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Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider,... Read More

VENICE, Calif. – Francesca Padilla was awakened by the sound of screaming people and breaking glass. Soon she could hear the tortured... Read More

Jim Acosta, the frequent Donald Trump antagonist who was all but pushed out by CNN earlier this year, may not be the type of person... Read More

Literature begins with the silence of the gods. As long as extra-human powers spoke to human beings, who communicated their messages in... Read More

“I am a sucker for people who seem to do what they do just for you (me).” The artist and writer Joe Brainard dashed off this... Read More

I’ve counted them all up: the teacher who laughs with children at their God and at their cradle, is already ours. The lawyer who... Read More

Last summer, I quit Spotify, and wrote about it with the rather unsubtle headline “Why I quit Spotify.” My reasons remain sound:... Read More

I am sitting in a bland conference room in Midtown Manhattan with twenty-nine so-called business professionals, and one of our instructors,... Read More

Though he is most often associated with New England, Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco. He dropped out of both... Read More

Today is World Happiness Day. So, like every year on March 20th, you are likely to see a lot of headlines reporting on the publication of the... Read More

The earliest evidence of weightlifting in the ancient Greek world is a sandstone block from Olympia, weighing about 315 pounds, with a pair... Read More

They are dressed in blue and ready for blood, thousands of them, pouring through downtown Lexington, Kentucky, on a Saturday night in... Read More

So great is the human need for connection and community that I have seen men and women bond while slam-dancing at punk rock concerts,... Read More

In 1993, 128 people were murdered in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, breaking a record for the largest number of individual... Read More

Recently a prominent member of the libertarian community died. Notable about the individual’s death is what he left behind. Though he... Read More

When Jackie Kennedy died, Peggy Noonan distilled America’s love for its First Lady into a little over a dozen paragraphs, nearly all of... Read More

Automation first claimed the horse. Then the automobile maker. And now, perhaps, the rest of us? Economists aren’t effectively... Read More

John Lennon described what Bowie did in his glam rock days as “just rock ’n’ roll with lipstick on”. I was in the... Read More

The lessons of the Democratic Party’s painful defeat in November turn on whom you ask. Moderates blame the excesses of wokeness. The... Read More

Most of our love lives will, at some point within them, be the locus of a good deal of disappointment. There are few other aspects of... Read More

A proposition: though “trash art” remains with us, the trash artist is a dying species. Trash art is focus-grouped these days,... Read More

Rock and roll ghosts are possessing our movie stars. Austin Butler apparently went so deep into character over the years-long process of... Read More

Nine days before the premiere of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney, Mulaney and the writing staff are gathered around a table in the... Read More

All apologetics are bold. You need guts to ask someone to reconsider their entire worldview. Viewed in that light, Ross... Read More

“World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no divisions between military and civilian participation.” —... Read More

Do innies have rights? By “innies,” of course, I mean the severed employees of Lumon Industries, relegated to the severed floor... Read More

Worcester, Massachusetts, the second-largest city in New England, is undergoing something of a renaissance. Downtown has a professional... Read More

There was one element of spring training that remained consistent every year: the opening speech. In my media work, I always ask managers... Read More

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) is both dead and lives on powerfully, if subterraneously, in several contemporary forms of thought. A quick... Read More

What is it with Britain’s cultural custodians and their hatred of everything British? National self-loathing drips from curators and... Read More

“Sarah, come to bed.” Sarah Wynn-Williams, Facebook’s director of global public policy, is on a private plane from Zurich... Read More

Tate hate has returned as Andrew and Tristan Tate inexplicably were allowed to enter the U.S. after having been detained in a... Read More

Literary readings are a funny thing. They’re often held at bars, but they’re not exactly ragers. I rarely see anybody get wasted... Read More

Franz Kafka published little during his life and shared the manuscripts of his novels and short stories mostly with confidants in his... Read More

I recently paid a visit to a nearby grocery store. A year ago, I helped build it. I was returning after a break of a few months. It’s... Read More