Getting Intimate With Updike

Here's a nice illustration of the personal and professional range of John Updike, the novelist, poet, essayist, critic, and short story writer who rose to singular fame (appearing twice on the cover of Time magazine, then the ultimate mark of celebrity) in the second half of the 20th century. During the year 1960, he volunteered to teach Sunday school at his local church. Meanwhile, he was fighting his publisher's lawyers, who worried that the sex scenes in his latest novel, Rabbit, Run, were explicit enough to violate U.S. obscenity laws, which were still a thing.

The post Getting Intimate With Updike appeared first on .

Our Man in Amman

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown that was invented by the British and then funded by the Americans. Constantly lies the head of state who claims to protect the Palestinians while cooperating with the Mossad. Abdullah II is the fourth king of Jordan, the state that Winston Churchill lopped off the Palestine Mandate in 1921 with, he said, "the stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon in Cairo." The plan, as proposed by Lawrence of Arabia in 1918, was to install the three sons of Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, as the Hashemite emirs, Britain's proxies in the states it was carving out of Ottoman territory. Abdullah is the last Hashemite standing. He has a pronounced facial tic.

The post Our Man in Amman appeared first on .

Tribe Mentality

The past few years have seen the almost unprecedented intrusion of politics into chick lit. It seems no novel about the life of wives or mothers can be complete without the occasional diatribe about systemic racism or Donald Trump or the genocide launched against transgendered people. For someone who is looking for a little escapism, the proverbial beach read is no longer a place to find it. But just as these authors are clearly under the sway of their political environment—or at least virtue signaling to show that they don’t just care about romance or drama in the PTA—they are also influencing the political environment as well. And they can use the broader audience they attract to plant information about niche ideological hobby horses.

The post Tribe Mentality appeared first on .

Embracing Their Inner Disney Child

“You think we’ll go to Hell because we’re worshipping Walt Disney instead of God?”

The post Embracing Their Inner Disney Child appeared first on .

The Audacity of Clothes: How Michelle Obama's Fashion Choices Changed the World

Barack and Michelle Obama have been criticized for trading their activist roots for a post-presidency focused on celebrity networking and voracious wealth accumulation. In an effort to dismiss her critics, Michelle has published a $50 coffee table book about fashion.

The post The Audacity of Clothes: How Michelle Obama's Fashion Choices Changed the World appeared first on .

A Kinder, Gentler Feminism

Leah Libresco Sargeant’s latest book, The Dignity of Dependence, carries with it the subtitle: "A Feminist Manifesto." Where that word may conjure a certain harshness, however, Sargeant’s book illustrates something much more gentle: a humane vision of the givenness of womanhood.

The post A Kinder, Gentler Feminism appeared first on .

Brave New Words

A book promising to explain the cynical, attention-grabbing tricks of social media while casting an adoring eye on the linguistic novelties of Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, X, and so on, aims to perform a worthy public service. It looks to expose the hidden dynamics of online culture while giving benighted readers a chance to know the linguistic progeny of young influencers. That is before, in all likelihood, taking a hard pass on their slangmaxxing.

The post Brave New Words appeared first on .

Karp's Quest to Save the Shire

"You're killing my family in Palestine!" a protester screamed at Palantir CEO Alex Karp while he was addressing a Silicon Valley conference last April. "The primary source of death in Palestine," Karp, the Jewish, half-black, progressive, tai chi practitioner shot back, without missing a beat, "is the fact that Hamas has realized there are millions and millions of useful idiots."

The post Karp's Quest to Save the Shire appeared first on .

Putting Atheism on the Defensive

Academic pariah he may be, but on the big questions Charles Murray is a man of his time. Science, he believed for most of his life, had demolished the traditional notion of God. Consciousness is produced by the brain, nothing more. The Gospels are less history than folklore.

The post Putting Atheism on the Defensive appeared first on .

Giving History the Human Touch

America owes all her triumphs to the humans who crawled across battlefields, toiled in factories, blasted through mountains, sermonized on soapboxes, and experimented in labs. American history—world history—is human history more than anything. The late David McCullough understood this as well as anyone, and in the posthumous collection of his essays and speeches, History Matters, this basic idea is a consistent throughline.

The post Giving History the Human Touch appeared first on .