“So many child stars come to such miserable ends,” yet “most children offered up to the god of showbiz are sent by their own parents,” marvels Mary Harrington at Unherd.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, a new member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in April 2015, sat down for a classified briefing from the FBI on Capitol Hill. The briefing was about him.
On a clear day, from the right spot on the Maltese coast, you can see Tunisia. It’s about 200 miles away — closer than Los Angeles is to San Francisco — and for most of recorded history, arranging travel from one to the other was about as complicated as hailing a cab. The Malta–Carthage run […]
Steven Spielberg’s latest big-budget adventure, Disclosure Day, came and went earlier this summer. Like Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), the film predicted a day in the not too distant future when the cover-ups and conspiracies surrounding alleged extraterrestrial life have ended — when the world would finally possess undisputed proof that human beings […]
Chris Bohjalian’s The Amateur tells a story from the perspective of an adult looking back at a decades-old pivotal event she sometimes misremembers. The event and its consequences shift their shape. Sometimes the story seems to be about killing someone with a golf ball. Sometimes it is about adult men who take sexual advantage of […]
There is no legally binding international treaty that establishes abortion as a human right. Yet governments around the world are increasingly told they are violating international law if they refuse to legalize or expand abortion. How did a right that nations never negotiated become one that international institutions now claim governments are obligated to uphold? […]
Every August and September, parents face a familiar ritual: purchasing school supplies, meeting teachers, and filling out a thick stack of medical forms. For decades, the mandatory immunization checklist was the most predictable part of this routine. School nurses filed the records away, classrooms opened, and the system functioned without much noise. The post-COVID-19 era […]
California was one of the last places in the world to join the “global economy,” but upon its discovery, the bounty of the “California Current” was plundered at record speed. In Tin Can Coast, author Joseph Ogilvy looks at the human and environmental history of the Golden State’s waters and the long succession of boom-and-bust […]
The first time Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette, arrived in the United States in 1777, the defining characteristic of both the French nobleman and the new nation for which he’d come to fight was their paucity of years, the one but a babe and the other barely more than […]
Over many years, I’ve met a great many seniors. One man was paid 25 cents per day as a plowboy during the Great Depression. He was paid 50 cents per day during harvest season. Another man, Russel, flew 54 missions as a turret gunner in an A-20 Havoc bomber over Germany during World War II. […]
I have been reading Tocqueville again lately, prompted by our nation’s semiquincentennial celebrations. Looking at where we are today, it is hard not to wonder: if Alexis de Tocqueville showed up in 2026, would he recognize modern America? More importantly, would he bet on us to last another 250 years? I believe he would judge […]
