Books

The American empire is arrogant, brutal and yet completely indispensable to Western civilisation.

An attempted rebrand.

James Panero on “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” at the Jewish Museum, New York.

A new entertainment and information destination for men and the women who love them.

In Jean Becker and Tom Collamore's Don't Tell the President, an oral history of the world of presidential advance, the authors provide a sense of what it's like to do advance work for a president or presidential candidate. Although this type of work has in some ways become easier with the advent of smartphones that allow teams to maintain contact with White House or campaign headquarters at all times, advance men and women are typically sent out to remote locations with minimal supervision and maximal responsibility. These teams face real, hard deadlines. The president will be at a certain time or place. The advance people must make sure everything runs smoothly. If they do their job perfectly, no one will notice. But if they screw up, the failed event will be blasted all over the evening news and the next day's headlines and become the fodder for late-night comics and the candidate's electoral foes.

He’s far more than the Supreme Secular Rationalist.

Hopefully more authors like Lionel Shriver get the opportunity to put a mirror in front of woke do-gooders everywhere.

A dumb podcast and the progressive turn toward nihilism

Mocked by Copenhagen’s most notorious scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of deeply personal attacks and the silence of friends and allies.

Paul Thompson writes about the incredible vanishing superstar.

The millennials in Andrew Martin’s new novel "Down Time" are treading water: caught between youth and age, breaking up, and settling down.

Some thoughts as publishing day approaches

What will it take to be fulfilled by life? Love, perhaps, or community, power, or professional success. At different points in my life I believed that having my work published would make me happy, or leaving the country, going back to school, getting a literary agent. I thought a new girlfriend might do it, or…

The American dream, according to Slavoj Žižek, amounts to “dematerialization” of real life as it becomes a “spectral show.”

“Historians will study how bad this book is,” one review reads.