RealClearBooks Articles

Last year, Charli XCX lit a neon-green fire under the pop world with Brat — a brash, chaotic album that redefined what pop could sound like in 2024. The summer became dominated by the British singer’s viral success, seeping into the mainstream of American politics and everyday life. This summer, a thoughtful new star opens up the Brat universe to a broader audience: Addison Rae. Known first as a TikTok star, Rae spent the past year making the case that she’s more than a viral personality. With her belting scream on a remix of ‘Von...

Paterson, New Jersey, 1979: Jamie Palmieri is an up-and-coming patrol officer, three years out of the academy and frustrated with his slow rise to detective. That all changes one frigid night in January, when a double homicide at a local bar leaves the owner and a young woman dead. In the wake of the Rubin "Hurricane" Carter proceedings and the city's lingering distrust for the police, Jamie is told to expect a "no one saw a thing" investigation. But as Jamie traces a series of small leads, he's sent on a path where the tables turn suddenly - with the still-unknown killer now stalking Jamie...

On a sunny day in Alexandria’s historic Parker-Gray neighborhood, I knock on the door of a large brick house painted yellow with green trim. “You’re right on time,” says R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. His home is less than a mile from the banks of the Potomac River and only a few blocks from the offices of The American Spectator, the magazine Tyrrell founded in 1967. Dressed in khakis and brown tassel loafers, the pocket square a silken plume rising from the breast of his navy-blue blazer, Tyrrell motions past the sitting room to his library, where a large portrait of...

Excerpted from Stop All the Clocks. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Arcade Publishing. “I was raised in South Florida,” Marcos said once Mona had finished. He didn’t offer any sympathy for her or ask follow up questions, which, oddly enough, Mona appreciated. “West Palm Beach. There’s a neighborhood called Parker Ridge, where all the Cubans live. It’s also where the local branch of Alpha 66 is at. Any idea what that is?” “Devil-worshipping fraternity of freemasons,” Mona guessed. “Close. It’s an...

The ability of racial preferences to stigmatize black achievements first hit home for me in college in the early 1990s. Just before the start of my senior year, I received a job offer from the local newspaper. A short time later, I happened to run into a former editor of the college paper where I had previously worked and told her the news. “Congratulations,” she said. “I heard they were looking for more minorities.” We were on friendly terms, so I don’t think it was her intention to offend, but the remark still stung. For me, the episode illustrated...

In late May, Kermit the Frog gave a commencement address. He did so at graduation ceremonies for the University of Maryland, alma mater of the late Jim Henson, the father of the Muppets. From his very first utterance one thing was clear to all in attendance: There was a throat in this frog. Kermit’s well-received words were the fetching fruits of independent thought, refreshing for their absence of a political axe to grind. He was, in short, nobody’s toady. Still, not everyone in College Park leapt for joy over where the selection committee had landed for a commencement...

A Thrilling Debut that Explores the Profound Mysteries of Life in the Digital AgeMona Veigh was feeling burnt out from the tech world—and life in general. Following the death of her unconventional colleague, Avram Parr, and the collapse of her AI company that left her a hefty cash-out, Mona retreated to her home on Roosevelt Island, free to toss her phone into the East River and curl up with a good book, forever.However, strange occurrences intrude on Mona's permanent vacation and thrust her back into the world. Colleagues from her former company begin to track her down and let on that...

This piece contains spoilers on 'The Last of Us' HBO’s The Last of Us is best known for its aggressive foray into the culture war, but beneath its surface-level agenda the show is an occasionally poignant character study on parent-child relationships. The gruesome Season 2 finale somewhat unexpectedly leaned into the latter last weekend, delivering a nuanced evolution to one of TV’s most obnoxiously jaded characters. And while the season attempts to paint Ellie as a “bad guy,” it perhaps inadvertently gives her a path to redemption. Season 2 picks up five years after...

From the BQE she caught the holy hell of it, the way smoke was streaming from burning steel. It was cinema, bad fiction, a plot point dreamed up as too ridiculous for art and discarded somewhere else. She drove on thinking that soon this would all dissolve and she’d be back home, in bed, maybe with Saul at her side. Emmanuel sleeping in the next room, under his Yankee posters. Her phone would ring and it would be Liv. Remember that time— The radio was beginning to use the word terrorism. It was a distant concept to her, men in foreign lands with submachine guns and hidden bombs,...

During the height of the pandemic, the Spanish priest Julian Carron published a book posing the simple yet loaded question: “Is there hope?” “The pandemic,” he posited, offered “a propitious opportunity for the verification” of the answer to this question—which “is the most widespread and challenging one in this time dominated by uncertainty…In fact,” he continued, “we are witnessing a full-blown clash between being and nothingness: a unique combat because of its import and dimensions, with a more visible part constantly...

A Contemporary Tragedy in a Classic StyleFour New Yorkers' paths collide in the days ahead of the 2016 election. Dan teaches Marxism while secretly courting a student. His girlfriend Mariko, an actress, finds refuge in her dying mentor's bed. When her sister, Akari, arrives from LA—in flight from her own dead-end romance—she becomes the unwitting witness to their mutual destruction . . . In crystalline prose, Gasda maps the territory between who we pretend to be and who we are—and how far we are willing to go when we think the internet isn't looking. The...

Akari was on the couch, scrolling Instagram. Her body was small, but she was very toned and lean from yoga and pilates classes, so she appeared longer than she was. And though her eyes were cast down, she was aware that Dan was staring at her, studying her very intently. “You look like someone, actually, who really needs to talk,” she said, without looking up (she was on the couch, he was on the floor). “Well, sure I do, yeah.” Dan laid down on the rug in the small common area, groaning slightly because his back was stiff; exhausted, he didn’t think he could or...

In 1985 – when I was 7 – the young kids in my neighborhood had a “swear club.” To join, the initiate had to hide behind a tree with the assembled members and say every swear word he knew. It was less common for children our age to encounter profanity back then. There weren’t many parents who routinely used profanity around kids, and other adults would clean up their speech when children were in earshot. This meant that the obscenities we did know were gleaned from overhearing adults in moments when they thought kids weren’t listening, or in brief bits of a...

It's 1973 and Mona Glass is a 24-year-old amateur tennis star in a long-running affair with Saul Plotz, her former college professor. Her parents like Saul and desperately want the free-spirited Mona to marry. But 34-year-old Saul already has a wife and two children. One day, Saul happens on an idea: stage a fake wedding for the benefit of her old world parents, invite a few friends in on the joke, and go about their lives. The ruse works. Except Saul realizes he actually wants to marry Mona, who vows never to permanently tie herself to a man. After losing her city job in the 1970s fiscal...

Five years after pandemic lockdowns disrupted the rollout of Chromatica, Lady Gaga has blessed our ears with her gigantic, return-to-form seventh studio album: Mayhem. The past years for the star have been action-packed with everything but giving us another pop album. She finally embarked on a postponed tour, released a remix album and a second jazz collaboration album with Tony Bennett, and honed her acting craft in the underrated House of Gucci and Joker: Folie à Deux. At last, Mother Monster is back on the radio in a true return-to-form. From the opening lead single...

Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. The selection, running from 1959 until six days before Plath’s famous suicide in 1963, consists of “Mushrooms,” “You’re,” “The Babysitters,” “The Applicant,” “Ariel,” and “Edge.” Working with the conceit that Plath conceived herself in her poetry as a classical...

In a letter to Henry Lee penned a little more than a year before his death, Thomas Jefferson famously described the Declaration of Independence as “an expression of the American mind.” With great learning and insight, Paul Seaton explores the founding document that gave voice to that mind in his book, “Public Philosophy and Patriotism: Essays on the Declaration and Us.” Seaton calls the Declaration the “first epic poem that Americans penned about themselves.” Simply describing its well-thought-out political theory is not enough. The Declaration tells a...

The Ideological Lie, as Solzhenitsyn calls it, was born when modern revolutionaries replaced the age-old distinction between good and evil with the illusory distinction between progress and reaction. In the name of progress, evil was called goodness, and goodness in the form of wise restraint was labeled evil, backward, racist, colonialist, sexist, etc. Jacobinism, Marxism-Leninism, National Socialism, Progressive Democracy, the New Left, and now, the new woke dispensation have all iterated upon this central conceit. Their adherents were all frenziedly preoccupied with being on “the...

Freedom, here, abides in this cell before me,bound to a crude, stone throne of eternityto reconcile Creator with creationand prevail against the proud, spiteful nations. Terrified, here, I quake in His bold Presence —He crowned, beaten and robed by flesh’s fragile weakness.Ancestors and heirs mock you with reed and shame;How dare I then petition and speak your name. The Man, yet, manifests mercy with a glance,the eyes, of which, pierce deeper than nails or lance.Yet He beckons me anon in a humble tonguewith a searing breath from the Song forever sung. This man, timidly, fails to...