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“As if under a spell, or hypnosis, she couldn’t escape,” Vicky (Shu Qi) says at the beginning of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s... Read More

Should you still go to college? At this point you really have to start to wonder. The prices get higher and higher. Paying a fortune for... Read More

I’ve listened to a fair number of podcasts over the past few years that touch on the rise and fall of the blogosphere—in the... Read More

MEG HOWREY’S NEW NOVEL Body Language drops readers in medias res into the lives of a trio of adult sisters from the Midwest returning... Read More

Imagine you discover a magical ring that bestows invisibility on its wearer. What do you do next? Many an introductory ethics course has... Read More

In January 1919, more than 2 million gallons of molasses exploded from inside a pressurized holding tank in Boston. A tsunami of syrup, which... Read More

What will people do all day? I mean, of course, if the AIs surpass us at all economically necessary forms of labor. There’s an emerging... Read More

I kept hearing that sex in movies was dead, but I’ve spent the summer watching a surprising amount of sex in the theater. It... Read More

The letter, dated February 12, on South Florida State College letterhead and hand delivered by the Director of Human Resources, contained... Read More

The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings... Read More

Youth may be wasted on the young, but what if the young are already wasted? The writer Nancy Lemann coined the term “wastrel-youth... Read More

Eleven years ago, on a cold midnight in Los Angeles, I lay on a chaise lounge at the pool of the (now abandoned) Standard Hotel, made famous... Read More

In 1996, a task force of independent healthcare experts recommended that doctors stop giving urine tests to people who did not show symptoms... Read More

Is it possible for a monolithic streaming service to cook up a great idea for a series, attach a multitalented A-lister, a proven... Read More

Sir David Attenborough is beloved. The esteemed natural historian recently topped a list of the U.K.’s favorite “national... Read More

Cards on the table: there is no God, and Christian rock cannot achieve greatness. Chances are you agree with the latter; to each their own... Read More

When I woke up to the news that the writer Wendell Berry had died at 92, my mind turned to a conversation I had back in 2007 on his Kentucky... Read More

Have you ever heard a body hit the padded steel and wood planks of a wrestling ring? It’s jarring, in person – slappy,... Read More

I’ve been reading “Snow White” to my eldest. In our edition, the vain and wicked queen looks into her magical mirror and... Read More

I have​ a Rosalía hangover. We climbed a giant day to reach her, all twenty thousand Chicago fans. Strutting and grinning and... Read More

Our kids were playing Settlers of Catan over the holidays. Or rather, they weren’t. They’d rearranged the strategy game’s... Read More

Arguments about the way history (or ancient literature) is depicted in entertainment can get surprisingly heated, as recent controversies... Read More

There is a lot of debate about whether artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) in particular, will make people smarter or... Read More

Being a writer in the same generation as Matthew Gasda is an awful thing. Consider how few writers in their thirties can compete with his... Read More

‘As the world cries out and voices are distorted in the din — to the point of all meaning being obscured” — this... Read More

If you’re still not convinced that creativity and originality are under siege, particularly in the movie business, look no further than... Read More

Alasdair MacIntyre was a political animal, or so one naturally assumes. He was at any rate an Aristotelian, and since Aristotle declared man... Read More

Like most adults who write their thoughts down regularly, I was raised in a home by a mother who maintained piles of books strewn around the... Read More

TikTok — is that the one where people send out videos of their cats? Or is that Instagram? WhatsApp — is that the one where... Read More

Will marriage survive the internet? It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our... Read More

The White Rapper Mount Rushmore is The Beastie Boys, Eminem, Mac Miller and Paul Wall. The Beastie Boys came up when rap was still novel, and... Read More

ONE There are some film critics I read to get a sense of whether a movie is worth seeing and, perhaps, to get some idea of how I might... Read More

IT WAS HARD TO MISS the American tech elite’s MAGA makeover. Tech CEOs poured money into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and... Read More