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There was a boy in postwar Liverpool, and his name was Mike. Mike had a girlfriend named Celia, who once let him borrow a record by an... Read More

On Thursday morning, my son Ben and I joined more than a million Knicks fans in Lower Manhattan to raucously celebrate New York’s NBA... Read More

In a 2014 blog post titled “No One is Bored, Everything is Boring,” the British cultural theorist Mark Fisher refined the... Read More

Spectacle has always been Steven Spielberg’s primary idiom, the language in which he expresses himself most naturally. As a precocious... Read More

BEN GIBBARD EMERGES from the elevator bank at precisely 8 a.m., because he is never late. The Death Cab for Cutie front man is wearing gray... Read More

I’ve never much liked horses. The first time I meet my sister-in-law is at the stables, where she keeps an enormous bay stallion with... Read More

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who... Read More

I hope I will not shock anyone reading this by admitting that I am not a straight woman—nor for that matter a woman of any... Read More

1. People say retirement communities in Florida are famously replete with venereal disease while others say no, our elderly do not do this,... Read More

With Juneteenth celebrated this month, I was curious about America’s Black women poets. So I went to my New Oxford Book of American... Read More

The original Toy Story is not a movie about children. It’s about envy, status anxiety, and a workplace that threatens to become toxic.... Read More

Our summer issue features a folio on AI in which a group of literary writers and critics pause to think through a technology evolving so... Read More

Most histories of the American founding celebrate its courage. Lawrence Reed’s new book Born of Ideas does that too, but it does... Read More

Since artificial intelligence went mainstream a few years ago, it has done double duty as a political personality test: tell me what you... Read More

Leonard Cohen was, and remains, an enigmatic figure. In his life, he toed an unsteady line between rockstar-dom and cerebral, ascetic... Read More

Years ago, I attended a college graduation ceremony in Missouri. The graduates and faculty wore black gowns. During the procession, the... Read More

In 2018, hours after Andrew Sean Greer won a Pulitzer Prize for Less, I got him on the phone in Italy and asked if he was... Read More

Flannery O’Connor enthusiasts know that she spent the final thirteen years of her life (1951-64) living with her mother, Regina Cline... Read More

From elementary school into adulthood, boys and men read less, and less well, than girls and women. Fourth- and eighth-grade boys are roughly... Read More

The 1994 World Cup was America’s first summer fling with soccer. Robin Williams monkeyed about at the pre-tournament draw calling... Read More

IN EARLY 2026, something happened that Big Tech proponents had both longingly anticipated and deeply feared: an agentic AI system was... Read More

That will-o’-the-wisp, the great American novel, at least in the modern period, almost inevitably features an automobile. The fatal... Read More

It might be the most celebrated arrest in American music history. Sometime in early 1913, a New Orleans street kid, who might have been as... Read More

Over the last few decades, thinkers within religiously oriented philosophical traditions have done significant work showing how these... Read More

In London, when the sun briefly peeks out from behind the almost permanent cloud cover to warm the gray metropolis, locals typically react to... Read More