Farewell, Alex Trebek On Friday, November 6th, between 1 and 2pm Pacific Daylight Time, I participated in an audition for the TV game-show Jeopardy!. Normally auditions are conducted in person at various regional locations around the US. As a Northern Californian, I should have been attending a live audition in San Francisco. But Kevin Mims 13 Nov 2020 · 14 min read
Corruption and Remorse—The Novels of a Watergate Conspirator As an avid reader of pop fiction, I’m more partial to the Nixon administration than any other White House. The Reagan years may have produced more crooks, and the Trump years may have produced more chaos, but there is one measure by which the criminal and criminal-adjacent members of Kevin Mims 17 Sep 2020 · 19 min read
Barney Rosset and the Unending Struggle to Read Freely It is by now a familiar truism that the Internet—and social media, in particular—has awarded the intolerant, the narrow-minded, and the censorious unprecedented power. To this challenge from below, publishers have, by and large, responded with dismaying timidity. Large multinational publishing firms have hastily withdrawn controversial titles and Kevin Mims 6 May 2020 · 22 min read
Warehouse Work in an Age of Contagion As regular readers of Quillette will know, I work at a warehouse in West Sacramento, California, where every workday I toil in close quarters with dozens of other employees. In the days before the advent of the novel coronavirus pandemic, that wasn’t a problem. Now, however, it’s a Kevin Mims 30 Mar 2020 · 6 min read
The Decline of the Great American Family Saga In February, the Atlantic published a much discussed essay by David Brooks entitled “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” Brooks noted that the conditions that once made nuclear families viable—strong unions, plenty of jobs that paid living wages, inexpensive housing and transportation and education costs, stay-at-home mothers, high numbers Kevin Mims 28 Feb 2020 · 13 min read
The National Book Foundation Defines Diversity Down Last month the Huffington Post published an essay by Claire Fallon entitled “Was this Decade the Beginning of the End of the Great White Male Writer?” Fallon celebrated the notion that white men are losing their prominence in contemporary American literature and that the best books being published in America Kevin Mims 7 Jan 2020 · 11 min read
'White Christmas' and the Triumphs of the Greatest Generation Michael Curtiz’s 1954 classic White Christmas is so popular that it generates new think-pieces every time the holiday season rolls around. Last year, the New York Times republished its own original review of the film, in which the late Bosley Crowther panned the movie. Other pieces in other places Kevin Mims 20 Dec 2019 · 11 min read
In Praise of Sylvia Plath's Forgotten (Sorority) Sister A tragic early death can do wonders for a writer’s reputation. On October 27, Google dedicated its search page to the late Sylvia Plath, who would have turned 87 that day, had she not taken her own life, at the age of 30, back in 1963. It seems unlikely Kevin Mims 28 Oct 2019 · 8 min read
'Cancel Culture,' Roaring Twenties-Style The term “cancel culture” has become hotly contested of late. Critics say it is indiscriminately used to describe different degrees of mass opprobrium produced by transgressions that range from the trivial to the criminal. Now, while mob justice is never a particularly good idea, it is certainly true that some Kevin Mims 27 Sep 2019 · 12 min read
William Peter Blatty's Counter-Countercultural Parable In her new book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics (excerpted in Quillette on August 27), essayist and cultural critic Mary Eberstadt documents just how damaging the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and its normalization of divorce in particular, has been to America’s children. She mentions Kevin Mims 13 Sep 2019 · 13 min read
How (and Why) to KISSASS On June 29, the New York Times published an essay entitled “I’ve Picked My Job Over My Kids,” in which lawyer and law professor Lara Bazelon wrote movingly about her professional life, how much personal satisfaction she derives from it, and how it gives meaning to her days. In Kevin Mims 6 Aug 2019 · 7 min read
Tourist Journalism Versus the Working Class A few days before the Fourth of July, British comic John Oliver used the pulpit of his US infotainment show, Last Week Tonight, to deliver a lengthy monologue about the depredations of Amazon.com. His specific complaint was that Amazon doesn’t treat its employees very well. According to Oliver, Kevin Mims 19 Jul 2019 · 17 min read
Pop Fiction's Rich History of #MeToo Drama Lately, the very serious people who write about TV and film and books for publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Times have been tripping over themselves to heap praise on highbrow novelists, filmmakers, and screenwriters who have used their platforms to tackle issues such as rape Kevin Mims 19 Jun 2019 · 12 min read
Goodbye, Herman Wouk On May 17th, American novelist Herman Wouk died, just ten days before he was due to turn 104. If Ernest Hemingway’s life and career had been as long as those of Herman Wouk, he’d have been alive as recently as 2003 and he’d have published a book Kevin Mims 18 May 2019 · 8 min read
Banned Books Week: 10 Pop Fictions to Annoy the Politically Correct These are the books you should read with great ostentation at sidewalk bistros, corner restaurants, and in doctors’ waiting rooms. Kevin Mims 26 Sep 2018 · 15 min read
