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Nov 7, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Steve Salerno |Brian Stewart |Claire Lehmann |Kevin Mims
Sophia Corinne Salerno did not cry at her birth—and, at least in the two short years I knew her, seldom cried thereafter. She entered my life with eyes open and unblinking; from the first, she took her breaths with a calm self-possession that would prove invaluable in weathering the drawn-out nightmare of her parents’ uncoupling. It was Sophia’s misfortune to be born into a relationship whose principal players were united in just two things: their love for her and their contempt for one another.
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Nov 7, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Brian Stewart |Claire Lehmann |Kevin Mims |John Lloyd
In January, historian Niall Ferguson argued that the decision before Americans in the 2024 election was a stark choice between republic and empire. A Trump restoration presented a special menace to the American system at home while the Democrats’ feeble brand of global leadership—for which Harris was a faithful servant and ardent surrogate—would usher in a post-American global order.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Claire Lehmann |Kevin Mims |John Lloyd |Samuel Kronen
On election day, I caught the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Sitting across from me an elderly woman wore a t-shirt with the image of Trump pumping his fist in the air with the words “fight, fight.” A small "I Voted" sticker was pressed onto her lapel. She sat with an easy confidence. There were no disapproving glances from other passengers. There was no tension. No conflict.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |John Lloyd |Samuel Kronen |Greg Koabel
Bright Lights, Big City, Jay McInerney’s debut novel, was published in 1984 and thus celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. If you are under sixty years of age, this probably doesn’t mean much to you, but by the time McInerney’s book arrived, literary fiction had been in the doldrums for most of the late 1970s and early 1980s. That period is fascinatingly documented in Dan Sinykin’s recent book, Big Fiction.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Evelina Silveira
Arm-in-arm, the three of us prowled cobblestoned streets in the pitch black of a moonless night, hurling rocks at factory windows. Inebriated by our socialist fervour, Jennifer, Karl, and I followed each missile with a shouted slogan, damning the capitalist managers who, come morning, would bear witness to our brave act of anti-capitalist defiance. But when morning broke, those managers never arrived—because their factory existed only as a dream. Still, I was giddy upon waking.
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Oct 27, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton
A review of Sonny Boy by Al Pacino, 384 pages, Penguin Press (October 2024)When I’m reading celebrity memoirs, I’m usually tempted to skip the first few chapters. I generally don’t care about the family history, the toddler years, or the misadventures of adolescence. I want to jump to the parts of the story I know best—the books they wrote, the films they made, the songs they played, and so on. I’m glad I overcame that temptation when reading Al Pacino’s new autobiography, Sonny Boy.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
quillette.com | Roya Hakakian |Herbert Bushman |John Lloyd |Kevin Mims
On 28 November 2023, the profile of a tenured professor at Oberlin College disappeared from the schoolâs website. Only a day earlier, typing Mohammad Jafar Mahallatiâs name into the siteâs search box returned a page with an extensive biography and links to several of his posts and videos. His photograph was there, too: a bearded man with a greying hairline and a reticent smile that suited his title of Professor of Peace and Friendship Studies.
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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 | 
realclearbooks.com | Kevin Mims
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.
