I am a writer in Los Angeles, which is just a sidelong way of saying I still have roommates as I approach 30. I’m lucky in that it’s a largely frictionless affair, though the television is far too communal for someone who watches far too much of it. The other night I was catching up […]
In his famed 16th-century tract The Prince, the Florentine diplomat and author Niccolò Machiavelli warned that mercenaries are “dangerous,” for they are “disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful and valiant before friends” while being “cowardly before enemies.” Soldiers of fortune, Machiavelli claimed, “have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men.” Such men fill […]
The first city was founded by the first murderer in the biblical story, which tells us something deep about urban dwellings. Jam a crowd of people inside city walls, and what did anyone expect would be the result? Disease, depravity, crime, and the madness of the mob. In the Bible‘s first books, Sodom and Gomorrah […]
The exhibition “Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” will run at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11. After a long day of hiking, you’ve finally reached the top of the mountain. Tired, thirsty, but exhilarated by your accomplishment, you set your walking stick at your side and look around. But instead of […]
Often in political history, towering figures command such attention that even the most consequential of their contemporaries are reduced to footnotes. George S. Boutwell dedicated his life to the defense of democracy, the abolition of slavery, civil rights, and the fight against imperial expansion, yet his name is hardly remembered outside academic circles. He helped […]
President Donald Trump‘s strategy for resolving the war in Ukraine has so far centered on heavy U.S. pressure applied to Ukraine and sympathetic rhetoric toward Russia. It is important that this change now, and with his recent decision to cut off all Russian oil sales to Europe, there are positive signs that the president understands […]
They say joining the military is life-changing, and from everything I’ve experienced and heard from others, I believe that to be true. I recently spoke with former Navy Lt. David Pingenot, whom I knew when I was growing up in Iowa, and I was interested to learn that enlisting in the Navy changed his life, […]
Last month I spent nearly $200 getting a stack of old trousers taken in at the waist. I had been keeping them folded up on a top shelf in a closet, in a kind of Carbohydrate Lover’s Strategic Reserve, because I know from past behavior that just because they’re too big for me now, there’s […]
I have seen my share of action movies, monster movies, and, to my chagrin, horror movies, but seldom have I seen a movie that treated the human body so callously, so coldly, or so cavalierly as Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17. In his first outing behind the camera since 2019’s Oscar-winning sensation Parasite, Bong has made […]
The Ukraine war is like a Russian doll. A series of five increasingly complex geopolitical questions encases a solid core of historical conflict. That core issue is whether Ukraine should be independent of Russia or whether, as often in its history, it falls so far within Russia’s sphere of interest that it becomes a second […]
This is a painful column to write. All my life, I have seen the United States as the repository of mankind’s loftiest hopes and ambitions, the nation that would place its flag on Mars as surely as it did on the moon. Even when the U.S. clashed with my British homeland, as when American troops […]
