Immigration has emerged as a dominant point of debate heading into the 2024 presidential election. Like so much of our discourse, there is more heat than light surrounding the matter. And yet the facts of the case are remarkably clear. After President Joe Biden suspended many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s enforcement mechanisms, millions of […]

A friend of mine told me that when he was younger, he misheard the word “centimillionaire” and thought it was “scented millionaire.” As misunderstandings go, that one makes a certain amount of sense. The phrase “scented millionaire” conjures up a powdered and cosseted rich guy, someone who is sure to have a net worth in […]

Fifteen years ago, the world of streaming used to be a simple place. You could pay $9.99 a month to Netflix or Hulu and open the door to a vast array of primarily archival content. At the time, this was a veritable Library of Alexandria of licensed content in which the original rights holders had […]

When HBO debuted Band of Brothers in 2001, it was an event — prestige television’s answer to the question, “What if Saving Private Ryan were 10 hours long and based on the experiences of real people?” Executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and based on a bestselling book by Stephen Ambrose, the miniseries followed […]

The premise of I.S.S. is intriguing. Six astronauts on the International Space Station, three American and three Russian, watch in horror as the world below descends into nuclear war. Both crews receive separate orders from their governments to seize control of the station from the other “by any means necessary.” The orders disrupt the station’s […]

There have been several farcical fictional treatments of university life in the United States over the past couple of decades. The 2021 Netflix series The Chair, revolving around Jay Duplass’s disillusioned English professor who finds himself canceled after performing an illustrative Nazi salute during a lecture, was at its most interesting when it abandoned the […]

Certain readers consider themselves guardians of the canon and refuse to class crime stories as literature, filing these books away out of sight in that baggy, catch-all category of genre fiction. There is, to be sure, the bad crime novel, or the run-of-the-mill offering, which relies too much on plot and pace. But there is […]

Though voters elected Republicans to the House majority in the last congressional elections, since the start of Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) revolt against the speakership of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP seems keen to give that majority away. And as former President Donald Trump cleans up in the nomination fight and aims for a White […]

America’s on-the-ground decision-makers have their hands tied. Teachers lack the authority to run their classrooms, and their superintendents lack the authority to manage them. It takes forever to build anything, thanks to interminable permit requirements and special-interest objections. Doctors are exhausted from never-ending administrative burdens and the threat of lawsuits. People, in general, feel helpless […]

When the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff left Russia with his wife and two daughters at the end of 1917, he left behind all his works except the recently revised Piano Concerto No. 1 and the vocal score for an opera called Monna Vanna, which he would never complete. He also left behind the family’s beloved country […]