Texas Porn Star Massacres Ti West’s clever and original ‘X’ trilogy is elevated postmodern horror at its finest and its director’s best work to date. Allan Stratton 24 Jul 2024 · 12 min read
Rereading Philip Roth Today Roth’s early works portray Jewish characters who are fearful of antisemitism in America as paranoid. He later changed his mind—and so have I. Peter C. Herman 23 Jul 2024 · 12 min read
Dutchmen on the Hudson In the 21st instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how the arrival of Dutch fur traders sparked an upheaval in regional Indigenous geopolitics. Greg Koabel 20 Jul 2024 · 19 min read
The Man Who Wasn’t There Richard Morton Jack’s comprehensive new biography of Nick Drake offers a glimpse of a brilliant but troubled soul. Matt Hanson 19 Jul 2024 · 10 min read
Abiding Legends Richard Matheson, George R. Stewart, and the birth of the Calipocalypse. Kevin Mims 9 Jul 2024 · 23 min read
Art over Man: The Roger Waters Test Case When we create art, we are our best selves, better than the selves we are outside of art. Thomas P. Balazs 4 Jul 2024 · 9 min read
The Birth of Quebec In the twentieth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Samuel de Champlain and Récollet missionaries established a fledgling French colony in what we now call Quebec City. Greg Koabel 4 Jul 2024 · 17 min read
‘Superintelligence,’ Ten Years On AI catastrophe is easy to imagine, but a lot has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to pan out. Sean Welsh 2 Jul 2024 · 12 min read
England’s Daydreaming Robyn Hitchcock’s new memoir takes us back to 1967—a year the British singer-songwriter never outgrew. Dave Thompson 2 Jul 2024 · 12 min read
France’s Founding Fathers: A Review of ‘House of Lilies’ In a new book, Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells the story of the Capetian dynasty (987–1328), whose rulers stitched a set of medieval duchies and counties into a single kingdom. Charlotte Allen 26 Jun 2024 · 20 min read
The Roots of Progressive Radicalism: Nellie Bowles vs. Musa al-Gharbi In two new books, a journalist and an academic offer competing explanations for the extremist ideological tendencies within left-wing cultural, academic, activist, and political institutions. Jonathan Kay 25 Jun 2024 · 16 min read
Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time The recycling industry—and the world at large—has yet to fully reckon with a bombshell study that dropped last year. Frank Celia 17 Jun 2024 · 17 min read
Too Much Chocolate Fifty years of Robert Cormier’s “classic” young-adult novel is more than enough. Kevin Mims 13 Jun 2024 · 9 min read
Roger Corman: A Filmmaker’s Filmmaker An account of all the lives Corman touched, the careers he helped to jump-start, and the genres he pioneered would fill several books. Jacob Bielecki 6 Jun 2024 · 12 min read
George Orwell’s Error Had he lived long enough to witness the fruits of liberal capitalism, perhaps Orwell would finally have accepted the failure of socialism. Christopher J. Snowdon 6 Jun 2024 · 13 min read