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Whose idea was it to make Russell Brand a right-wing celebrity? The British comedian and actor denied the one charge of rape and three... Read More

Philip Roth’s chosen vocation was the novel, and he practiced it almost nonstop for six decades with a monkish devotion. In his hands... Read More

A friend of mine suggested the Dr. John Delony Show to me a couple of years ago. Intrigued, I gave it a couple of listens. People call into... Read More

I came to the work of Harry Crews through word of mouth about the printed page. When I was still a teenager, I used to stay up late on the... Read More

“Do you ever get paranoid that you’re not being paranoid enough?” asks John Malkovich in Martin McDonagh’s new black... Read More

IT HAS BEEN a busy year for Emily Brontë’s admirers, with Deborah Lutz’s new biography This Dark Night: Emily Brontë, a... Read More

In writer-director Martin McDonagh’s debut film, In Bruges, two hit men hide out in the eponymous Belgian city, waiting for a call from... Read More

“Sometimes people have a vision of themselves that just doesn’t fit with reality,” Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward... Read More

Welcome to the Post-Literate Dark Age where smartphones, high-speed internet, and addictive scrolling apps are holding people’s minds... Read More

Cormac McCarthy was America’s great shaman-storyteller. His novels often seem as much called into being as written, demanded by the... Read More

Once you’re familiar enough with the late Norm Macdonald’s comedy, something interesting happens: you start laughing at the... Read More

Growing up, I played a lot of baseball. We were a baseball family through and through. Like many other Canadian suburban middle-class... Read More

In 1977, Martin Scorsese was working in a cocaine-filled, insomniac frenzy to complete The Last Waltz, his film about The Band’s final... Read More

Growing up, I always preferred fictional worlds to the real one. As an only child who struggled with social anxiety and was very much not... Read More

FOR THE LAST five decades, the writer and critic George Scialabba has been carrying the torch for two traditions vital to the well-being of... Read More

At some point in the first volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, the author-narrator is struggling with feelings of... Read More

Yesterday, maybe you heard, Bob Dylan met The Pope. Photos of Dylan’s Vatican summit with Pope Leo XIV took over the internet. The man... Read More

In late 2025, I issued frank warnings about AI in a series of posts for premium subscribers: On August 8, 2025, I alerted readers to the... Read More

Of the many internships and part-time jobs I had in college, the worst one was, by far, a fact-checking internship at a major American news... Read More

A modern reader looks at the title of Jane Austen’s 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, and sees two words that mean pretty much the... Read More

I saw Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, in the same (similarly packed) theater... Read More

In the desert, as the song goes, you can remember your name. So it’s fitting that Matt Damon has come here—to a sweltering... Read More

The novelist A.S. Byatt is widely beloved in highbrow literary circles. Her work has won many literary prizes, including the Booker Prize,... Read More

Friedrich Hölderlin was the most enigmatic figure of German Romanticism. His lyric poems, hymns, and dramas constitute the furthest... Read More

Although the end of year marks a slow period for publishing, the upcoming slate of books from now into 2027 surely exude the maxim of quality... Read More

“These people shouldn’t even have children,” my co-worker railed. Another piped in: “The parents should be arrested... Read More

What does it mean to speak well and what connection—if any—is there between speaking well and speaking the truth? In his 2024... Read More

An interview with Jana Prikryl Read More