When W.G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, he was eulogized by the Anglophone literary world as the author of four singular novels. Artfully fusing fact and fiction and interlarded with grainy and blurry photographs, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, and Austerlitz revolve around real-life characters […]

Shortly before dusk on Nov. 3, 1870, Laura Fair approached Alexander Parker Crittenden as he sat with his wife and three of his children on El Capitan, a San Francisco-bound ferry. The newspapers described Fair as a mysterious woman who wore all black as if dressed in mourning. She had followed Crittenden onto the ferry. […]

A young friend of mine called me up the other day. He is in the venture capital business and feels he has reached what young people call “a career plateau.” Maybe he has, though in my experience, people his age — he’s about 30 — have outsize ideas about where they should be in their […]

“To mess with our pronouns is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what’s down — life itself,” the Columbia University linguist, prolific author, columnist, and podcaster John McWhorter emphasizes in his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. “Pronouns are used so frequently, […]

My brother Rick and I grew up in a time and place ideally suited to the formation of lifelong baseball fans. The time was the 1950s and early 1960s; the place was Pomona, California, just a bit east of Los Angeles. The Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958; I had my 10th […]

In 1816, John Keats wrote in his poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” that when he encountered George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, it filled him with limitless excitement. As he put it, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.” It is, unfortunately, more likely […]

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called her to discuss the possibility of allowing proxy voting only for new moms after President Trump appeared to back the Florida Republican in her efforts. Luna, who had led the fight against GOP leaders in the House to push for proxy voting for new...

United Auto Workers (UAW) Shawn Fain stressed that there is an “excess capacity” in the auto industry within the United States amid President Trump’s tariffs and layoffs at certain manufacturers. Fain joined CNN’s “The Source” on Thursday, just a day after the Trump administration’s import tariffs went into place and following the news that Stellantis...

Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) was confirmed Thursday as the presumptive Democratic nominee in the 2025 gubernatorial race in Virginia. She is the lone Democrat running to be governor, according to the Democratic Party of Virginia (DPVA), which released a full list of candidates running in the 2025 primary races Thursday evening, once the 5...

Fox News conservative legal commentator Andy McCarthy said in a Thursday interview it seems politics is “overwhelming the law here,” in the debate surrounding the Trump administration’s efforts to deport alleged gang members. McCarthy pushed back on Vice President Vance’s recent comments suggesting criticism of administration’s deportation strategy “is such a weird, mistaken placement of...