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There is a saying in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: “You can bomb a hospital, but not Bralima.” Short for Brasseries,... Read More

On the last day of May 2025, I submitted my resignation letter to what had long been my dream employer. It was not a decision I took lightly.... Read More

The protagonist of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer finds solipsistic respite in the theater: In the evenings I usually watch... Read More

I often pass near my neighborhood an old rusty bridge. You wouldn’t think twice to look at a bridge like that. Usually, such bridges... Read More

For Arturo Sandoval, jazz represents a way of life, but the way it came into his life could only be described as an act of fate. The trumpet... Read More

Why, of all people, defend the dilettante? An amateur at best, a flighty rascal at worst: why take an interest in someone whose own interests... Read More

With the partial exception of the presidential campaigns that Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas waged in the early 20th century, socialism has... Read More

Gregory Clark, the economic historian behind A Farewell to Alms and The Son Also Rises, has released the final installment of his trilogy on... Read More

At the Brooklyn Nets’ home opener against the Charlotte Hornets last week, one longtime fan pointed out the strange dynamic inherent to... Read More

I WENT TO A BOOKSHOP in Montreal and saw that the bookseller had Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Life of M, open on the counter beside the... Read More

In 2005, Alain Badiou argued that in the second half of the 20th century, there was a “French philosophical moment” comparable to... Read More

In a thoughtful new book called The Future of Jokes, Robin Ince asks, “When the world is such a joke, how do you parody... Read More

Christopher Abbott has a secret. We’re sitting in the Bowery Hotel’s outdoor patio in Lower Manhattan, making small talk about... Read More

There are films that you seem to live inside. Ninety minutes and change of what transpires on the screen singes your mind’s eye and... Read More

Halloween, a holiday steeped in transatlantic cooperation, is upon us. A pagan celebration birthed in Britain some 2,000 years ago was... Read More

Harold Wright Cruse (1916–2005), my colleague at the University of Michigan for decades, may have been the most flamboyantly... Read More

America and the West are going through a civilizational crisis. The clearest sign of it here in the United States is the rapid rise of a... Read More

When the story of Karyann Parkinson—a Virginia mom convicted of child abuse for letting her five-year-old walk alone to a nearby... Read More

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