RealClearBooks - Book News, Book Reviews, Publishing Industry Aggregator

It just so happened that the day everything changed, the day AI safety went mainstream, I was sitting in a multi-story fortress of autists... Read More

On October 14, the publisher Faber & Faber announced that it would stop selling books by the Irish novelist Sally Rooney in the United... Read More

Youth is full of women running out of time. Alex (Sharon Horgan) is a divorced, 50-year-old literary agent with a college-age son. At this... Read More

Maybe you were by a pool this summer, or on a beach, or on a train headed to either of the above. As though in a particularly on-the-nose... Read More

Consider the sticky situation of Sophie Baek, the heroine of Bridgerton’s fourth season. Despite being but a lowly housemaid, she and... Read More

The memory doesn’t start with the violence. It starts with the silence—a mundane, routine pause during a changeover at... Read More

Thirty-six years ago, a writer named Ian Frazier published a short satirical piece in the New Yorker imagining what would happen if the... Read More

One evening, thirty odd years ago, I was watching Gloria Steinem drift through a crowded lecture hall when I overheard a scientist ask her... Read More

Most art is bad most of the time. In a capitalist system, the purpose of professional criticism is to distinguish the good from the bad.... Read More

As you may be aware, I have just completed a book about the “tech right,” which will come out next year. I don’t lack... Read More

We are all busily weaving our own webs of language, threading filament upon filament in the hope of ensnaring the objects of our desire. We... Read More

On June 23, choirs of French schoolchildren and a large crowd of dignitaries thronged around the Pantheon in central Paris during a heat... Read More

I’m working on another essay about AI and Marx, but I saw the Nathan Fielder Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything and... Read More

The American chemists at Bikini Atoll treated their laboratory like a toilet. Broken beakers and dirty flasks decorated the field office.... Read More

With people grousing over the new Tom Cruise movie, the Daily Wire facing protests over its new film about ICE, and interest finally waning... Read More

As previously mentioned, I have been reading Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on the history of China during its years under the rule of... Read More

Christopher Dawson’s work is a kaleidoscopic treatment of a dizzying amount of Western history. Throughout, he looks at everything from... Read More

Tom McCarthy’s theoretically dense novels, beginning with Remainder in 2005 (for which he received the Believer Book Award), all... Read More

We are all busily weaving our own webs of language, threading filament upon filament in the hope of ensnaring the objects of our desire. We... Read More

I’ll say this for Digger — it made me think. Specifically, it made me think about two things: 1) just how condescending Alejandro... Read More

For the eighth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David—the show’s star, creator, and Chief Zeitgeist Officer—decided to... Read More

As strange as it may sound, rock and roll is the conservative movement’s fraternal twin. They were born at the same time. The very year... Read More

MY FRIENDSHIP WITH August Lamm began the old-fashioned way. We were introduced at the Brooklyn dive bar Sharlene’s after a book reading... Read More

Britain’s Labour government labeled Palestine Action a terrorist group in July 2025. The Irish novelist Sally Rooney responded by... Read More

I’ve done a lot of Justin Herbert analysis while avoiding the most interesting aspect of his spectacular decline. Maybe I’m still... Read More

One of my joys in traveling to Brazil, which I did recently for the seventh time, is dining. In general, Latin America is the great... Read More

Tom Cruise may possibly be the biggest movie star in the world. His career has been a constant stream of blockbusters spanning more than four... Read More

In a special episode of “Get Real” this week, host David DesRosiers speaks to the former publisher of Forbes magazine, Jeff... Read More

Because no one reads anymore, it’s increasingly common for people to opine on the state of literature who have not seen or touched a... Read More

Young women today have unrealistically high standards. When I speak to conservative young men about dating, this is something I often... Read More

On Saturday night, I saw the Smashing Pumpkins live for the first time in over a quarter century. They were playing a 15,000-seat arena. If... Read More

I try to keep my guard up. As we see the fallout of the successes of Marvel and Star Wars having compelled studios to buy the film rights to... Read More

The women of Gen Z have once again done a service to society by giving us (among many other useful terms, like “pick-me girl,”... Read More

Here follow two visions of the poet Allen Ginsberg. First vision: from “Lunching with Ginsberg,” an essay by the poet August... Read More

From a young age, we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up. Firefighter, doctor, president, mechanic, astronaut, teacher,... Read More

In a journal entry in 1958, Sylvia Plath wondered how her mother would feel if she discovered who her daughter really was. What if she found... Read More

Musk, Alex Gibney’s latest documentary, is nearly four hours long with a ten-minute intermission, which is surely more time than any... Read More