Lena Dunham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Helen DeWitt

Manifesto(es)

Lena Dunham and her social strategist on coming back online, her new memoir Famesick, and embarking on a Substack book tour

Hidden oases in one of America’s most populous cities.

The German writer’s postwar works were ruthless in their condemnation of a country that, in its inability to reckon with historical atrocity, was beyond reform.

It's the cycle of life. The cycle of showbiz.

On Max Watman's 'Tomorrow, the War'

In 2001, six-year-old Haley Zega got lost on a family hike in the Arkansas wilderness. She was found after three days where she survived drinking river water. Now there’s a book about it. What does it take to be a book? Novelist and Bard College professor Benjamin Hale is Haley’s uncle, so he wrote an article about it in Harper’s. When an article is expanded into a book, you wonder how much extra filling you get in the reading. A lot of books should be articles, rather than the other way around. (A lot of articles should be Substack posts, a lot of posts should be tweets, and a lot of tweets shouldn’t exist at all.)

From the Savoy in London to an airport hotel in Queens, Jim Windolf tells the little-known story of the rooms where the musical giants forged a surprisingly close bond.

Ross Barkan's Colossus

In the face of bourgeois Jacobin challenges, can the American experiment survive the twenty-first century?

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.