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“MY WHOLE LIFE IS A DARKROOM,” deadpans Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice (1988) when her father offers to build a photography studio in... Read More

For many Americans, fall means football. But for some of us, fall means cross country. Cross country doesn’t dominate culturally. It... Read More

The year is 2038. A ghostly, snow-swept winter in a New York City grown colder and taller. In a tendril-like high-rise, playwright M is... Read More

In 1381, more than a hundred thousand poor English people rose up demanding an end to serfdom. During the uprising, they killed a coterie of... Read More

The title of Hulu’s dark melodrama, Tell Me Lies, is an imperative. To read it is to put yourself in the willfully self-deluded... Read More

The university administrators have gotten tired of paying lip service to Luddites. AI is not going anywhere, they tell us, and it’s... Read More

Every great literary city exists twice. There is the city itself—the place of traffic, weather, rent, construction sites, bad coffee,... Read More

In April 1941, with the Wehrmacht in Paris and the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact still in force, the political theorist James Burnham... Read More

If Zach Cregger’s career tells us anything, it’s that starting out as a comedian might be the best training for becoming a horror... Read More

Michael Anton is one of the American Right’s preeminent essayists. His 2016 “Flight 93” heralded the start of the Trump... Read More

FEW BOOKS TO COME ACROSS MY DESK lately have stirred so many emotions as The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New by Annie Dillard. In the... Read More

Of the world’s “holidays,” Talk Like a Pirate Day (or, to use its full name, International Talk Like a Pirate Day) is... Read More

Back in 2024, after Warner Bros. decided to can Coyote vs. Acme for a tax write-off, there were “funeral screenings” held for the... Read More

What happens when a portly man in his 60s named Thornton Melon enrolls in college to be with his son? What happens when that man is a... Read More

In “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” the late Mike Davis analyzes Angelenos’ historic inability to accept that... Read More

Ada, the latest novel from Mark Haber, begins at a frantic pitch. The narrator, Haber’s latest in a series of misanthropes, outcasts,... Read More

Toward the end of Woody Allen’s 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the stormy painter Maria Elena is leaving. But where will she go?... Read More

Ifirst read Nancy Lemann on the recommendation of a friend. This—especially in a time of targeted ads and the bludgeoning... Read More

It’s not often that we get a ringside seat to the Birth of a Narrative. Usually, those overseeing the parturition are careful to manage... Read More

Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly,... Read More

A writer receives a letter from her high school teacher, who married the writer’s high school sweetheart. A professional Brad Pitt... Read More

Let me put some numbers behind a trend you might have noticed: More than ten major musical artists have outright canceled their tours in... Read More

A potentially sweeping reform to K-12 education beginning in January is forcing Democratic governors to weigh the political risks of joining... Read More

It’s been a decade or more since Jordan Peterson became famous telling the world that most papers don’t get cited and that... Read More

THEY ALL HOLD their breath when Josh Allen goes rogue. They can always see it coming. He'll be a little laggy at the start of a game,... Read More

ANTON JÄGER’S Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences (2026) is a strange book: too short to offend,... Read More

It is the big new fear in AI development: coldly rational minds pretending to be good, while doing something else entirely. But who is really... Read More

On February 27, 2026, hundreds of well-paid employees at OpenAI, joined by over a thousand at Google, publicly backed Anthropic’s... Read More

Too many American colleges treat political debate as if it were a toxic lab experiment, something that can only be permitted under strict... Read More

Ion Stoica is a Romanian-American computer scientist and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. As cofounder of the unicorns... Read More

Carlo Rovelli is now 70 and these two books have the air of closing arguments. Then again, all his books sound like closing arguments and he... Read More