On the day before Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado leaves Congress, he became the first Republican in this entire Congressional session to back a Democratic discharge petition.
If you haven’t read The Three-Body Problem, the 2008 novel by the Chinese science-fiction writer Cixin Liu, you’ve probably seen or heard of others reading it — people on subways, people in airport terminals, or President Barack Obama, whose endorsement contributed to the book’s popularity in the United States. The book, a heady and dense […]
In a worst-case scenario, Virginia Woolf said, Renaissance women writers would wind up like Judith, Shakespeare’s sister, who, although she was as clever and talented as her older brother, did not amount to anything. Feeling depressed and rejected, she killed herself. But Woolf was wrong. Shakespeare had a daughter named Judith. His sister was Joan, […]
In the grand theater of the upcoming NFL draft, as exhaustively covered a meat market as exists anywhere in the sporting world, individual combine performances can dramatically alter the monetary value of a young athlete’s career. Take Ricky Pearsall, for instance, a senior wide receiver from Florida. His performance at the combine turned heads and […]
Uber is a fact of urban life today. But not too long ago, summoning a cab through a smartphone app was a newfangled concept that threatened the status quo of tightly regulated, uncompetitive, unreliable, and often corrupt local cab sectors throughout the country. In Disrupting D.C., Katie J. Wells, Kafui Attoh, and Declan Cullen take […]
The Right and Left don’t agree on much these days. But over on X, people on both sides of the political spectrum recently united to lambaste conservative commentator Ben Shapiro for speaking some simple truths about the untenable trajectory of retirement. “No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, […]
I believe it was the critic Dwight Macdonald who first pointed out the prevalence of “how-to-ism” in American literature. It isn’t just that there are lots of practical manuals for cooking or gardening, succeeding in business or love, but that the instructional mindset permeates even the most celebrated novels. If you’ve read Herman Melville’s Moby […]
In this age of rampant divisiveness, distrust, and dissent, it should come as a relief when a diverse group of people agrees on something. But when the “something” that has been agreed upon is the existence of unidentified flying objects, or at least the possibility of their existence and their origin from outer space, it […]