What do you get when the party of feminism joins up with the party of the upper-middle-class strivers? You get today’s Democratic Party, where career achievement and material success become all-consuming goals in life. NBC News asked nearly 3,000 Gen Zers for their top priorities in life. Specifically, it asked, “Which of the following is […]
Part of being a student — even an old one, like me — is spending time in the library. As I write this, I am sitting in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, looking up at a wall festooned with names of honored, illustrious alumni and super-rich donors, two categories that do not always, or […]
I am always on the lookout for historians who can fashion well-worn stories from the past into sparkling new dramas filled with cliffhangers and near-catastrophes that keep me turning pages in taut expectation of an outcome decided centuries ago. Author Scott Ellsworth provides just that in Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the […]
Godzilla has terrorized the Land of the Rising Sun for decades. Known as a kaiju (monster) in Japan, and King of the Monsters in the United States, Godzilla’s fearsome roar and atomic breath is a child’s nightmare come to life. It’s fought with and against other gigantic creatures. It’s struck fear in the hearts of […]
Until it closed last year, Monarch Novelties was the only souvenir store in Washington, D.C., that sold campaign memorabilia exclusive to the three presidential elections of the 1960s. The store was an oddity, a decaying building on 14th Street that, for more than 80 years, trafficked in eccentricities: not just Kennedy– and Nixon-era nostalgia but […]
Recently, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has argued that during the Biden years, Army basic training became too soft and lost some of its hardcore edge. He wants basic training to toughen up. Which brings us to a phenomenon in the Army I’ll call the Hardcore Paradox: Soldiers enjoy comfort and dislike pain, stress, and […]
Arundhati Roy dedicated her debut novel, The God of Small Things, to two people who, it was safe to assume, were her nearest and dearest: “For Mary Roy who grew me up,” she wrote, “Who loved me enough to let me go.” The other dedicatee was more cryptically designated: “For LKC, who, like me, survived.” […]
“Nobody wants this!” Oscar Martinez of The Office insists to the documentary camera crew on the hunt for what became of the Dunder-Mifflin crew 12 years after the long-running program went off the air. “Don’t you guys have enough after nine years?” Evidently, no, Oscar. We need more. Much more. The Paper, which began streaming […]
Wednesday is Constitution Day, the date on which that venerable document was signed by the delegates to the convention that drafted it. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s worth asking ourselves whether we are still capable of keeping the republic it created. The United States was the first nation in the history of […]
