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“I’m glad you didn’t forget about our date,” says John with a slight smile, then pauses, his eyes fixed unblinkingly... Read More

(I leave in eight days for Asia, where I will be for six weeks—Seoul, Qingdao, Taipei, Taitung, Okinawa, and hopefully Yangon if I can... Read More

I’m on the Northeast Regional and as I cross Hell Gate Bridge and look to the left at Manhattan in all its grandeur, I am overcome with... Read More

Before the lights dimmed for the film, “The Lady from Shanghai” at Vidiots, Aidan Gannon and Jason Fine were busy perusing... Read More

Aaron Timms, a writer and critic, was standing in a corner at TJ Byrnes, an Irish pub in New York’s financial district, explaining the... Read More

This post at The Athletic is making the rounds, drawing criticism on the right. I think it’s easy to mock this column, but... Read More

At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend:... Read More

It is a major part of Mario Puzo’s story about himself, the myth of The Godfather if you will, that before writing this piece... Read More

If anti-Communism was the ruling passion of the neoconservatives in foreign affairs, opposition to the counterculture of the 1960s was their... Read More

1. Michael Silverblatt, who died on Valentine’s Day, was the greatest literary influence of my life. He hosted Bookworm, a radio... Read More

You don’t need a crystal ball to divine Gavin Newsom’s ambitions. “Yeah, I’d be lying otherwise,” he told CBS... Read More

For a brief moment on Sunday, America was united. After the final Olympic hockey showdown between the United States and Canada went into... Read More

If you’re like me, you spent all Sunday evening watching clips of the United States men’s hockey team clinching, then receiving,... Read More

Last fall, Harper’s magazine published a much-discussed dispatch about an online cult of porn obsessives. These... Read More

In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was... Read More

Let me tell you the tale of the ungrateful creatures who crawled out of Eden. They murdered their own mothers. They slaughtered their own... Read More

I’m going to start with a spoiler, because we’re talking about a nearly 200-year-old novel with more than a dozen film... Read More

Last summer, I visited family in Seattle. Fresh off antidepressants, a few glasses of rosé, and a day at the Chihuly Museum pushing my... Read More

A reflection on an inspired work of folk art in rural East Tennessee… The house of God sits at the end of an old dirt road lined with... Read More

Reading about other writers is my guiltiest and least productive pleasure. The fugitive bolt of recognition is exactly what I’m... Read More

The Perception I spent a long career at the CIA but I rarely write about it. The myth is too pervasive and exciting, so that anything I said... Read More

{Cough, clears throat}. Chapter one. It’s 1991 in Manhattan. Cue a Gershwin piano trill, followed by sirens; open on an old lady... Read More

People can be rude about my being from Ohio. I don’t understand why. It is a relatively dense swing state where the demographics around... Read More

This is the last part of a series which I began in 2024. The first two parts bore the somewhat bombastic heading “Why I... Read More

Robert Duvall, one of Hollywood’s most versatile and admired actors, has died at the age of ninety-five. He played any number of iconic... Read More

Risk 4. The Advice Fallacy: A veritable cognitive bias club sandwich There’s a particular kind of cognitive and rhetorical... Read More

In one of his loveliest and most idealistic sonnets, Shakespeare writes, Love is not love Which alters... Read More

Last Friday, onstage at a major AI summit in India, Sam Altman wanted to address what he called an “unfair” criticism. The OpenAI... Read More

The disappointing truth is that most lives are failures from the general human standpoint. Many of us rarely move from wish to purpose. Those... Read More

Every great invention is also a question. Consider the telescope. It certainly has practical applications—it can help you scope out a... Read More

Shelly Romero has early memories of going to her local supermarket and picking pulp fiction off the shelves. “We were very working... Read More

Every crop we consume came from a wild ancestor. Through breeding, people selected for bigger grains, juicier fruit, more branches, or... Read More

In late 18th-century Europe, you knew trouble was brewing when your son started wearing yellow pants. This was a sign he might be suffering... Read More

A decade after the untimely death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, veteran journalist James Rosen has released the second volume of his... Read More

The Cotillion Room in The Pierre hotel has wall panels painted with pale green laurel wreaths, plush carpet patterned with grey-blue... Read More

On January 30, 2026, the Department of Education (ED) released its proposed rule defining what constitutes a “professional... Read More