Guests of the Nation

For evidence of a so-called cultural vibe shift, the pendulum swing away from the extreme sensitivity and irrational wokeness of the preceding decade, look no further than Lionel Shriver’s new novel, A Better Life, a blunt but layered—and entertaining—depiction of America’s once-lax immigration policies.

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No One Is Alone, Except Maybe Stephen Sondheim

Despite favoring sometimes-ghastly subjects, overly calculated lyrics, and eminently unhummable music, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim was something of a conservative when it came to acknowledging his forebears. In Sondheim's case, that chiefly meant lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, who gladly accepted the role of substitute father to the boy then known as Stevie—a comprehensively unhappy child of divorce—and even more eagerly agreed to school him in musical-making. That he wanted to make musicals in the first place is a testament to the outsized influence of Hammerstein, who, with composer Richard Rodgers, created such masterpieces as Oklahoma! and South Pacific.

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How to Handle Your Out-of-Control Ivy

That video of congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, grilling college presidents about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated their university policies—and the college presidents responding that it depended on the context—has been viewed more than a billion times, making it what the jacket copy of her new book calls "the most-watched congressional hearing in history."

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From Desecration to Consecration

In this compact, highly readable book treating issues about which he has also written elsewhere, Carl Trueman examines how it is that, at least on his telling, our world has become one in which limits are no longer meaningful moral boundaries but, rather, obstacles to be overcome. What we have lost, he says, is the sense that every human being is made in the image of God. But it is not as if this belief has just slipped away gradually, no longer making sense in a disenchanted world. Trueman's claim is stronger. Our culture now takes delight in surpassing and setting aside old limits that were thought to characterize our humanity. The problem is not disenchantment but desecration—the transgressing of older moral limits.

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A Novel Way to Approach Death

Everyone loves Julian Barnes. I don't know of any other novelist who has been praised by both David Bowie and Angela Merkel. He has also been praised by Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, and John Updike, even if Updike referred to him as "an English television critic," which Barnes was at the time. (Updike was reviewing […]

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The Fall and Rise of Bowie

It’s easy to start a fight between David Bowie fans: Simply ask them to name his best album. Thanks to Bowie’s rare combination of talent and industriousness, a case could easily be made for at least half a dozen of his 26 studio records, each boasting a unique sound. How can anyone compare The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to Scary Monsters?

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Letter to the Editor: Who's Censoring Whom?

Nicholas Clairmont's review of Jacob Siegel's The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control ("Tyranny Through Technology," March 29, 2026) calls it "careful and specific" and "unimpeachably sourced." I am one of the book's caricatured villains and I want to address the sourcing and specificity directly.

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You’re Not a Monkey’s Uncle

I know nothing about primate anthropology, but I did know a primate anthropologist. She took me into the rainforests of southern Uganda, where we spent several afternoons lurking in the shrubbery and watching a troop of chimpanzees. When we got too close to the mothers and babies, the males chimped out. They got up on their hind legs, bared their teeth, howled like extras from Tarzan, and started bounding toward us. To avoid a savaging, we mimicked subordinate chimpanzee behavior. This requires no scientific expertise, though experience of male pattern baldness may help. You look down in shame and repeatedly stroke your pate from back to front as though trying to glue down the strands of a combover in a high wind. If that doesn’t work, run your other hand over your eyes and nose as though wiping that smirk off your simian face before you make one of the alphas come down there and do it for you.

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Tyranny Through Technology

George Orwell, in his immortal 1946 essay "The Prevention of Literature," delineates a distinction between two types of attackers of intellectual freedom, both real but one in a sense more real than the other. "On the one side," he writes, "are its theoretical enemies, the apologists of totalitarianism, and on the other its immediate, practical enemies, monopoly and bureaucracy." This distinction is at least as useful in the age of Trump and social media.

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Brothers in Arms

Writing a novel after spending years writing nonfiction is no easy trick. Trust me, I know. My hard drive is littered with stories never shared. My next book, if I do finish it, will be another nonfiction tome. Completing a novel, or even a novella, feels to me a bit like becoming a ballet dancer after spending decades running cross country.

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