“Demure” once meant full-skirted dresses, chaste necklines, low-heeled pumps, and pearls. Sweetness, modesty, a 1950s femininity that did not assert itself. In my all-girls Catholic high school, it was still held up as an ideal in the late 1970s—but by the time we graduated from college, we snorted at the thought. For four […]
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Vender read Becker in college, long before he found himself hunting witnesses in crack dens. “The people in this place were already dead,” he would realize […]
As a law student in New York, Jim Clemente had no money for Broadway shows or clubs. “I’d take a milk crate and sit in Times Square and watch people,” he tells me, “trying to figure out who they were, where they were from, and what their stories were.” He had no idea […]
The dilemmas have filled advice columns forever. “My friend asked me to—” give her an alibi, smuggle cocaine, lie to her husband, risk prison by helping her die…. Though most of my friends are the law-abiding sort, I dread some future ask that leaves me stymied, torn between ethics and love. Cicero would […]
First, an admission: in the immediate wake of the shooting at the Trump rally, I watched the video of Donald Trump raising his fist and blurted, “Fuck.” A grudging admission that the man, even shoeless, is a consummate showman. That he knows, instinctively, how to galvanize a crowd. That his chutzpah is undeniable, […]
“It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked. “Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Patel, co-founder and editor in chief of the tech news site The Verge, had been chatting breezily with him about AI and the internet. […]
After the American presidential debate aired last week, a woman in Switzerland, a Facebook friend I know nothing about, said the USA is doomed either way. Fair enough. The debate reflected very badly on everyone including the moderators. The golf sequence alone should bring us shame before the Swiss. I will not add […]
There is an article in The New Yorker about Miranda July, whom I have never read. She sounds interesting, so I zip along, half-skimming—then skid to a stop. She is reading the notes she wrote for her new novel, All Fours, to the reporter. Here is one from 2018: “Thinking about what aging […]
Last week, Christians flooded D.C. The Faith & Family Coalition was hosting its annual Road to Majority Policy conference, the nation’s largest public policy gathering of conservative Christian activists. One stump speech after another urged them to vote, evangelize, and pass out some of the $62 million worth of political literature designed to […]
Bob Woodward, often praised with superlatives such as “the best reporter of our time [and maybe] the best reporter of all time,” has 24 short videos on investigative journalism on the site MasterClass. These are from 2017, but I only just watched the material and found it interesting, informative, and inspirational. As always, […]