Selected Older
Where Have You Gone, Annie Dillard?
Annie Dillard. The Atlantic, March 2016.
Their Struggle
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels. The Nation, October 12, 2015.
Controlled Rapture
John Updike. The New Republic, September 15, 2014.
Dread and Wonder
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The Nation, March 5, 2014.
The Jewish Mark Twain
Sholem Aleichem. The Atlantic, January/February 2014.
Beattitudes
Anne Beattie, The New Yorker Stories and Mrs. Nixon. The Nation, December 12, 2011.
The Children’s Hospital
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. The Nation, July 4-11, 2011.
The Whole Human Mess
Saul Bellow. The Nation, December 13, 2010.
The Renunciation Artist
Leo Tolstoy. The Nation, March 1, 2010.
Aracataca and Sucre
Gabriel García Márquez. The Nation, September 21, 2009.
Last Evenings on Earth
Roberto Bolaño, 2666. The New Republic, February 18, 2009.
Recent
We Aren’t Raising Adults. We Are Breeding Very Excellent Sheep.
The intersection of wokeness and excellent sheephood. Common Sense, May 24, 2022.
On the Bobos
The political stupidity of the liberal elite. Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 2022.
American Education’s New Dark Age
On campus wokeness (a condensed version of the Nexus essay from fall 2021). UnHerd, March 2022.
Escaping American Tribalism
Learning to question my beliefs more deeply than I ever had before. UnHerd, March 2022.
Birthrights
Growing up Jewish, and identity more broadly. Liberties, Winter 2022.
Disenchantment and Dogma
On the limits, and virtues, of secularism. Salmagundi, Fall 2021-Winter 2022.
Human History Gets a Rewrite
A review of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The Atlantic, November 2021.
Wokeness on Campus: The Reign of Stupidity
Nexus 87, Fall 2021.
The Individual Nuisance
On Harold Rosenberg, my latest intellectual infatuation. Liberties, Spring 2021.
Stages of Grief
What the pandemic has done to the arts economy. Harper’s, June 2021.