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Cards on the table: there is no God, and Christian rock cannot achieve greatness. Chances are you agree with the latter; to each their own... Read More

When I woke up to the news that the writer Wendell Berry had died at 92, my mind turned to a conversation I had back in 2007 on his Kentucky... Read More

Have you ever heard a body hit the padded steel and wood planks of a wrestling ring? It’s jarring, in person – slappy,... Read More

I’ve been reading “Snow White” to my eldest. In our edition, the vain and wicked queen looks into her magical mirror and... Read More

I have​ a Rosalía hangover. We climbed a giant day to reach her, all twenty thousand Chicago fans. Strutting and grinning and... Read More

Our kids were playing Settlers of Catan over the holidays. Or rather, they weren’t. They’d rearranged the strategy game’s... Read More

Arguments about the way history (or ancient literature) is depicted in entertainment can get surprisingly heated, as recent controversies... Read More

There is a lot of debate about whether artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) in particular, will make people smarter or... Read More

Being a writer in the same generation as Matthew Gasda is an awful thing. Consider how few writers in their thirties can compete with his... Read More

‘As the world cries out and voices are distorted in the din — to the point of all meaning being obscured” — this... Read More

If you’re still not convinced that creativity and originality are under siege, particularly in the movie business, look no further than... Read More

Alasdair MacIntyre was a political animal, or so one naturally assumes. He was at any rate an Aristotelian, and since Aristotle declared man... Read More

Like most adults who write their thoughts down regularly, I was raised in a home by a mother who maintained piles of books strewn around the... Read More

TikTok — is that the one where people send out videos of their cats? Or is that Instagram? WhatsApp — is that the one where... Read More

Will marriage survive the internet? It’s a question no one was asking in the 1990s, even as the World Wide Web became part of our... Read More

The White Rapper Mount Rushmore is The Beastie Boys, Eminem, Mac Miller and Paul Wall. The Beastie Boys came up when rap was still novel, and... Read More

ONE There are some film critics I read to get a sense of whether a movie is worth seeing and, perhaps, to get some idea of how I might... Read More

IT WAS HARD TO MISS the American tech elite’s MAGA makeover. Tech CEOs poured money into Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and... Read More

2009 we went to visit the famous writer S. at his apartment in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood I’d passed through... Read More

In case you haven’t noticed, men and women are struggling with each other. Both groups report less interest in love and family than in... Read More

I owe Wendell Berry my life. Not literally, of course, but maybe in a deeper and more important sense, the life that I now lead. Considering... Read More

I used to ghostwrite SEO-optimized promotional web content for a living. I thought the good times would never end. Each morning, people... Read More

In Robert Earl Keen’s 1993 song “Corpus Christi Bay,” the narrator reflects on a life wasted. He works the oil rigs with... Read More

Matthew Gasda’s new novel, Stranger Beauty, is the ambitious tale of M, who’s life is uncovered within the novel’s... Read More

For all the mythic stature of Tupac Shakur, you’d have expected his murder trial to have been held somewhere with a little more... Read More

A tech startup called Orchid recently went viral for all the wrong reasons. Its launch ad showed a boyfriend forgetting his anniversary, too... Read More

You’ll have to read Marlon James’s new novel, The Disappearers, wearing asbestos gloves. The pages of this incomparable epic are... Read More

If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic, I have some bad news to share: "The End of Reading... Read More

Ten years ago, an editor at Penguin approached me to ask if I would like to edit a collection of essays by Wendell Berry for a British... Read More

In September of this year SUNY Press will publish Bill Kauffman’s twelfth book, Upstaters: Poets, Pols, Prophets, and Bush-League... Read More

The 250th anniversary year of the United States Declaration of Independence puts one in a frame of mind to reflect on what we consider... Read More

RICHARD RUSSO IS a regionalist. Like many celebrated US novelists—Sarah Orne Jewett, Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, Jesmyn... Read More

1. This review of The Quarrymen by Caleb Caudell is late. I’ve seen a couple people say they zipped right through it. I did... Read More

If the past few years of American literary publishing have had a zeitgeist, it has been more like a series of geists from zeits past. There... Read More

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of... Read More

For three magical summers between 1997 and 1999, the women’s festival known as Lilith Fair was a touring caravan of musicians, feminist... Read More