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2 months ago | 
quillette.com | Robert Thornett |Graham Daseler |Joan Smith |Jonathan Kay
Kodiak Island is one of America’s most remote places. Located off the southwest coast of Alaska, it has only 12,500 residents but receives over 60,000 tourists per year. They come for the scenic green coastlines, which have given Kodiak the nickname the “Emerald Isle,” as well as activities like coho salmon fishing, watching Kodiak bears and whales, and kayaking.
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2 months ago | 
quillette.com | Graham Daseler |Joan Smith |Jonathan Kay |John Aziz
A review of Only in America: Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer by Richard Bernstein, 252 pages (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024)Shortly after sunset on the evening of 6 October 1927, 1,400 people converged on the Warner theatre in Manhattan to watch history being made. At first, the motion picture being projected seemed fairly ordinary—a run-of-the-mill family melodrama, performed in silent pantomime, just like every other feature film before it.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Herbert Bushman |John Lloyd |Kevin Mims |Joan Smith
The article that follows forms part of The So-Called Dark Ages, a serialised Quillette history of Late Antiquity, adapted from Herbert Bushman’s ongoing Dark Ages podcast. This is the eleventh instalment, and the sixth dedicated to the Huns. To read previous instalments, tracing the history of the Goths, click here.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Alan Davison |John Lloyd |Kevin Mims |Joan Smith
In the foreword of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s classic 1991 book The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, he asks, “What happens when people of different ethnicities, origins, speaking different languages and professing different religions, settle in the same geographical locality and live under the same political sovereignty?” He answers his own question by making a dire prediction: “Unless a common purpose binds them together, tribal antagonism will drive them apart.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | John Lloyd |Kevin Mims |Joan Smith |Juan P. Villasmil
A review of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution by Eric Kaufmann, 400 pages, Forum (July 2024)Earlier this year, Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of political science, left Birkbeck College in the University of London where he had taught for twenty years. He was also head of the political science department there, and already had a number of deeply researched books behind him.
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Aug 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Joan Smith |Juan Villasmil |Doriane Lambelet Coleman
America has produced plenty of high-quality political novels. Few American mystery novelists have ever investigated a real-life murder, and few contemporary Western novelists have ever participated in a cattle drive. But plenty of political professionals—presidents, vice presidents, governors, senators, journalists, campaign managers, political appointees, government insiders—have written political novels, and many of them are very good.
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Apr 13, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Holly Lawford-Smith |Justo Antonio Triana |Joan Smith |Bradley Strotten
John Braine was born 102 years ago today, a couple of months before Kingsley Amis (whose 100th birthday was celebrated here). Yet while Amis has remained a part of the British literary consciousness, Braine has fallen into comparative obscurity. Today, he is remembered chiefly—and perhaps only—for his debut novel, Room at the Top.
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Apr 13, 2024 | quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Holly Lawford-Smith |Justo Antonio Triana |Joan Smith |Bradley Strotten
John Braine was born 102 years ago today, a couple of months before Kingsley Amis (whose 100th birthday was celebrated here). Yet while Amis has remained a part of the British literary consciousness, Braine has fallen into comparative obscurity. Today, he is remembered chiefly—and perhaps only—for his debut novel, Room at the Top.
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Apr 12, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Judith Butler |Holly Lawford-Smith |Justo Antonio Triana |Joan Smith
A review of Who’s Afraid of Genderby Judith Butler, 620 pages, Penguin (March 2024). Philosopher Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, has endorsed Judith Butler’s latest book as follows:Judith Butler is the most important philosopher working in the United States today, and the one whose legacy is most likely to survive the test of time.
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Apr 11, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Justo Antonio Triana |Joan Smith |Robin Hanson |Charlotte Allen
In December 2021, Walnier Luis Aguilar Rivera was sentenced to 23 years in prison by a Cuban court for participating in the mass protests of July 11 and 12. He was 21 years old when he began his sentence and he’s the father of two young daughters. According to a report in Foreign Policy:[On July 11], tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the island to protest skyrocketing prices of essential goods. It was the largest event of civil unrest in Cuba since the 1990s.
