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A couple of years ago, I went through a plastic-exposure epiphany. It dawned on me that nearly everything my family touched involved plastic.... Read More

Pornography gets the blame for a lot of societal problems, including the so-called “sex recession.” Can porn ever really be... Read More

A well-stocked indie bookstore might carry around 10,000 titles. Then there’s Barnes & Noble, where any individual location might... Read More

‘You just piss it oot,’ my friend Stuart Ritchie has always told me. In a politer register, other friends have expressed... Read More

Franklin, Kentucky, is a small town. To get there from where I grew up on the outskirts of Bowling Green, you drive south down Nashville... Read More

At first glance, you wouldn't think that the biblical tale of Jews entering the Promised Land after 40 years in the desert has much to do... Read More

In the past few months, unreleased frontier AI systems have significantly disrupted a classic conception of mathematics. They successfully... Read More

How to begin the never ending? Like that Bob Dylan song, one of my favorites, “Tangled Up in Blue”? “Early one... Read More

[Victor Frankenstein voice]: It’s alive! It’s alive! The horrible monstrosity is ready to be unleashed upon the world. I mean, of... Read More

I grew up in a high-control Christian sect. On the surface everything looked wholesome, like plain, bare-bones Christianity lived out within... Read More

There’s a reason that low-stakes arguments like whether Airbnb hosts force guests to do too many chores or exactly what plastic surgery... Read More

Teaching a unit about AI, in the age of AI, to grade-obsessed highschoolers, is a situation ripe with ironies and recursions. In my very... Read More

When the sixties ceased swinging, the sexual revolution diversified and penetrated new markets, like real estate. Adults-only apartment... Read More

In his forthcoming book Reading Relations: How Authors Enter Our Lives, Australian English professor Dan Dixon offers a proposition that will... Read More

I live in a suburb of a northeastern American city that could, if you squint and ignore the constant road work and clamorous industrial rail... Read More

It was not unusual to walk into Gold’s Gym in sunny Santa Cruz back in the late Nineties to find Greg Glassman “screaming in the... Read More

China Miéville’s The Rouse is a book that should not exist, and yet here it is. It should be read cover to cover, and then... Read More

Once, in a conversation with a friend of mine from college, I got to talking about how annoying it was to read research papers for classes. I... Read More

As nights lengthen and the autumn air cools, those of us who remember the golden age of trick-or-treating can recall the sound of packaged... Read More

It’s time for this month’s art news, the good, the bad, and the sad. I’ve written about a dozen presidential sites over the... Read More

“When all else fails, you hit ‘em with the truth! You know, the hard truth! Just bang, bang, bang!” swaggers Digger... Read More

The great irony of the present crisis in the humanities is its similarity to the one in the Renaissance that gave rise to what we understand... Read More

I spent a month traveling all over the country interviewing people about America’s 250th anniversary. My plan was to write something... Read More

Years ago, I tried to help the senior management of a large global company that had just hit the wall. The quarterly results were a disaster,... Read More

I was born and raised in one civilization and have spent my adult life in another. This vantage point lets me see what each culture cannot... Read More

Walking down Washington, D.C.’s empty streets, one gets the persistent feeling that the city is vanishing into thin air. In some sense,... Read More

The U.S. has been running a real-time experiment on two approaches to criminal justice: the Biden-era emphasis on social justice versus the... Read More

In 2000, the Chinese filmmaker Dai Sijie, who has lived in France since 1984, published a short novel in French, Balzac et la Petite... Read More

YOUR HAMMER ASKS you if you’re frustrated. Your car tells you it missed you. Your fridge sizes you up and suggests a healthy... Read More

The written word is on a hot streak, despite the naysayers who claim people don’t read anymore, who insist print media is dead, and who... Read More

In this optimization-obsessed age, it can feel downright subversive to say that gut feelings are more valuable than statistics. But the... Read More