One Friday afternoon in my junior year of high school, we were informed over the loudspeaker that every member of the junior class would be staying after the final bell to take a writing test. Undeterred by the groundswell of groans ringing round me, I felt that inimitable, slightly embarrassing…

Children of Men starts out with a BANG. Down-in-the-dumps, deep-in-his-cups Theo, played by Clive Owen, ducks into a crowded coffee shop in a bustling section of London where it just so happens no one is drinking coffee. All eyes are glued instead to the television, where a news bulletin reveals…

I remember an afternoon in the spring of 2012 spent drifting through the Harvard Book Store. I’d escaped the crush of mid-day foot traffic outside—it was probably cold out on those brick-lined streets, but I don’t really remember, and I know I didn’t really care. I’d been overcome by a…

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel. Those were the words of Martin Luther, and like any pearl of wisdom that has whistled down the wind of the ages, it puts me in mind of what a wizened elder might say to a…

Character is destiny, Heraclitus said. Know yourself, or watch helplessly as you are torn to pieces by the latest hurricane to sweep through society. You need a bedrock to cling to when that storm comes, because like a noisome wedding guest descending upon the table where you had been quietly…

As Matthew Futterman wrote in the New York Times back in February, the decision by Melbourne officials to remove fans from the Australian Open, in accordance with the latest Covid-related lockdown in the city, immediately drained the energy from the proceedings. …

It is in all likelihood an inextricable, incorrigible component of my male toxicity that, after watching Carey Mulligan in a scene from Promising Young Woman, the glitzy, lip-glossy, curse-wrapped-like-a-candy film from Emerald Fennell, I found myself humming the melody from Belle and Sebastian’s “Step Into My Office, Baby”—only, I changed…

In January, I watched The Fisher King. …

I recently re-watched Garden State. Here was a film that had unmoored senior-in-high-school me the first time I’d seen it back on a dreary winter afternoon in early 2007. It must have been a Friday, one of those blessedly free slates to start the weekend I reveled in between the…