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There’s a scene in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the novel by Otessa Moshfegh, where the protagonist takes a dump on a piece of... Read More

I date my coming of age as a writer to Fall 2003, when my nonfiction short “Kilbrennan” was published in the North Dakota... Read More

In the first TV ad for Joe Biden’s ill-fated reelection campaign, a somber narrator warned Americans that the values we hold most dear... Read More

In Sirāt, a band of ravers drive deep into the Moroccan desert searching for the next gathering where they can dance freely. A father and... Read More

In the first short story in Will Self’s first book, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, published in 1991, the narrator’s mother... Read More

Feeling like things in America are divided right now? Turns out, it’s not just here. In a survey of 23,000 people from 29 countries,... Read More

In her prose poem, “Toni Morrison,” Nikki Giovanni imagines cooking a “Toni Morrison stew.” Read More

Sometimes opportunity knocks in booms and bangs. I told a good friend a week ago that I was heading to North Adams, Mass., a short drive... Read More

I read Emma Gannon’s new book A Year of Nothing in one sitting earlier this year. This was no great feat. It is a very... Read More

I would estimate that in 20 years of writing for a public audience, I’ve maybe made reference to any kind of sexual or romantic... Read More

In the early months of 1836, a 33-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson sat in the Old Manse in Concord, gazing down the hill to the Concord River... Read More

The work of Tom Stoppard, who passed away last November, is commonly described as dazzling, clever, and emotionally powerful—all of... Read More

There’s a line by Heinrich Heine that irked me when I first read it and irks me now when I read it again: “Psychical pain is more... Read More

Bob Dylan invokes Walt Whitman in “I Contain Multitudes,” the opening track on Rough and Ready Ways, which the singer... Read More

It is perhaps in the nature of academics to fret about declining standards, especially as these academics age and become ever less attuned to... Read More

History has been kind to Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161-180 A.D. Born to a patrician family in 121 A.D., his father died when he... Read More

One of the best reasons to attend college is to have the space to remake yourself. The campus grounds are an open terrarium for growth and... Read More

My old friend Ed Feulner, the man who built the Heritage Foundation from the ground up, used to say that in politics, “there are... Read More

At the dawn of 2026, I spent an irresponsible amount of time cataloguing what I did in 2025. There are so many ways to aggregate a... Read More

A few weeks before Christmas in 2022, Amber Lavigne was cleaning her 13-year-old’s bedroom when she stumbled upon her daughter’s... Read More

In 2014, at a small Stanford University lecture hall, the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to... Read More

Last week, New York magazine published a cover story on Heated Rivalry and fujoshi, a Japanese term for women who love stories about sex and... Read More

American Psycho has the distinction of being the last novel to cause a true moral panic. Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 glimpse into the... Read More

Most of the year’s Oscar movies are fairly typical of the new trend to reduce art to ideology, some more concerned with race (Sinners,... Read More

A woman stands on a stage under harsh, punishing red light, wearing a black skirt over tight black pants.  Read More

Corporate America sucks. The job, whatever it is, could be accomplished by a high schooler with moderate emotional maturity. The... Read More

The Future of Love is your eighth collection of poems. How is it different than your other collections? My last collection, a selected... Read More