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When Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate back in July, the predictable scrutiny a vice presidential nominee... Read More

My introduction to Abercrombie & Fitch came through LFO’s “Summer Girls,” the 1999 song best remembered for... Read More

On the morning after the New York Yankees won their first pennant in fifteen years, I was playing softball in Brooklyn’s Dyker Park.... Read More

“It’s not going to attack you,” Jeff VanderMeer promises when an alligator creeps past us just after dawn. I’ve never... Read More

In 1962, Norman Mailer sat down to debate his friend William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley was America’s most influential conservative, and... Read More

Sports serves many purposes in modern life, practical and moral instruction chief among them. Football “teaches you discipline and... Read More

In Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Lenny and Lila are a pair of newlyweds on their way to Florida for their honeymoon. As they... Read More

First published in 1992 by the avant-garde stalwarts Dalkey Archive Press, Going to Patchogue, a morbid, mordant, and at times malicious... Read More

Sometime in the middle of August, just as the weather has become sweltering, the sound of crickets has become deafening, and the aroma of cut... Read More

In the late ‘90s, the writer Sarah Vowell did a piece for This American Life about rewatching Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. I... Read More

Historiography, the history of history, is a richly complex subject, which asks why history has been written the way it has. Ever mindful of... Read More

The District of Columbia, the capital city and seat of government for the United States, contains a population of roughly 700,000 in a... Read More

In his memoirs, the iconic Mexican President Benito Juárez sums up his time living in exile in New Orleans in two terse sentences,... Read More

In 2014, HBO launched the first season of True Detective, its biggest debut, an eight-episode story created and written by Nic... Read More

Ralph Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress include hundreds of photographs that the novelist took over many years, mostly as a... Read More

I know I’ve already mentioned Ann Powers’s book, Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, but it’s on my mind... Read More

When I was growing up, “cool” was everything. The musicians, actors, writers, and talking heads we idolized and tried to imitate... Read More

Welcome to the latest edition of Barkan’s Briefly Noted, my review of contemporary books. For prior editions, go here, here,... Read More

Zones for Employment and Economic Development were an experimental approach to addressing Honduras’ endemic poverty, violent crime, and... Read More

This essay is a continuation of last week’s newsletter “Do Men Even Like Women Anymore?” I recommend reading that first, if... Read More

The greatest sin an artist can commit is to allow time to pass them by unnoticed. Sadly, that is exactly what has happened to the legendary... Read More

I. In September 2022, Netflix released Blonde, Andrew Dominik’s 167-minute adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s 738-page novel... Read More

An election year is notoriously tricky for book publishers: What author wants their book to come out in the weeks immediately before... Read More

The season has come again (actually, we’re a few weeks behind schedule) for the restorative quadrennial reading of Michael... Read More

Do dogs know what art is? Oscar is a big, “free-spirited” Lab mix. My husband and I adopted him when he was just a few months... Read More