Until recently, I would have guessed I’d never get to do an old-fashioned book tour in my lifetime. After all, I didn’t make a single public appearance in more than a decade, from February 2013 until June 2023. I’d occasionally get invited to give speeches, then hear that the hotel had canceled the conference out of fear of Antifa violence or of bad publicity for platforming a crimethinker like myself who thus deserved to have his conference smashed up by Black Bloc thugs. Granted, in retrospect it seems extremely weird that an avuncular, public-spirited, and intensely reasonable ...
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 ...
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” ...
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 ...