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As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right,... Read More

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of... Read More

Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes. Like many gestures, it conveys... Read More

It was 2018 when I discovered Scott McClanahan, and how did that come about? Oh, trying to impress some guy. He was in prison at the... Read More

The editor came late to British publishing. Until well after the end of the Second World War, the man—and it usually was a... Read More

It was in sociology classes that I first heard the phrase “white supremacy.” Quite naturally, the first thing I thought of was... Read More

The Swiss writer Christian Kracht is contemporary fiction’s great thrasher of expectations. No novel of his ever resembles its... Read More

For a brief, impressionable period of my life, I believed in literature. I believed in its singular importance, that there was something... Read More

In this episode of Get Real, David DesRosiers speaks with Green Beret veteran and former Virginia delegate Nick Freitas about the importance... Read More

Why is Japan… the way it is? Urbanists like me look with longing at Japan’s clean and timely trains, its dense but orderly... Read More

If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its... Read More

Jane Austen fans eagerly await yet another adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” which is due for release by Netflix this fall.... Read More

People can be surprised when they hear that I wrote a novel that centers professional wrestling. Someone like me–a Brown person raised... Read More

Just after dinnertime on December 26, 2006, the seabed off the southern tip of Taiwan suddenly lurched. Eight minutes later, it lurched... Read More

I saw Obsession twice in the theaters. First time was with my sixteen year old son, the second time with my eighteen year old son. Both of my... Read More

The dogs are trying to escape, shoving their noses through his knees and climbing all over each other attempting to paw their way out the... Read More

Every morning after breakfast, Dawn and I take a walk around my folks’ farmhouse in New Hampshire. A red-tailed hawk complains about us... Read More

I’ve admired Scott McClanahan’s writing for at least a decade. His writing is straightforward, direct, and clear. He writes what... Read More

When I set out to examine the state of tennis footwear in 2026, I knew there was one man I needed to speak to. At 41 years old, Vicente... Read More

It is a sunny July morning in the Midwest, one of those days when it starts off cool, the dew lingering a while on the grass and the... Read More

Like all good Americans, I need constant airflow. Temperature is not so important but stagnant unmoving air is death. What I need is a... Read More

I went into Tony, Matt Johnson’s new Anthony Bourdain biopic, as I imagine many people in the food world did: hesitant and somewhat... Read More

A series of minor events — a dinner party, a holiday in La Spezia, a poorly attended funeral — make up two years in the middling... Read More

Most everyone in my part of the world can feel, at some level, that we’re stuck. The culture, the institutions, the ideas, the leaders... Read More

On a recent morning commute, I sat on a train in one of those awkward four-person configurations with a shared table. Across from me sat a... Read More

I want to live in the world of Ted Lasso. Not because the grass is always cut and everyone smiles a mile wide—frankly, that all screams... Read More

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham makes three-point shots from half-court while barely breaking a sweat. But while her on-court swagger... Read More

After inflaming a culture war and causing her teammates and colleagues to be bombarded with hypothetical questions for weeks due to her... Read More

Many Americans have assumed that if you want a serious education in history, philosophy, or literature, you must go to college, preferably a... Read More

Thanks so much to all the people who subscribed after my first post. I was not expecting that; very heartening to see people’s interest... Read More

In another timeline, we would’ve gotten the first true blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey about 20 years ago, probably starring Sean... Read More

When I was a child, my parents were judicious about what they would allow me to watch. Cartoons were tightly limited, but Turner Classic... Read More

In the middle of the 1930s, a young English schoolmaster, Wystan Hugh Auden, began writing a torrent of tremendous poems. Some are rollicking... Read More

“It’s not like years ago,” croons Michael Stipe on R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” the spare, piano-driven... Read More

Gen Z hates work. That seems fair enough, at least at first glance. At the same time, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, is complaining that... Read More