Archive

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...

Sometimes when I am starting a column, I look back to see what I wrote for this space roughly a year ago. I did so earlier this week, and...

Two years plus a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column that began thus: “I am and always have been a creature of routine.” And that was very...

If you have been following this column for a while, you know I love the very idea of “forthcoming books”; you may recall my account of learning, for the...

A year ago at this time, I devoted a column to “Hopes and Wishes for 2024”—mostly hopes, as it turned out, but with a handful of wishes. (I was...

A year ago, after a series of annual lists that grew longer and longer, I changed the format of this feature, making it much more manageable in size and...

In October of 2023, I wrote a column here about how I came to be doing jigsaw puzzles—every day!—with my wife, Wendy, something I could never have imagined. We...