Back in 1992, I published a piece about voting at the Y on Lexington Avenue. “At the Y, nothing has changed,” I wrote: I went on to say that I’d fallen “a long way from the hot certainties of my Read More …

Earlier this week, the Times published a letter written by Brett Kavanaugh to his buddies, in 1983, in which he went over the logistics for renting a house on the Maryland shore for an annual prep-school rite of passage known Read More …

I grew up spending summers in a house that my parents built for five thousand dollars, in 1952, on a hill above Newcomb Hollow, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a young man died on Saturday from a shark bite. My father Read More …

This isn’t about age. At least it’s not entirely about age. Admittedly, a number of years have passed since I began travelling the New York subway on a reduced-fare MetroCard for senior citizens—what I have always referred to as a Read More …

The photograph in the Facebook post is pretty: piles of red rocks balanced at the edge of a cliff, suggesting a miniature mirror of the jagged rock face opposite. The stacks look like small shrines to mountain solitude, carefully balanced Read More …

“Some of the stuff I’ll be doing tonight I’ve only done a few times on stage,” the country musician, mystery novelist, and former gubernatorial candidate of Texas, Kinky Friedman, warns, with his deadpan, mellow rasp. “So I might screw up. Read More …

Lately, the only enjoyable Twitter accounts are the ones that are timely entirely by chance. One of these accounts is @MagicRealismBot, which auto-generates odd, evocative plot summaries: “One hundred metaphysicians imagine an exclamation mark into existence,” or “An arrogant supermodel Read More …

In March of 1971, Aretha Franklin was twenty-eight years old and the undisputed Queen of Soul. She’d had so many gold records over the previous four years that a new category of Grammy had been invented for her. But she Read More …

Who could forget that famous scene from “The Godfather” in which the Mob boss’s consigliere orders the bloody head of a racehorse named Khartoum placed into a Hollywood producer’s bed? Or that other gem, when the boss’s dandy henchman menaces Read More …

The Israeli writer Amos Oz, who died on December 28th, at the age of seventy-nine, was a cultural hero in the old sense, an acolyte who patiently made himself the gray eminence of a lost, or losing, cause: Labor Zionism, Read More …