Arts & Letters
A selection of recent articles on this topic
Fact-Checking the New Yorker
Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American…
On the Pleasure of Admiring
The great essayist William Hazlitt observed that there is pleasure in hating. “Without something to hate,”...
The Viking History of Greenland
There was now much talk of looking for new lands.” This line from the thirteenth-century Icelandic Saga…
The Madness in Miami
The great boxing spectacles of the past—the Thrilla in Manila (1975) and the Rumble in the Jungle…
Lancelot in the Desert
The Last Westernerby chilton williamson jr.386 pages, st. augustine’s press, $19.95 In his dedication to The Last…
The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole
A year after I became a Catholic, when my teenaged son was thinking about college, we visited…
The Wallet
Oxblood, bifold, kept / In a back bedroom / Closet all these years, / It dates to…
Another Madonna
Many may not notice the young rabbit, caught / in the thicket of brush near the bottom…
Birdwatching
The people I want most to like all do it. / I listen to their talk of swifts…
The Burial of the Faithful
You want a day as boring as a shrub, / a high, departing plane the only sound.…
Letters—February 2026
As a forty-eight-year-old who graduated from high school in 1995, Trevin Wax’s “We Were Jesus Freaks”...
Snowdrops
A gray ordeal, / these winters wrapped in scarves up to our eyes, / as we lean tense…
Another Year, Another Book Stack
Lists, lists, lists—how they proliferate. But it just so happens that I love lists, and have done…
Shakespeare and the City
Recently I checked into a pleasant, fairly sterile Marriott in Shoreditch ahead of my London debut as…
Semiquincentennial Prep with HBO
Having recently lamented in this space that book reading is on life support in these United States,…
