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Across forty years, Tom Cruise’s career has chronicled the decline and fall of America in the public imagination. When Top Gun first... Read More

Despite using it every day, and spending a lot of time thinking and worrying about it, nobody can quite agree on what money is, or why it so... Read More

Sir Patrick Stewart has died at the age of 86, after a career of six decades that took him from the Royal Shakespeare Company in... Read More

In her recent video installation Boring Billion, the artist Yuyan Wang traces a strange genealogy of machines.1 Pieced together from found... Read More

To ask what Tolkien thought of God is rather like asking what Marx thought of socialism or how Samuel Pepys regarded the business of... Read More

I know that many gen zers are having sex frequently and happily — I have overheard real Sex and the City-type brunches and walked into... Read More

It’s a gross exaggeration to say that television is a lost art, but we can maybe agree that it has changed. Big-time. But sadly, not... Read More

It’s 3 p.m. at the Sunset Tower Hotel, the purgatory hour between lunch and dinner at one of Hollywood’s favorite places to... Read More

When I was teaching at the University of Kansas in the unusual spring of 2020, I noticed an uptick in the number of students telling me they... Read More

Sacha Baron Cohen’s durag-wearing poseur is back for “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” released Oct. 23. Critical reception has been... Read More

I’m writing this on Halloween and hear that the sponsors of the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale are going door-to-door wearing... Read More

We’re all about festive cheer, but Thanksgiving is getting squeezed out by spooky cobwebs and nativity scenes. It’s time to chuck... Read More

We may never know exactly what happened at the Chi Pi fraternity on the Cornell campus on an October night in 2024. Memories fade and become... Read More

“Warning: this chapter contains attempted sexual assault, gore, and eye trauma.” So reads a content note in the popular... Read More

BEYOND THE OFFICIAL, job-related labels we can assign him—writer, teacher, filmmaker—it is difficult to define what British-born... Read More

Beneath the seventeenth-century Palace of Westminster there was a hidden Medieval undercroft, enduring like a line of erased poetry not fully... Read More

Michael Jordan is hanging in the air. It’s 1998, in Salt Lake City, and he’s just released the most famous shot of his career. As... Read More

When Alicia hopped her first train in May 2024, a southbound freighter out of Georgia, there were a few things she didn’t know yet.... Read More

The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was 65 when his great treatise on the transformation of life was published. With Philosophie... Read More

Last month, I sat in a packed-to-the-gills movie theater to experience the latest release from a controversial comedian whose work regularly... Read More

Novels are the best of life and these are the best novels of the year, at least the best not told “sorry I really like it but I... Read More

“The cruel, gray facts,” unlike the “truths in your heart,” are a matter of record, the Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen... Read More

During the quarterback meeting the night before the Chicago Bears hosted the Philadelphia Eagles on Sept. 29, backup QB Case Keenum probed... Read More

Stations, a new novel by the Irish writer Louise Kennedy, lays out a friendship that shapes a heart, and tears it. Red Camelin is the first... Read More

Clare Ath always loved the outdoors. The summer after her freshman year of college, she got a job as a backpacking guide in Colorado,... Read More

Talking to the Los Angeles Times in 2014 he said, “I think I’m an okay writer, but a very good storyteller,” and then, on a... Read More

In 1970, the poet, educator, and architect June Jordan posed the following question during a middle-school graduation speech in Ocean Hill,... Read More

For almost six months (!), I’ve been facilitating a reading group—Intellectual Bootcamp—through Persuasion Institute. We... Read More

We had Taylor Lorenz on last week to talk about AI. And in the course of the conversation, I threw out something that’s been on my mind... Read More

IN THE PARIS REVIEW this year, god of American letters Sarah Schulman said MFA writing programs disserved students if “they were of the... Read More

I first watched The Craft—the cult-classic horror film about four teenage outsiders who form a witches’ coven—in a... Read More

The first book I tried to read by Kazuo Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day. I was disturbed by how convincingly Ishiguro adopts the voice of... Read More