November 2019

In 1995, comedian Denis Leary recorded a track called “Asshole,” a song about an all-American guy who likes “football and porno and books about war.”

A few years ago I started collaborating with a client on her first book. When we signed the papers, in addition to including the fee structure and the schedule, I added one important stipulation: There is no guarantee that this book will sell.

“I wanted to go to college to avoid being a third-generation janitor.” The man on stage at this California town hall tells a familiar story. He’s now a beloved high school principal, but to finance his education, he took out a loan—$80,000.

I missed Guillaume Nicloux’s film The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq on its release in 2014. What a mistake...

In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Orsino, the Duke of Illyria, having been repeatedly rejected by the Countess Olivia, invokes a musical metaphor to describe his lovesick heart...

In the 1980s, having a poster of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting in my college dorm room made me feel sophisticated and grown-up: I’m living in New York, it announced....

Since a few hours ago, when we wrote those short notes to each other, I’ve been to a meeting of the Failed Novelists Society. This was partly an attempt to advance a story...

Though surely unintentional on the part of the author, the timing of the book’s publication, the first English-language monograph on Japan’s history of leprosy, could not have been better.

About a hundred years after that fateful day when the Augustinian monk Martin Luther apocryphally affixed his remonstrance to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and thus supposedly initiated the Reformation...

When Nancy and her lover, Louis, are on the road somewhere outside Baltimore, and she has finally left her husband, and the world outside the car looks the way...

In January the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, suffered a minor scandal concerning the virtue of the Mother of God.

Andrea Long Chu’s Females is—already—many things to many people, including, as Bryony White notes, “an exercise in logic, not what they were expecting.”..

I was back in Oakland for my new job. After nearly a month of looking for a place to live, I got a text from Jenny: “Would you consider a shack?”

Socialism was hardly in the air in the suburban us of the late 90s and early 2000s. In Sunkara’s characteristically breezy telling, it took a lingering oasis of American social democracy, the local public library...

In Noah Baumbach’s newly released “Marriage Story,” Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson play a couple who are going through a painful, protracted divorce battle.

If Handke bears witness on behalf of the people of Serbia, how does he do so? What is the self-consciousness Handke ascribes to the Serbian people?

In Silencing the Bomb: One Scientist’s Quest to Halt Nuclear Testing, Lynn Sykes offers a fascinating look at the time and effort it took for states, during and after the Cold War, to agree...

At 2:28 pm on August 28, 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walked into a PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania.

The big story of the campaign so far has been the ascent of Elizabeth Warren. A reluctant and somewhat shaky candidate in 2012...

Place Edmond Rostand in Paris was packed on Sunday 6 October. Smartly dressed families kept arriving. They had gathered to oppose a new law that will extend assisted reproduction (PMA) to lesbian couples and single women...