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 min read
Long Read
A collection of 197 posts
Blood, Sweat, and Gasoline
The story of Hollywood’s most unlikely blockbuster franchise, Mad Max.
Allan Stratton
· 21 min read
The Limits of ‘The Israel Lobby’
Mearsheimer and Walt still don’t understand American support for Israel.
Matt Johnson
· 25 min read
Imposing Order on Grief
Rob Henderson's 'Troubled' is a disjointed book, but provides valuable testimony to the importance of a stable childhood.
Iona Italia
· 23 min read
Less Than Half ‘A Man in Full’
One of US television’s most experienced and talented writers has made a mess of Tom Wolfe’s second novel.
Kevin Mims
· 24 min read
Springtime for Sinwar
Notes on the pro-Hamas Left and its antecedents.
Jeffrey Herf
· 21 min read
The Paranoid Style in Shakespeare Denialism
Against conspiracist trends, there is an obligation on defenders of a liberal society to uphold the integrity of its intellectual methods.
Oliver Kamm
· 25 min read
Misadventures of a Stalinist Stooge
Benn Steil’s engrossing new biography of Henry A. Wallace is a timely cautionary tale and a masterpiece of 20th-century American history.
Ronald Radosh
· 23 min read
Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)
After half a decade of critical adulation, Godard’s career slumped into doctrinaire Maoism, bitterness, incomprehensibility, and irrelevance. It never recovered.
Charlotte Allen
· 36 min read
Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)
A brief five-year period produced nearly all the Godard movies that film aficionados still remember, but even these celebrated works have dated poorly.
Charlotte Allen
· 33 min read
Sex and Smashed Steel
A look back at J.G. Ballard's ‘Crash’—one of the the 20th century’s greatest and most disturbingly prophetic novels.
Benjamin Kerstein
· 25 min read
Mystic Without a Church
Werner Herzog’s new memoir provides a look back on the magisterial and occasionally maddening career of a cinematic visionary.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 17 min read
Toward Ruin or Recovery?
The modern feminist response to rape is failing women, and it is failing victims of rape most of all.
Larissa Phillips
· 35 min read
The Amityville Horror—A 50-Year Old Lie That Won’t Die
Jay Anson’s haunted-house yarn was a highly lucrative hoax, but it struck a popular chord amid the financial precarity of 1970s America.
Kevin Mims
· 26 min read
Motorpsycho Nightmare
Robert Pirsig’s insufferable cult novel about philosophy and bike maintenance turns 50.
Kevin Mims
· 18 min read