I recently found myself sitting across a table from a stranger, chewing awkwardly in silence. It was a familiar scenario: a hole-in-the-wall sandwich shop with not enough tables and me sitting alone, assenting readily when an older woman asked if …

I am a person with a brain and I watch The Bachelor. And not just as a joke. Sure, a part of me will always be that pajama pants-ed person snacking away on olives and soft cheeses while snarkily jeering and judging. …

“It is inevitable,” Stephanie Bernhard wrote in The New Inquiry in January, “that our fictional landscapes will evolve in tandem with our physical landscapes.” A changing climate, she argued, will change the way we write: the ravages of a warming world …

People think about 1994 now because Kurt Cobain died then, which causes one to squint through the year, misremembering the end of that era as encompassing all of it. It has always struck me that 1994 ought to be one …

For a few decades, Lyndon Johnson’s proclamation that “Carl Sandburg was more than the voice of America … He was America” seemed almost believable. The young Socialist newspaperman from Illinois had grown up to be a comforting, white-haired bard who …

Don Draper is watching his wife Megan get ready to film an ad for Baxter shoes. She’s dressed in a mock-European folk costume consisting of a canary blouse, scarlet dirndl and floral headdress. It’s ludicrous, like a parody of Snow …

When I wake up at the hotel in Reno, my memories are a messy pastiche. I reach for an image to encapsulate my experience of Burning Man, but everything I grasp feels like a cliché. Dancing beside a fluorescent art …

Near the end of his life, Adam Smith returned to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book and in his estimation, if not history’s, his best. He had recently finished extensive revisions to The Wealth of Nations, and, as …

If you have anything to do with intelligent teenagers (children, siblings, students, colleagues), you’ll have heard that the only political belief worth having at the moment is libertarianism. Teenage libertarians, unlike all too many of the grown-ups who lay claim …

In her new book The Mansion of Happiness, the historian Jill Lepore claims that the debates Americans have over issues like abortion, stem cell research and end-of-life care, usually understood as having to do with science and religion alone, must …