When “the Colonel” Tom Parker first pokes his head out the door of the Louisiana Hayride to lay eyes on Austin Butler’s Elvis, the pink-suited Presley’s being trampled by nerves like a church grandma on Thanksgiving night. He’s not ready to play to the fans at the festival, he thinks…

Episode 5 of MARVEL’s Moon Knight series is all about delusions. During Episode 5, we see the handpicked protagonist Marc Spector go toe-to-toe with a psychologist/cult leader whose divine mission in life is to genocide every human with a high crime waiting in their future. For most of the 42-minute…

On Thursday night, Stephen Curry tallied 34 points, 7 rebounds, and 7 assists in Game 6 to deliver the Golden State Warriors their fourth NBA Finals title since he joined the team in 2009. But Curry’s championship masterpiece of a series against the Boston Celtics wasn’t just the capstone of…

It’s time for me to write here more consistently, and on an actual day. The short-story author George Saunders claims that we all go through stories with a cart called “Things I Couldn’t Help But Notice.” So, this summer, I’m going to experiment with Things, a weekly roundup of phenomena…

Any sentence or phrase about Representative Liz Cheney’s political career should start with a disclaimer: She’s probably not going to be in Congress next January. Since former president Donald Trump sparked a riot on the steps of the US Capitol, Cheney has been the loudest and most persistent Republican in…

When we first found out that an 18-year-old had opened fire on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, very little of what else hit the headlines came as a novelty. From the reticence of local police to protect its nonwhite charges, to the unusual press-conference political posturing that so many Americans…

What is a church even for, if it can’t deal with the rape of its own congregants? On May 22, an independent report from Guidepost confirmed what hundreds of Southern Baptists already knew: The organization that oversaw their churches was swamped with sexual abuse cases, and members of their leadership…

When ESPN’s telecasts of the Golden State Warriors’ first-round playoff series would cut to commercial, a funny thing would happen. Repeatedly, with a frequency that bordered on the absurd, the Disney broadcast would play Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back in Town as the images of athletic accomplishments faded into…

In the closing minutes of the Sixers’ 99–90 playoff exorcism at the hands of the Miami Heat, I wasn’t really thinking about anything taking place on the court right that minute. Why would I? The team was losing, with a whimper and not a bang. Philly’s fans were booing like…