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“In the end,” the omniscient narrator of 1984 explains, “the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would... Read More

Perhaps it was the stultifying heat wave that swept through the Mid-Atlantic in early July, making the couch in my air-conditioned living... Read More

Each morning I wake up and go to the beach1, without crowds or sticky salt water. After a short swim, because I’m not much of a beach... Read More

EARLY IN 2023, the theater historian Charles O’Malley and I circulated a nonfiction book proposal to publishers. Our book, we wrote,... Read More

On average, Gen Zers say they’d need to earn a salary of $600,000 per year to feel financially successful. That’s around 13... Read More

The differences are immediately obvious. When you cross through the other side of the looking glass into rural or “Real” America,... Read More

In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in... Read More

Emily Wilson is doing something Odysseus only managed once: The British scholar is embarking on her second voyage through The Odyssey. Read More

Even by the arcane standards of soccer songs and chants, the Argentine team’s locker room number required some explanation.... Read More

It’s easy to feel that you’ve arrived at The Vampire Lestat both a little early and a little late. Lestat is the third season of... Read More

ONE OR TWO THINGS ABOUT the ghost: they are disruptive, usually desperate. They test the borders of the corporeal and invite the living to... Read More

Saint Augustine’s political analysis of the city of man and the city of God structures Pope Leo’s XIV’s first encyclical... Read More

The cultural consensus is that Gen Z is miserable. Today’s young people are lost and stagnant—and for good reason, too. You see,... Read More

In 1998, Patrick O’Brian had reached the height of literary eminence. During the preceding decade, he had been elected a fellow of the... Read More

We want to have an honest conversation about how publishers are feeling about and using AI. These tools are in their infancy, and while the... Read More

There is a scene, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, that surely contains the ultimate cinematic statement... Read More

Let’s get this out of the way: the last Marvel movie I was into—like, really dug—was Sam Raimi’s Dr. Strange in the... Read More

We are three weeks past Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s “royal wedding.” The venue of choice was Madison Square Garden, the... Read More

Seeing is believing. An Exquisite Eye, the new summer exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., premieres the majestic... Read More

In 1984, Bill Buford, an American literary editor in his late twenties, began devoting his spare time to following “football... Read More

Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed.... Read More

Mankind now makes most things better. There are some possible exceptions: much music and art, perhaps, and maybe also functioning liberal... Read More

The Dutch long had great confidence in their state, whose army of social and physical engineers could be trusted to shield citizens from... Read More

My Sylvia Plath fandom dates back to the early nineties, when I was in my late teens and randomly pulled The Bell Jar off the shelf at my... Read More

There is what happened, and then there is the story of it, the “required repetition of the good story over and over again to friends,... Read More

For centuries, we have been encouraged to meditate on death. From Stoic practice to Victorian jewelry to contemporary tattoos, the idea of... Read More

Wilfred M. McClay has written a characteristically thoughtful and eloquent reflection on the daunting moral and cultural ills that plague... Read More

As far as I was concerned, it had never not been there – that gaping black hole in the side of the gorge. I was a... Read More