mistake not, will mark an epoch,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis magazine in 1924. One... Read More

Sometimes culture moves in a way that blindsides me. For instance, I actually saw the now INFAMOUS Shane Gillis SNL monologue before it... Read More

Word had reached me early. Grimes, the impish thirty-eight-year-old Canadian musician and mother to three of Elon Musk’s fourteen... Read More

I’ve always been a wannabe Luddite. Despite my dependence on—and sometimes addiction to—technology, I’ve never shaken... Read More

In 1932, the poet John Cornford — then a 16-year-old schoolboy — sent samples of his work to W.H. Auden.  Read More

In the opening of Music Against the Night, Yiyun Li claims, “If someone were to write John Field’s biography, it would be a... Read More

NATHAN FIELDER HAS MADE A CAREER out of examining the gap between reality and perception, particularly in the context of what we see... Read More

The name Nokia comes from an ancient manor house sitting at the confluence of two rivers near the city of Tampere in western Finland —... Read More

Books about successful people often make success sound rather unappealing. Education should be intense and rigorous, focused on driving up IQ... Read More

The 77,303,568 people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 were apparently unfazed by the more than 30,000 false or misleading statements he... Read More

There’s an oft quoted statistic in the book world that millions of new books are published each year (the link says 4.2 million in... Read More

It’s been a brutal year for many in the journalism profession, with newsrooms across the nation announcing layoffs and many talented... Read More

Before there was Nathan Fielder, there was Tom McCarthy. Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal recreates mundane situations in compulsive... Read More

Seven million people watched To Catch a Predator on average during the show’s mid-aughts run as part of NBC’s newsmagazine... Read More

My views on AI have changed.  Read More

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