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I think it’s very rare, maybe unique to our times, that people should brag about being crazy. Some do it to prove they’re... Read More

WHEN I BEGAN commuting by train to Chicago two decades ago, nearly all my fellow passengers read the newspaper. I watched them turn the pages... Read More

It started with a tiny blue bottle next to the cash register at a 7-Eleven. The year was 2023. Colin was a college student in Los Angeles and... Read More

There’s been a lot of talk in recent days about the various crises plaguing our existence. The bond-price crisis. The Iranian crisis.... Read More

There is something so exhilarating and disturbing about Digger that some people may elect to dismiss it as chaos, or out of control, and a... Read More

Rich Baris has fired a warning shot. The self-proclaimed 'people's pundit' and director of BIG DATA POLL insists that young Americans are fed... Read More

What’s next for Tom Cruise? The actor, now in his 60s, is showing no signs of slowing down—not that anyone thought he’d... Read More

In 1960, a country boy named Glen Campbell showed up in Los Angeles with a guitar, a pompadour hairdo, and a lean, hungry look. He was... Read More

The novel has always been obsessed with technology. You can trace realist fiction’s evolution along advances in religion, banking,... Read More

Scholars, journalists, and commentators are pretty typical conference guests. Babies? Not so much. But there were quite a few babies at The... Read More

During the first year of the gilets jaunes protests, I taught English in France. By the time I arrived during that impossibly hot August in... Read More

Over the past two decades, in the name of “equity,” elite institutions moved to disassemble everything they had spent years... Read More

You may have heard already that Digger, the new film cowritten and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (The... Read More

It's 2019, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) is in a video. It shows her dancing on a rooftop with friends. Everyone on... Read More

Published in 1942, Albert Camus’s The Stranger is a staple of francophone literature, with French newspaper Le Monde ranking it number... Read More

“He’s sort of talking. He’s sort of distracting to me. He seems to be sort of talking to himself.”  With that... Read More

Gen Z men are sadder and lonelier than any generation before them—but damn, they look good while doing it. While previously men turned... Read More

Houston’s Energy Corridor neighborhood, named after the oil and gas companies that have planted their US headquarters along this... Read More

Within weeks of the lockdown orders — days, even — there were think pieces. The writers among us were frighteningly eager to... Read More

Great literature, and I suppose all art, ages well with time. Or maybe we age well with great art. Read More

For many years I’ve felt myself moved in the direction of the spirit. I can remember, when younger by a couple of years, thinking of... Read More

The two men in our circle were about what I expected. Both were readers of the blog LessWrong and worked for some kind of amorphous tech... Read More

Across the last half-century or so, Doonesbury has been one of those rare institutions that could always be counted on—even while the... Read More

Early in this volume of Robert Frost’s letters, he writes, “I know by heart a good deal of Keats’s poetry, but have to... Read More

There are few things stranger than reading a highly anticipated new book — in this case, Tracy Daugherty’s biography... Read More

The right has its own unwritten rules of political correctness. There are forbidden words, and while they might not be met with censorship,... Read More

I knew the joke version of Sylvester Stallone long before I encountered the real one. Specifically, I knew the Spitting Image puppet: a... Read More

The day after my second novel was published, I flew to New York City for an evening literary event at the Center for Fiction featuring myself... Read More

An hour after I was laid off, my former CEO held a seven-minute all-hands meeting to read a Claude-generated script about how leadership had... Read More

I never intended to collect Philip Larkin’s books. I just wanted to read them. There weren’t many back in the 1970s. Larkin had... Read More

I’m guilty of using the metaphor in a single way. As a critic, I’ve sometimes referred to works as being xeroxes of other, more... Read More

In 1996, the prolific underground filmmaker George Kuchar brought ten years of camcorder footage to the prestigious Robert Flaherty Seminar,... Read More

Fiction is full of novels that depict the murky intrigue, grubby treachery, and moral compromise of the world’s second-oldest... Read More

In January, I was introduced to an Anthropic employee who I was told was exploring a specific question: “Who should AI be?” I... Read More