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Nov 19, 2025
For a while in my writing career—a decade, perhaps—I was anguished over the state of the novel in the United States. What did it mean that people seemed to be reading...
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Nov 7, 2025
There’s a trite observation to be made, in times like these, that reality seems to outstrip fiction. The novelist’s lament is that he can’t keep up—too...
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Oct 28, 2025
It is the rarest of gifts to have lived long enough to survey both a life and a century in its greatest breadth; even rarer still to be both an active participant and shaper of the...
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Oct 17, 2025
I consider myself a lucky person. In the mid-2020s, amid the great upheavals in my industry, I am able to carve out a middle-class living as a writer. I can pay my rent in New York...
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Oct 6, 2025
Gore Vidal, who would have turned one hundred today, is not always a man easily remembered. There is no simple canon to jam him inside, no well-meaning scholarly societies to huddle...
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Oct 3, 2025
I invited Alex Perez and Ross Barkanto join me for this episode of the podcast because I’d seen both of them write essays or posts recently reflecting on their...
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Sep 26, 2025
My father, who took a somewhat jaundiced and cynical view of the United States, always retained a reverence for the Founding Fathers. He saw them as brilliant, flawed men who...
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Sep 15, 2025
The young man is seated, clenching a microphone. Beneath a tent promising the American Comeback, he completes, calmly enough, a sentence about gang violence. The bullet, too fast to...
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Sep 8, 2025
Not long ago, I reread large chunks of The Love Affairs of Nataniel P., which is one of the great American novels of the 2010s. Adelle Waldman’s debut is a send-up of...
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Aug 25, 2025
A new horror film is enrapturing America, and it’s well-worth your time. Weapons tells the story of seventeen schoolchildren who all disappear in the early morning...
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Aug 18, 2025
Not long ago, I was at a party with media and political types. While slugging my white wine, I ended up in conversation with a former editor of a high-flying, 2010s digital...
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Aug 4, 2025
It felt, in my early adolescence, there was nothing more ruthless than running.
For reasons I could not understand at the time, I had stopped being able to beat anyone in a race. In...
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Jul 28, 2025
Like a ghostly flickering between radio stations on a country night—multiple voices, and realities, briefly converging on one dial—we witnessed, not long ago, the...
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Jul 16, 2025
On May 5th, my new novel, Glass Century, was published. You may have known this because you read this newsletter. In fact, if you joined up at any point in 2025...
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Jun 9, 2025
Midway through 2025, it’s safe to say woke and anti-woke are exhausting themselves. Cultural clashes that characterized so much of the last decade just do not matter any...
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Jun 2, 2025
I’ve been wrestling, of late, with what to make of artificial intelligence. Am I too much of a skeptic? A pessimist? I meet enough techno-optimists to second guess...
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May 30, 2025
It is easy to understand the populist case against Harvard.
The elite Ivy League university holds an endowment worth more than $50 billion. For centuries, the richest, most powerful,...
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May 23, 2025
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...
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May 13, 2025
Since releasing a new novel last week, I’ve been asked several times about the difference between writing fiction and nonfiction. A vast majority of readers know me for my...
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May 6, 2025
There were surely critics, in the middle of the 1960s, who had no concept of what was to come. The counterculture could feel faddish; so could New Hollywood, sexually explicit...
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May 5, 2025
There’s a paragraph in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, his polarizing if riveting account of a life in letters in midcentury America, that’s always stuck with...
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Apr 29, 2025
In David Polonoff’s rollicking novel WannaBeat, a twentysomething named Philip Polarov tries to become a writer in 1970s San Francisco. Philip is middle-class and...
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Apr 21, 2025
What’s an anti-woke intellectual warrior to do these days?
There are two clear paths: the victory lap or the firm turn against MAGA. Each is, in its own way, intellectually...
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Apr 15, 2025
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I went to many rock shows in Williamsburg and Bushwick. The neighborhoods, like me, were a bit scruffier then. The glass monoliths had not yet...
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Apr 14, 2025
These are peculiar and disorienting times for those who believe in the life of the mind. The old university systems, which were the bulwark of the postwar American boom, now seem in...
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Apr 9, 2025
When I was young, I wanted to be a successful novelist. Success, in this sense, took on superficial, external forms that were predicated on a wholly twentieth century concept. Born...
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Mar 28, 2025
Should we, in fact, reject our cultural elites? This is one of the more pressing questions of our volatile political moment. My id—my inner, nastier Ross...
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Mar 27, 2025
The one bright spot for Democrats these days, it seems, is Bernie Sanders. It is an indication of the party’s sad state that the only figure aligned with it who is able to draw...
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Mar 19, 2025
Sixty years ago this month, The Beach Boys Today! appeared in record stores across the country. The Beach Boys were, in 1965, one of the very few American rock acts to...
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Mar 10, 2025
We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning...
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Mar 4, 2025
In the 2010s, a certain kind of social justice activist took a hard turn against the mainstream media. The rancor was of a different flavor than the Chomskyian critiques of corporate...
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Feb 21, 2025
There is a new Marvel movie out and no one seems to care. No one, of course, is an exaggeration, a provocation, since there are obviously human beings buying tickets...
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Feb 5, 2025
When I think about the artificial intelligence revolution, I keep returning to a simple dichotomy: need vs. want.
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Jan 30, 2025
With Donald Trump, it is perpetually difficult to gauge what matters and what doesn’t — where does the bluster end and the change begin, and how seriously should we take...
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Jan 28, 2025
The liberal critics demand evidence. This is nothing new, and I don’t blame them. I practice journalism, which is evidence-based, and I have been consuming Nate Silver since he...
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Jan 21, 2025
The American republic is a sibilating beast; it has fifty mouths and one hundred eyes, and the blood on its fangs drips with love. It is sick and confused and outrunning death. It is...
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Jan 10, 2025
Explaining the New York Post to anyone who is not from New York is always difficult. This left-leaning city has a daily newspaper that is owned by a right-wing media tycoon...
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Jan 1, 2025
Every year, I write a piece rounding up all the books I read. I chart almost nothing in my life except reading; I’ve got notebooks listing all the books I’ve...
Nov 19, 2025For a while in my writing career—a decade, perhaps—I was anguished over the state of the novel in the United States. What did it mean that people seemed to be reading...
Nov 7, 2025There’s a trite observation to be made, in times like these, that reality seems to outstrip fiction. The novelist’s lament is that he can’t keep up—too...
Oct 28, 2025It is the rarest of gifts to have lived long enough to survey both a life and a century in its greatest breadth; even rarer still to be both an active participant and shaper of the...
Oct 17, 2025I consider myself a lucky person. In the mid-2020s, amid the great upheavals in my industry, I am able to carve out a middle-class living as a writer. I can pay my rent in New York...
Oct 6, 2025Gore Vidal, who would have turned one hundred today, is not always a man easily remembered. There is no simple canon to jam him inside, no well-meaning scholarly societies to huddle...
Oct 3, 2025I invited Alex Perez and Ross Barkanto join me for this episode of the podcast because I’d seen both of them write essays or posts recently reflecting on their...
Sep 26, 2025My father, who took a somewhat jaundiced and cynical view of the United States, always retained a reverence for the Founding Fathers. He saw them as brilliant, flawed men who...
Sep 15, 2025The young man is seated, clenching a microphone. Beneath a tent promising the American Comeback, he completes, calmly enough, a sentence about gang violence. The bullet, too fast to...
Sep 8, 2025Not long ago, I reread large chunks of The Love Affairs of Nataniel P., which is one of the great American novels of the 2010s. Adelle Waldman’s debut is a send-up of...
Aug 25, 2025A new horror film is enrapturing America, and it’s well-worth your time. Weapons tells the story of seventeen schoolchildren who all disappear in the early morning...
Aug 4, 2025It felt, in my early adolescence, there was nothing more ruthless than running. For reasons I could not understand at the time, I had stopped being able to beat anyone in a race. In...
Jul 28, 2025Like a ghostly flickering between radio stations on a country night—multiple voices, and realities, briefly converging on one dial—we witnessed, not long ago, the...
Jul 16, 2025On May 5th, my new novel, Glass Century, was published. You may have known this because you read this newsletter. In fact, if you joined up at any point in 2025...
Jun 9, 2025Midway through 2025, it’s safe to say woke and anti-woke are exhausting themselves. Cultural clashes that characterized so much of the last decade just do not matter any...
Jun 2, 2025I’ve been wrestling, of late, with what to make of artificial intelligence. Am I too much of a skeptic? A pessimist? I meet enough techno-optimists to second guess...
May 30, 2025It is easy to understand the populist case against Harvard. The elite Ivy League university holds an endowment worth more than $50 billion. For centuries, the richest, most powerful,...
May 23, 2025From 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...
May 5, 2025There’s a paragraph in Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, his polarizing if riveting account of a life in letters in midcentury America, that’s always stuck with...
Apr 29, 2025In David Polonoff’s rollicking novel WannaBeat, a twentysomething named Philip Polarov tries to become a writer in 1970s San Francisco. Philip is middle-class and...
Apr 21, 2025What’s an anti-woke intellectual warrior to do these days? There are two clear paths: the victory lap or the firm turn against MAGA. Each is, in its own way, intellectually...
Apr 14, 2025These are peculiar and disorienting times for those who believe in the life of the mind. The old university systems, which were the bulwark of the postwar American boom, now seem in...
Apr 9, 2025When I was young, I wanted to be a successful novelist. Success, in this sense, took on superficial, external forms that were predicated on a wholly twentieth century concept. Born...
Mar 27, 2025The one bright spot for Democrats these days, it seems, is Bernie Sanders. It is an indication of the party’s sad state that the only figure aligned with it who is able to draw...
Mar 19, 2025Sixty years ago this month, The Beach Boys Today! appeared in record stores across the country. The Beach Boys were, in 1965, one of the very few American rock acts to...
Mar 10, 2025We live, largely, in a utilitarian world. This is not a state of affairs I welcome but it’s one, having survived the American educational system, I understand. Much of learning...
Mar 4, 2025In the 2010s, a certain kind of social justice activist took a hard turn against the mainstream media. The rancor was of a different flavor than the Chomskyian critiques of corporate...
Feb 21, 2025There is a new Marvel movie out and no one seems to care. No one, of course, is an exaggeration, a provocation, since there are obviously human beings buying tickets...
Feb 5, 2025When I think about the artificial intelligence revolution, I keep returning to a simple dichotomy: need vs. want.
Jan 30, 2025With Donald Trump, it is perpetually difficult to gauge what matters and what doesn’t — where does the bluster end and the change begin, and how seriously should we take...
Jan 28, 2025The liberal critics demand evidence. This is nothing new, and I don’t blame them. I practice journalism, which is evidence-based, and I have been consuming Nate Silver since he...
Jan 21, 2025The American republic is a sibilating beast; it has fifty mouths and one hundred eyes, and the blood on its fangs drips with love. It is sick and confused and outrunning death. It is...
Jan 10, 2025Explaining the New York Post to anyone who is not from New York is always difficult. This left-leaning city has a daily newspaper that is owned by a right-wing media tycoon...