In the autumn I started classes at the Princeton Theological Seminary. It’s a late-in-life transition from my work as a television writer and producer to graduate student in theology. At some point, if I’m diligent in my studies, I may become an ordained Episcopal priest and a television writer and producer, which will allow me […]
In 2018 the journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, a writer at the New Yorker who is particularly adept at using true crime as a vehicle for probing intellectual questions, published Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. The book looked at the ripple effects of a notorious, decades-old crime: the 1972 […]
At one point, Joan Didion was a writer, known for her books and essays, which people read and liked — or didn’t. There was The White Album, which everyone read, and A Year of Magical Thinking, which everyone bought, and an assorted many other titles that everybody claimed to know but probably didn’t. At her […]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe has long been regarded as a true master of German literature. While few anglophone readers today are familiar with Goethe’s entire body of work, its influence, especially Faust, echoes in modern books, movies, classical and contemporary music, opera, and more. His first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was one of […]
Soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and Guardians are all service members. We may focus on them storming a beach or driving a tank or soaring the skies in a jet, but regardless of what they do, they’re all said to be “in the service.” I recently spoke with retired Army 1st Sgt. Travis Baker, asking about […]
“New York is a city of things unnoticed,” declares Gay Talese at the beginning of A Town Without Time, the new collection of his journalistic work centered on New York. New Jersey-born Gay Talese made a brand-new start of it in New York in the early 1950s. After a stint as a copy boy for […]
No living American filmmaker can be plausibly said to have undergone such a profound artistic evolution as Clint Eastwood. From a greenhorn starring in Rawhide to an auteur of international standing in under a dozen years. Nor can any claim a comparable list of outright masterpieces: The Outlaw Josey Wales, Bronco Billy, Bird, the supreme […]
Dune: Prophecy, HBO’s prequel series to the blockbuster films of the same name, opens with a quasi-cryptic epigraph about war set against an abstract, smoky monochrome backdrop — an implicit promise to the viewer that it will deliver more of the awesome, austere sturm-and-drang that made those films the most artistically successful fantasy adaptations since […]
President-elect Trump plans to nominate ex-president of the border patrol union, Brandon Judd, as his ambassador to Chile. “I have personally known and worked with Brandon over the past nine years. Brandon helped me develop and implement the most effective Border Security policies in our Nation’s History,” Trump said Thursday night on Truth Social. “I...
President-elect Trump picked Anthony Salisbury to be the deputy Homeland Security Advisor on the White House Homeland Security Council. “Tony will bring his vast Law Enforcement, counter-narcotics, and counter-cartel experience to the White House where he will serve under Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor,” Trump said in a...