My anthology Noticing is coming out in paperback this week from Passage Press for $29.95. Please buy it. Also, I’m continuing my book tour with a speaking event in Los Angeles this Friday evening, before stops in Austin, New College in Sarasota, Fla., the West Virginia exurbs of Washington, D.C., and New York City. Here are my public speaking engagements (usual ticket price $45): Friday, March 29, 2024: Los Angeles Friday, April 12, 2024: Austin Tuesday, April 23, 2024: Sarasota, Fla. Friday, May 3, 2024: New York City (may be sold out) And here are Frequently Asked Questions about my ...
I’m not much in the business of making predictions about the future, because it’s hard enough to understand what’s happening in the present. I don’t forecast the next big thing so much as try ...
This festive break’s big Christmas and New Year U.S. movie release, Freud’s Last Session, stars Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, telling the story of the “great” psychoanalyst’s meeting ...
Last week a clip from something called “Timcast” went viral. Some round-faced, beady-eyed stoner (I think that’s “Tim”) was debating a manic Robert Downey Jr. look-alike ...
In his recent livestreamed interview with Hungarian-Canadian “toxic trauma therapist” Dr. Gabor Maté, besides crediting the ingestion of the hallucinogen ayahuasca with ...
During the dog days of August, there was a brief flurry of partisan excitement when Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert denounced the White House’s student loan giveaway as, ...
“As flies to wanton boys,” says Gloucester in King Lear after his eyes have been put out by the Duke of Cornwall at the behest of the evil Goneril, “are we to the gods: they ...
There are no sheep more ovine than those who get themselves tattooed in order to individuate themselves. Judging by the statistics, such sheeplike behavior is becoming more and ...
According to a Gallup poll, the percentage of the American population that now “identifies” as LGBTQ+ has doubled by comparison with ten years ago, and now stands at 7.1 ...
A curious example of the power of social trends on thought is that two years into the Covid pandemic, nobody of any influence has yet bothered to launch a campaign to persuade ...
To mark the centenary of the birth of Norman Mailer—which I shall not be celebrating wildly—a publisher decided to reissue a volume of his essays. An employee of the ...
In honor of my upcoming 53rd birthday, I’m launching a two-part (or three...haven’t decided yet) series on the changing face of my native city. I’ve never understood why ...
Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began: Despite the ...
There is a lot of misery in the world, it would be useless to deny it. The description of the world as a vale of tears surely conveys something to every one of us. And yet, all ...
Recently I have been dreaming a lot, unpleasant dreams but not nightmares. What this means, or even if it means anything at all, I don’t know. Perhaps it is a cerebral form of ...
Mrs. Clinton, who knows a thing or two about phoniness, praised Meghan Markle’s decision to speak of her “mental health” before tens of millions of her very closest ...