The Purpose of Imaginative Fiction
“What’s it about?” is usually the first question we ask when someone recommends a new book, and it’s the wrong question.
Elena Shalneva
· 9 min read
COVID-19 Betrays America’s Curdled Cult of Optimism
A philosophy of optimism was central to the flourishing of the American project. But it’s also useful to consider whether insisting that success and greatness lie around every corner can become a maladaptive response to problems that are complex and brutal.
Daphne Merkin
· 5 min read
COVID-19 Is Not the End of 'The End of History'
As COVID-19 suffocates the global economy, borders remain closed, and tensions mount between EU countries, the US and China, etc., Fukuyama’s critics are taking the opportunity to dismiss the “The End of History?” while ignoring its basic premises.
Matt Johnson
· 13 min read
COVID-19 Superspreader Events in 28 Countries: Critical Patterns and Lessons
In the absence of any comprehensive database of COVID-19 superspreading events, I built my own.
Jonathan Kay
· 21 min read
COVID-19's Gender Gap
This negative narrative around men risks exacerbating the gender empathy gap, part of a wider unconscious bias against men, recently identified as an aspect of gamma bias.
John Barry
· 5 min read
PODCAST 87: Sex Worker and Lawyer Nadia Guo on the Devastating Impact of COVID-19 on the Sex trade
Nadia Guo, a sex worker and lawyer, talks to Jonathan Kay about the devastating impact the COVID-19 pandemic is having on the sex trade—although it’s been great for the webcam business.
Quillette
· 1 min read
Easy Rider: 50 Years Looking for America—A Review
Easy Rider is an important movie—much more important than a simple measure of its quality would suggest—which is probably why the American Film Institute, among others, continues to rate it so highly.
Graham Daseler
· 14 min read
Woody Allen's 'Apropos of Nothing'—A Review
He cannot help being true to himself. In this calm, blithe, and objective memoir, Allen emerges, at wild odds with his comedic persona, as a very tough, independent artist, a passionate lover of women, avowing his innocence of the one and only charge ever leveled against him in 84 years.
David Evanier
· 12 min read
Long-Distance Love during Lockdown
Love, it turns out, remains an enduring mystery.
Marilyn Simon
· 7 min read
Candace Owens Is Dangerously Misinformed about Vaccines
The idea that two of the most common and effective HPV vaccines in the world are “infertilizing poor colored children in Africa and India” is as absurd as it sounds.
Matt Johnson
· 9 min read
Nineteen of the Loneliest Films Ever Made
Some of them are stylish pop art or lowbrow trash—depending on how initiated you are with their appeal. But they will also make you cry or simply stare at the screen with a detached jaw as you begin to rethink their implications behind your sterilized walls.
Art Tavana
· 12 min read
Viral Politics
The lockdowns have impacted different classes differently.
Joel Kotkin
· 11 min read
Lessons in Death and Life from the Diaries of Samuel Pepys
In Pepys’s time a scarlet cross on the door denoted an infected household and sentinels stood guard outside to keep people inside.
Colin Fleming
· 8 min read
Beware Your Innate Pessimist
Coronavirus is deadly, but it is not the bubonic plague, which had a mortality rate of 50 percent.
Marian L. Tupy
· 8 min read
Board-gaming in the Age of Isolation
In normal times, when we’re not all inside waiting out a pandemic, physical self-isolation can be both a symptom and cause of depression and alienation.
Jonathan Kay
· 10 min read