The Nightstand
Dwight Macdonald’s Self-Critical Integrity
What am I willing to lose to preserve the humanity of my neighbor?
More Articles in The Nightstand
Against Culture–Therapy, That Is
"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” —Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning
Does Wisdom Belong to the Aged? Samuel Moyn’s Gerontocracy in America.
The rhetorical method of the book is, above all, snark.
The Joy of Unexpected Books
Someday our children may read those shelves the way Ruth Swain read her father's—not as a catalog of books but as the story of a life, with all its detours and discoveries.
The Most Interesting People You’ve Never Heard Of
Upstaters is not a book for upstate New Yorkers only.
Novels in Action: A review of Joshua Hren’s “More Than a Matter of Taste”
Hren addresses our cultural moment through the idiom of corrective: great literature can help restore things that Western societies are losing.
The Gift of Limits: A Conversation with Leah Libresco Sargeant
Pretending we are not what we are—finite, dependent creatures—limits our freedom to act rightly in the world.
LLMs as the Worst of Both Worlds: A Review of Cory Doctorow’s The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
Most current iterations and applications of AI in the form of LLMs actually turn humans into reverse centaurs.
The Story in the Ordinary: A Review of Eric Cyr’s Here it Snows in June
There is always more at stake in our everyday lives than might at first meet the eye.
A Resurgence of Educational Localism? A Review of Skipping School
Unusually for books on homeschooling, Skipping School is written for both scholarly and general audiences.
The Dignity of Dependence: How the Vulnerabilities We Share Become the Ties that Bind
The loving entanglement that defies our culture’s idol of autonomy is available to men just as much as it is to women, though differently.
In Marce Catlett Wendell Berry Remembers for Us
Hardship fades from memory with each generation. Those who lived it remember the weight of it. Those who didn’t often forget.
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