Christopher Rufo’s new book is impressively erudite
America’s Cultural Revolution marks Rufo as an important, deeply knowledgeable thinker
Books
Wednesday
Taylor Lorenz is optimistic about the internet
Extremely Online is mostly a story about money
Emily Carroll’s new graphic novel plays on our deepest fears
A Guest in the House is a beautifully plotted study of the madness of isolation, steeped in the tropes of fairy tale and horror
An admirable but flawed new biography of George Eliot
The Marriage Question shows us a woman fragmented
Bernie Taupin is more than just ‘Elton John’s lyricist’
The songwriter’s book is free of sentimental clutter, but it would take a heart of stone not to be moved by the takeaway message
A diverting but unsurprising new history of the Astor clan
There is a fine, perceptive book to be written about the Astors and their influence, but Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune is not it
Friday
The roots of J.K. Rowling’s contrarianism
How did the woman who taught a generation to stand up to the Ministry of Magic betray liberal orthodoxy?
Zadie Smith’s latest novel is glittering, grand and powerful
The Fraud is a consciously (but not self-consciously) literary novel
How missing persons cases work in the wild
The real science of searching in nature is the most interesting — and disturbing — part of Lankford’s account
Maureen Ryan exposes the Hollywood horror show
At the end of Burn it Down , it’s hard not to wish that the industry could simply be shut down and rebooted all over again
Drew Gilpin Faust, a rebel with a cause
In Necessary Trouble the historian and former president of Harvard has given us a clear-eyed account of a vexed era
Monday
Taking a trip to Russoville
Richard Russo doesn’t do fireworks. Dazzling metaphorical flights are not his thing
Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece
It may be the Great American Novel critics have searched for
William Boyd’s latest novel is immense fun
In The Romantic , it’s as if Boyd has distilled the essence of centuries of novel-writing
Visiting a forgotten chapter in American history
We May Dominate the World is a work of prodigious scholarship, featuring an extraordinary breadth and depth of sources
Elliot Page’s memoir is a tale of tragic self-destruction
For the author, transgenderism was an escape hatch
Wednesday
Milan Kundera’s ‘transcendental buffoonery’
A look at the late Czech novelist’s legacy and philosophy
Sunday
The great late Yeats
A century ago, W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize. It was the start of a remarkable late era for the Irish poet
Why is George Orwell so difficult to pin down?
The writer is an easy man to admire and sympathize with, but a hard one to like
Lady Caroline Lamb and the frantic bed-hopping between the great houses of England
Antonia Fraser paints a convincing, shocking picture of upper-class mores in the late eighteenth century