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What is the state of American literature today? This loaded question never has an easy answer, and invariably the debate grows tedious,... Read More

Society is running out of babies, and no one can agree on why. Most people around the world, including Americans, live in a country where... Read More

In his breakout 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain recounts his early years as a cook... Read More

At undisclosed locations, in nondescript warehouses, vast troves of print books are scheduled for destruction. Each one awaits its bindings... Read More

“I’m actually not a fucking cook, I’m a writer,” Dominic Sessa says in the trailer for Tony, the new A24 movie about... Read More

I’m at Butterworth’s. An upscale restaurant popular among Washington’s right-wing elite; where Steve Bannon, Marco Rubio,... Read More

If you have ever tried to juggle, perhaps with those red Klutz Book fabric cubes full of beans, or with soggy tangerines, or with old tennis... Read More

It’s a rare sunny day where Jenna Ortega is. There’s not a cloud in the sky, and a gentle wind rustles the leafy branches over... Read More

In Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, an earnest young woman heads to Brown to study literature. Once there, she finds that novels... Read More

With almost every novel I read, I go through the same arc. At first the novel bores me. Then, suddenly, it becomes the most interesting thing... Read More

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has returned Homer’s epic to the center of popular culture, a feat that must be welcomed. Many... Read More

Baseball is America’s pastime. Football is its present tense, an obvious metaphor for war. Soccer is the egalitarian future. Meanwhile,... Read More

Open any parenting book from the past fifty years, and you will find a section about technology that starts something like this:... Read More

Two people are married. A few days later, the husband leaves for Quantico Marine Corps base. It is October, 1917—World War I. The... Read More

As you cross the Androscoggin River into Lewiston, you pass on your left the waterfalls that once set the mills to humming. On your right,... Read More

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of... Read More

Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes. Like many gestures, it conveys... Read More

It was 2018 when I discovered Scott McClanahan, and how did that come about? Oh, trying to impress some guy. He was in prison at the... Read More

The editor came late to British publishing. Until well after the end of the Second World War, the man—and it usually was a... Read More

It was in sociology classes that I first heard the phrase “white supremacy.” Quite naturally, the first thing I thought of was... Read More

The Swiss writer Christian Kracht is contemporary fiction’s great thrasher of expectations. No novel of his ever resembles its... Read More

For a brief, impressionable period of my life, I believed in literature. I believed in its singular importance, that there was something... Read More

In this episode of Get Real, David DesRosiers speaks with Green Beret veteran and former Virginia delegate Nick Freitas about the importance... Read More

Why is Japan… the way it is? Urbanists like me look with longing at Japan’s clean and timely trains, its dense but orderly... Read More

If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its... Read More

Jane Austen fans eagerly await yet another adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” which is due for release by Netflix this fall.... Read More

People can be surprised when they hear that I wrote a novel that centers professional wrestling. Someone like me–a Brown person raised... Read More

Just after dinnertime on December 26, 2006, the seabed off the southern tip of Taiwan suddenly lurched. Eight minutes later, it lurched... Read More

I saw Obsession twice in the theaters. First time was with my sixteen year old son, the second time with my eighteen year old son. Both of my... Read More

The dogs are trying to escape, shoving their noses through his knees and climbing all over each other attempting to paw their way out the... Read More

Every morning after breakfast, Dawn and I take a walk around my folks’ farmhouse in New Hampshire. A red-tailed hawk complains about us... Read More