Justin Lee
Associate Editor
Upon reading my short stories, Jaspreet Singh Boparai urged me to read the French Decadents, especially J. K. Huysmans. This summer I sprinted through The Damned (Là-Bas), enthralled. I’m now reading the rest of Huysmans’s Durtal quadrilogy, which fictionalizes the author’s own journey from unbelief (his soul “bogged down in the mud, macerating in a concentrated juice of old guano”) to occult spiritualism, to a robust Catholic faith. Aesthetic experience is key to Huysmans’s/Durtal’s conversion: He is overwhelmed by the transcendent beauty of Medieval art and haunted by the unwanted knowledge that what is most beautiful must also be most true. Key, too, is the palpable reality of Satanic evil, whose parasitism on the Church (“without sacrilegious priests a tradition of Satanism is impossible”) confirms the far greater reality of Christ’s mystical body. The parallels between fin-de-siècle Paris and our own moment are uncanny, from secularism’s exhaustion to pagan reversion and the aesthetic seductions of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Michel Houellebecq rendered this parallelism vividly in Submission. But much is left to explore. I suspect that those who undertake the journey will find resources, not just for critique, but for renewal.
Germán Saucedo
Associate Editor
My friend Teddy recommended that I read Lucky Jim, a 1954 comedic masterpiece by Kingsley Amis set in a provincial English college. The book follows James “Jim” Dixon, a young history professor who desperately navigates a social and academic labyrinth to keep a job he hates.
I have a very hard time enjoying situational comedy. The stress of cringe-inducing awkwardness is usually too much for me to handle. When I started the book, I disliked the protagonist and slogged through the beginning. (I even texted my friend in anger, calling Jim Dixon a few choice words.) In time, however, I came to see the book for what it really is: the love story of a man whose good character ultimately triumphs over phoniness and pretension.
Jacob Akey
Associate Editor
In the midst of Manhattan’s summer heat, I’ve been taking the uptown train to Riverside Church, where the Morningside Institute hosted a seminar series on Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. The two great turn-of-the-millennium thinkers put forward radically oppositional theories of what the future might hold. Both, several decades later, deserve mixed reviews for their predictive power. I did find that the seminar’s excerpts from Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man were more compelling than the caricatures of his thesis with which I was familiar. He prioritized the ideal over the real (ideological over the material) such that “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” marked the end of history itself. A recent First Things article (“The King and the Swarm,” August/September 2025) provides the blueprint for how history’s gears might start turning again—not through the intervention of events, as Fukuyama’s post-9/11 critics jeered, but through a change in consciousness driven by technology.
Speaking of technology, I’ve been preparing for the 2025 First Things annual intellectual retreat on “Faith in a Technological Age.” The funniest selection of texts from the Retreat Reader is by Hugh of St. Victor, who argued that food is of two types: “bread and side dishes.” He waxes poetic about the many types of bread—“[S]weet, wheaten, pan-shaped, rye, and many other kinds”—and puts forth that all other meats, vegetables, and fruits are merely “all that one eats with bread.” The most fascinating selection has been Leon R. Kass’s exposition of Genesis 11: the Tower of Babel. His essay argues that the tower is the heart of man’s city and its fall demonstrates “the impossibility of transmitting the right way through the universal, technological, secular city.” And “[p]recisely [the city] Aristotle celebrates, Genesis views with suspicion.” In many ways, Kass agrees with Paul Kingsnorth and his Erasmus Lecture, “Against Christian Civilization” (December 2024). If you could not make it to this year’s intellectual retreat, make sure to read Kass’s “What’s Wrong With Babel?”
Mark Bauerlein
Contributing Editor
I have two lighter histories to recommend, both of them portraits of notable men, one a worthy role model and one best kept at a distance. The first book is The Greatest American: Benjamin Franklin, the World’s Most Versatile Genius, by Mark Skousen, who happens to be a descendent of his subject. It has ample biographical material, but it’s more of a primer on the Founder’s character and opinions. In eighty three- or four-page chapters, Skousen covers Franklin on wealth, politics, work ethic, self-help, travel, the Chinese, personal debt, the Fourth of July, and dozens of other topics. It’s a breezy tour, sprinkled with pungent quotes and interesting anecdotes. For instance, while he served as ambassador to France in 1784, the French government asked him to join a scientific commission to study “animal magnetism” and the theories of Franz Mesmer, which were a live issue at the time. The group concluded that the whole thing belongs, in Franklin’s words, “to the age and reign of the fairies.” One can dive into any section and find life lessons that are just as pertinent now as they were 250 years ago. The book is ideal for young Americans who know that what today’s youth culture sells them is a bust and who want practical advice on better kinds of success and happiness.
The other book is a memoir by the renowned, notorious, despised, and beloved columnist and playboy Panagiotis “Taki” Theodoracopulos, who in The Last Alpha Male: The Amorous Pursuits and High Life of a Poor Little Greek Boy recounts the extraordinary life of a twentieth-century rake and wit. The facts themselves are a tale to be told—child of a Greek tycoon, prep schools in America, star tennis player, relentless womanizer, martial artist, writer at National Review, The Spectator, and Vanity Fair, polo player, co-founder of the American Conservative, buddy of William F. Buckley, Brigitte Bardot, and one hundred other stars, politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and fellow playboys in what used to be called the “jet set.” He appears on the Phil Donahue Show and twice on Oprah to mock and needle feminism, meets JFK and many of the president’s paramours, and captains the Greek karate team in the European championships.
The advice he gives is the opposite of Franklin’s, and it’s told in rousing, happy, hilarious style. When a lovely woman spots the fifteen-year-old Taki in a park reading Tender Is the Night and says to him the book will lure him into a dissolute existence, he replies, “I sure hope so.” When his father, fed up with the misbehavior (the Mafia showed up to his door to collect his son’s loan debt), exiles him to Khartoum, Taki manages to keep up the tennis, gambling, and seductions, commenting: “See what I mean about youth? One just doesn’t give a damn, and never worries about tomorrow, and can adjust to anything. Faust was no fool.” And yet, he has a moral code, which he insists on throughout: Don’t lie, don’t gossip, no “bootlicking upward” or “kicking downward,” don’t be a cad (he insists he loves all the women he’s known), honor is the highest virtue. The book makes a good pairing with Franklin as an example of what a young man ought not to do.
Francis X. Maier
Consulting Editor
I watched the PBS adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall after buying, but before reading, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s biography Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life. That was five years ago. I still regret the mistake. While Mantel the novelist gets a respectful nod in historian MacCulloch’s acknowledgments, her imaginings did him no scholarly service.
Wolf Hall is historical fiction at its most vigorously fictitious. In Mantel’s alternate reality, Cromwell (after a good soak in the author’s fabric softener and a superb performance by Mark Rylance on TV) is a man of intelligence, moderation, and good will, a kind of proto-liberal senior servant to a demanding king. Thomas More, in contrast, is a humorless religious zealot and malicious heretic-hunter. As others have noted, Mantel’s portraits of the two very different men are open to dispute. As a matter of simple fact, when his boss sent Thomas Cromwell to the chopping block in 1540 for a clumsy beheading, few Londoners grieved him, and for good reason. He was, arguably, a ruthless, scheming thug.
I finally did disinter MacCulloch’s Cromwell biography from my bookcase last month and read it in a week. It’s a marvelous work: thorough in its research, beautifully written, and engrossing in its vividly detailed picture of Tudor Era English life, religion, and politics. MacCulloch is fundamentally an admirer of Cromwell for the long-term impact he had on England’s Protestant character, domestic governance, and ultimate international success. But he does not paper over Cromwell’s ambition, his manipulative skill, and his many other warts. His treatment of Thomas More is—if not friendly—at least largely fair. And his portrait of Henry VIII as an impatient, paranoid, fickle, and extremely perilous employer is riveting. It’s a great read.
I do have one suggestion. Once you’ve read MacCulloch, but especially if you’ve already read Hilary Mantel, take the time to watch “The Two Thomases” (on YouTube, with a text-only version here), a 2019 lecture delivered by Richard Rex in Dublin. A frequent First Things contributor, Rex is professor of Reformation history and Polkinghorne Fellow in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge. You’ll get quite a different view of the two men called Thomas.
Claire Giuntini
Director of the Editor’s Circle
This summer I reread Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers. Considering how popular the murder mystery genre is, I’m always surprised by how few people are acquainted with Sayers’s series. Her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey, is as enjoyable a sleuth as you could possibly want: He knows everything about wine, music, and rare books; he has an amusing, witty way of talking; he’s brilliant and athletic. He isn’t necessarily good-looking (he’s got a prominent nose), but his personal appearance and manners are so polished and charming he could hardly be more attractive than if he was.
The other interesting, often frustrating, thing about Wimsey is his morality. Though raised rather high church, his moral code is essentially identical to that of the noble pagans. This aspect makes me think that people weren’t very different a hundred years ago from how they are today, the only difference being our modern noble pagans didn’t ring church bells as boys and can’t quote Scripture.
Speaking of quotations, the books are bursting with allusions to other works of literature and to each other, some made consciously by characters and others by Sayers herself. You’ll find Wimsey is always spitting out and riffing on bits from works of literature, some famous, others less so. You’ll also notice little allusive tidbits left by the author herself. I recently realized that Wimsey’s first words in the first book, “Oh, damn!”, are identical to his last words in the last, though the circumstances under which they’re said could hardly be more different.
There’s much food for thought, but what is Have His Carcase even about? For a non-spoiling description, I’ll just say it happens in summertime and involves Harriet Vane, Wimsey’s love interest, finding a body on a beach. Vane is one of the best attributes of the series, for it isn’t until she enters that Wimsey starts to read like a real person. And so I’ll say, come for Wimsey, stay for the character development. You’ll be feasting.
Isabel Hogben
Intern
A few weeks ago, I trained down to Radnor, Pennsylvania, for the annual summer seminar of my high school philosophy fellowship. On the Amtrak, I finished two very different reading assignments: Plato’s Republic and The Young Adult Playbook. The Playbook is a new guide for college students co-written by Anna Moreland and Thomas Smith of Villanova University, designed to help us “liv[e] like it matters.”
The book is divided into three sections: work, leisure, and love. Moreland and Smith exhort their youthful readers to trace back the meaning of work (service to “the world and the people in it”) to Genesis itself, to get off our phones and get into friendship, and to reject both hookup culture and premature commitments in favor of good, old-fashioned dating. In a word, the book preaches balance, and asks us to give work, leisure, and love their due attention and to put them in their due place. The book is eminently reasonable, ever pragmatic, and is sure to help a score of lost Gen Z-ers find their way.
My teenage classmates and I spent a few hours with Moreland discussing the chapter on “Finding Love,” and the only controversy was a bunch of precocious Catholic adolescents hesitating to equate a casual date with an internship (both ramping up to the real thing). I recommend the Playbook for any young person still figuring it all out, and, as the fall semester begins, as an excellent gift for any college student in your life!
Cecilia Jones
Intern
I’ve been making my way through G. K. Chesterton’s The Complete Father Brown Stories, a collection of largely self-contained works that promise a new adventure for each of my subway rides and coffee shop visits. It follows in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “tales of ratiocination,” as Chesterton’s titular character uses logical deduction to reveal the shocking truth behind all kinds of murders and mischief. Chesterton grounds these discoveries in deep religious conviction; he wrote Father Brown to repudiate the equivocation of innocence and ignorance. The humble priest, dismissed as “round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling,” possesses unique insight into evil because of his piety. After all, who is more acquainted with sin than the priest in a confessional? Fr. Brown sees the humanity within the crime, leading him to the human who committed it. Once the criminals are foiled, they face not only the letter of the law, but their confessor.
Between these elaborate crimes and revelations, I’ve been reading The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. The book (originally published as individual newspaper installments) shows Dickens at the height of his hilarity: silly-named chaps entangling themselves in duels, dalliances, and elections, all while maintaining the utmost dignity of a true Victorian gentleman. The distinguished members of the Pickwick club travel about the English countryside to further their esteemed scientific research, yet find themselves in unbecoming situations. The incisive cultural satire on the modern intelligentsia is delightful, as it is always the most fun to laugh at those who cannot laugh at themselves.
