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Barthelme was a Houstonian. To me this is the single most salient fact about him, though the competitors for that distinction are many: that... Read More

Though we didn’t know it at the time, the turn of the present century also marked the end of the album era. By which I mean a period... Read More

John Constable was born two and a half centuries ago on 11 June 1776, and to mark the occasion, Thames & Hudson has published a handsome... Read More

In his latest novel, Elegy in Blue, Mark Helprin, a novelist, essayist, and national security analyst, weaves a tale of sorrow, love, and... Read More

One of the strange political phenomena of our times is the return of socialism and Communism in our ideological discourse. Any number of... Read More

Last week, the (wonderfully named) French tech bro Brivael Le Pogam set X alight with an apology on behalf of his nation for having loosed... Read More

What do we want from our idols? Devotion to their ideals, of course, a keen sense of self-mythos, preferably an exalted capacity to live as... Read More

“What would you rank Timothée Chalamet?” Braden Eric Peters, aka “Clavicular”, a man who has spent years... Read More

Katherine Packert Burke’s second novel All Us Saints is structured like a chamber play. Trading in the autofictional, referential,... Read More

Here in Miami, you can see the smiles on faces everywhere. Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Or if not dead, at least indicted. I am referring,... Read More

There was a time when Cannes’ strangest species was the ‘Euro pudding’: prestige films assembled from several funding... Read More

In a famous passage of The Confessions, St. Augustine asks “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody... Read More

George Washington’s Farewell Address is, in effect, the culmination and fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence. Washington had... Read More

Sometimes known as the “Father of American illustration,” Howard Pyle (1853-1911) plays an enormous role in American art,... Read More

Reyna Grande’s immigrant history is grounded in loneliness, dislocation, a fractured birth family, psychological abuse, physical abuse,... Read More

READING WELLWATER, the sixth collection from Canadian poet Karen Solie, comes with a sense of late arrival. Solie’s collection was... Read More

Today is a day I’ve dreaded for over a decade. At around 6:20 a.m., we’ll get my oldest son Judson up, give him a bath, put his... Read More

Americans occasionally look at high school history and civics tests from previous centuries with amusement mixed with shame. The contrast... Read More

Bob Spitz has compiled a press-cuttings history of the Rolling Stones. Like much of their music, it is hacked together from other people's... Read More

Where do songs come from? And where do they go?  The first is a question of inspiration, the second one of posterity. Consider the... Read More

As a tween, I’d often fantasized that I’d grow into The Devil Wears Prada’s Andy Sachs. I dreamed of working at a glossy... Read More

Last year, while at a literary magazine party at a big Greek restaurant in New York City’s Financial District, I saw Alex Karpovsky... Read More

Women have done painful and extreme things in the name of beauty and cultural expectations for centuries—foot binding in China, neck... Read More

“The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed,” wrote Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue... Read More

A decade ago, the only dress that mattered was a lace-trimmed bandage number with a Mother of the Bride-appropriate matching shrug that was... Read More

The 82-year-old actor and writer Wallace Shawn is spending a lot of time in Dimes Square. He loves it. On a recent Friday afternoon, he... Read More

A new epoch of sports — and, we are told, of human achievement — is upon us. The Enhanced Games, an athletic competition that... Read More

When Christopher Nolan’s new The Odyssey film was announced, many people were understandably excited. Although composed nearly three... Read More

After nearly eleven years and 1,801 episodes, Stephen Colbert has left the desk of The Late Show. It wasn’t entirely his choice, of... Read More

Artificial intelligence might be the only thing that Americans hate and/or fear as much as one another. Fun fact: According to a recent... Read More