New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed executive orders recognizing the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and handed one of the pens to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem, who once represented an al-Qaida operative.
The Trump administration on Sunday renewed its appeal to the Supreme Court after a federal judge blocked new restrictions on mail ballots ahead of the midterms.
My husband and I have been scoping out the housing market for the past three years, hoping for the right time (and price) to buy our first home. But like many young people, it seems we’ll be waiting a while yet.
You are familiar, perhaps, with those literary questions that are now ubiquitous on social media: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre? Bret Easton Ellis or Jonathan Franzen? The Iliad or the Odyssey? My answers, until recently, were: Both, Jane Eyre (I am a bit of a contrarian), Ellis, and the Odyssey. After finishing Robin Lane Fox’s magisterial Homer and His Iliad, I have come to see the error of my ways. The answer to that last question must be the Iliad.
How do you know if someone you’ve just met went to Harvard? They’ll tell you in the first two minutes. I plagiarized that joke from the English original about the false modesty of people who went to Oxford. Plagiarism is allowed at Harvard. Its president, Claudine Gay, is a serial plagiarist, but she still has her job. Like laws in the real world, academic rules are for the little people.
Those mourning the death of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Louise Glück last month may, or may not, take solace in that there is a new poetic act in town, in the form of the actress Megan Fox. Fox, who is engaged to the bellicosely named musician Machine Gun Kelly, announced the project on Instagram (naturally), saying, “These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence. I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins.” Only the cynical might observe that Sylvia Plath offered a rather pithier summation of the same idea at the end of her poem "Daddy," when she concluded, “Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
The economy is growing. Unemployment is falling. Wages are finally beginning to rise faster than inflation. Yet most voters say they are unhappy with how President Joe Biden is handling the economy. More voters now believe they would be better off financially under former President Donald Trump.
If you believe the greatest danger our nation faces is that young people might believe in God, don’t worry. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has you covered.
In 1989, the same year Seinfeld premiered, no comedian had ever headlined at Madison Square Garden. Since then, nearly 20 comedians have done so. Comedy is changing, and its icons have permeated culture in a way that it would take several comedy books to chronicle, if anyone wanted a Comedy History Reference volume set. Nobody does, so instead, we now have Comedy Book, a light look from Vulture writer Jesse David Fox at how comedy works and why its position in American cultural life is now, despite many claims to the contrary, higher than it has ever been.
Anyone who has watched an NFL game over the last several years should be aware of the league’s pandering to the Black Lives Matter movement and other social justice issues. It’s impossible to miss the left-wing propaganda in stadiums throughout the country. Messages such as “End Racism” or “It Takes All of Us” are painted in every end zone on the football field. These, and the NFL’s other social justice “initiatives,” are primarily the result of the league’s flag kneeling fiasco and fallout from the death of George Floyd in 2020.
