Nat Segnit on theme-park propaganda, the international appetite for jingoism, and a hypothetical Winston Churchill musical ...

My wife, Heidi, and I put up a string of Christmas lights early in the pandemic. They were LEDs that slowly flashed different colors, hung along a copper wire that stretched above our windows. As 2020 ...

When the crow whisperer appeared at the side gate to Adam Florin and Dani Fisher’s house, in Oakland, California, she was dressed head to toe in black, wearing a hoodie, gloves, and a mask. This was a ...

Wendy Carlos: A Biography, by Amanda Sewell. Oxford University Press. 264 pages. $34.95. Electronic music existed in the United States before the majority of Americans had access to electricity. The ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

During the worst romance of my life, I often fantasized about holding a funeral for the relationship. Over time, I worked the fantasy out in detail: I had picked a location and imagined congregating ...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...

The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45. This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...

The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, by Jon Meacham. Random House. 416 pages. $20. The Soul of America, directed by KD Davison. HBO, 2020. 77 minutes. It’s the beginning of the new ...