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It was not unusual to walk into Gold’s Gym in sunny Santa Cruz back in the late Nineties to find Greg Glassman “screaming in the... Read More

China Miéville’s The Rouse is a book that should not exist, and yet here it is. It should be read cover to cover, and then... Read More

Once, in a conversation with a friend of mine from college, I got to talking about how annoying it was to read research papers for classes. I... Read More

As nights lengthen and the autumn air cools, those of us who remember the golden age of trick-or-treating can recall the sound of packaged... Read More

It’s time for this month’s art news, the good, the bad, and the sad. I’ve written about a dozen presidential sites over the... Read More

“When all else fails, you hit ‘em with the truth! You know, the hard truth! Just bang, bang, bang!” swaggers Digger... Read More

The great irony of the present crisis in the humanities is its similarity to the one in the Renaissance that gave rise to what we understand... Read More

I spent a month traveling all over the country interviewing people about America’s 250th anniversary. My plan was to write something... Read More

Years ago, I tried to help the senior management of a large global company that had just hit the wall. The quarterly results were a disaster,... Read More

I was born and raised in one civilization and have spent my adult life in another. This vantage point lets me see what each culture cannot... Read More

Walking down Washington, D.C.’s empty streets, one gets the persistent feeling that the city is vanishing into thin air. In some sense,... Read More

The U.S. has been running a real-time experiment on two approaches to criminal justice: the Biden-era emphasis on social justice versus the... Read More

In 2000, the Chinese filmmaker Dai Sijie, who has lived in France since 1984, published a short novel in French, Balzac et la Petite... Read More

YOUR HAMMER ASKS you if you’re frustrated. Your car tells you it missed you. Your fridge sizes you up and suggests a healthy... Read More

The written word is on a hot streak, despite the naysayers who claim people don’t read anymore, who insist print media is dead, and who... Read More

In this optimization-obsessed age, it can feel downright subversive to say that gut feelings are more valuable than statistics. But the... Read More

It went on long enough that the crowd curdled and its cheers turned sarcastic. It was the middle of April, just three weeks into a six-month... Read More

Before we saw a single parakeet, we heard them: a disembodied static that grew louder as we approached Hither Green Cemetery in southeast... Read More

The first time I read Rachel Aviv’s journalism, she had chosen a subject she rarely writes about—herself. In “Prologue:... Read More

Netflix’s new documentary “Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald” feels like a philosophical guide from the late, great... Read More

Imagine: The year is 1845. You, your wife, and your seven children sell your farm and buy a covered wagon. You load it with everything you... Read More

Conservatives are in their post-fusionist era. That is, the days of big tent-ism on the political right have reached an end. Conservatives,... Read More

Having required decades to write and rewrite, William Gass’s The Tunnel has always been a difficult novel to read. An enormously long,... Read More

Some of these places along here, they used to be somewhere. Two decades into the 20th century, Route 66 tied half the country together.... Read More

Netflix. Great company. Revenue growth for the most recent quarter was 12%. Its net income was up an astonishing 44%, year-on-year, to $3.7... Read More

Fatherland, the new Paweł Pawlikowski film about Thomas Mann’s 1949 trip to Germany, may be the most powerful film about the current... Read More

A man cosplays schizophrenia, gets himself admitted to an insane asylum, and pens an exposé that indelibly alters U.S. diagnostic... Read More

During the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, an almost two-mile-long corridor along the city’s main artery, including Meša... Read More

I started reading Matthew Aldrich’s The Natural Order just a few hours after I got a colonoscopy. In the end, the novel was better. But... Read More

For the record, I generally deplore acronyms. They oversimplify important concepts and are often employed to mask someone’s... Read More

From the printing press to the radio, from television to social media, communication technologies affect politics and broader society by... Read More

When Chanita Chayaluk decided to open her restaurant and wine bar Taan, she hoped “to showcase Thai food in Chicago in a different... Read More