Culture

Mary Gaitskill Has Come Online

Mary Gaitskill Has Come Online 1

Mary Gaitskill is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer celebrated by readers and critics (this one included) for her uncompromising acuity and clear-eyed vivisection of our mottled human nature. Now she is something else, too: a blogger. In June, Gaitskill,…

Mark Ulriksen’s “All Rise!”

Mark Ulriksen’s “All Rise!” 3

On Tuesday, September 20th, Aaron Judge, the Yankees’ six-foot-seven-inch star outfielder, hit a home run deep into the left-field bleachers. It was his sixtieth of the season. Only Babe Ruth and Roger Maris have reached that number in the history…

Mark Ulriksen’s “About Time”

Mark Ulriksen’s “About Time” 10

Baseball fans have long been known for their patience. But, this year, Major League Baseball introduced a series of new rules that will alter the routines and rhythms of the old ballgame, adding some hustle to the mix. Bases, once…

Marcel Proust on What Writing Is

Marcel Proust on What Writing Is 16

Proust died at fifty-one, in Paris, of pneumonia, on November 18th, and last year was the centenary of his death. Since I first read “In Search of Lost Time,” his immense and unique autobiographical novel, a long passage about what…

Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been a Rebel

Lorraine O’Grady Has Always Been a Rebel 22

How to walk properly, according to Lorraine O’Grady, the eighty-eight-year-old conceptual and performance artist: “With your chin tucked under your head, your shoulders dropped down, your stomach pulled up.” Good posture has become a concern for O’Grady in the past…

Long LIV Golf  – The American Conservative

Long LIV Golf  – The American Conservative 25

LIV Golf, the first serious challenge to the PGA’s monopoly on professional golf, has drawn the media’s ire for its Saudi investors. The firestorm has involved the same feigned hysteria the American public endures in each news cycle. If you’re…

Letters to Jeb Bush

Letters to Jeb Bush 29

In the fall of 2015, I moved from Brooklyn to Vermont for a month to try to write something new. I had spent four years working on a novel—four years covering cocktail napkins with notes about the tiniest interpersonal dynamics…