Archive

Earlier this week, the editors of the Wall Street Journal highlighted “A U.S. Life Expectancy Milestone.” After stagnating for about a decade and then declining, “life expectancy in the...

Lists, lists, lists—how they proliferate. But it just so happens that I love lists, and have done so ever since I was a little boy, making my first lists,...

This list would have been different a couple of months ago, or yesterday—maybe even in the wee hours tonight—but here are some of the books I particularly enjoyed (excluding...

I just came across a 3×5 card (yes, I still routinely use that primitive technology) on which I had jotted down some titles that were scheduled to be published...

If you are a regular reader, you will have noticed that the interval between the previous column and this one has been two months rather than two weeks, due...

The stacks referred to in the title of this column, as you may have guessed, are made up of books, to be found on all three levels of our...

If the mere words “forthcoming books” set your heart aflutter, you know we’re on the eve of a new publishing season. In the old days, that would have meant...

This week, my wife, Wendy, our daughter Katy, and I have had delightful company. On July 25, our daughter Mary and our grandson Thomas (youngest of Mary and John’s...

You could fill a small library with books from the last twenty years devoted to the erosion of religious belief and practice among Americans, particularly belief in Christianity. And...

I’ve just gobbled up a newly published book by my dear friend Alan Jacobs, whom I see only rarely these days (though one such occasion, blessedly, was earlier this...

On the first day of a new month, I turn the pages of our calendars. To the left of the kitchen sink, for instance, on a small section perpendicular...

We know that our lives can change suddenly, “in the twinkling of an eye,” a truth that sets countless stories in motion, and yet when it actually happens to...

Several weeks ago, in sync with the start of Major League Baseball’s 2025 season, the University of Nebraska Press published David Krell’s 1978: Baseball and America in the Disco...

Readers of the April issue of First Things will have seen James F. Keating’s learned and perceptive review of James M. O’Toole’s excellent book For I Have Sinned: The...

Do you remember those illustrations (which used to be very common) that showed, say, a deliberately jokey “map” of what was in someone’s brain or “on their mind”? That...