Note: the Democrats’ last four presidential inaugurations have included readings by American poets. Poetry has never been featured at a Republican president’s inaugural ceremony. This poem is tremendous. Believe me: poems don’t get any classier than this— The best words, the smartest rhyme scheme, Big-league prosody. When you take other poets—look at Robert Frost. He…

A couple weeks after the presidential election, I compiled and published here a top-50 movie list in which I selected my favorite film for each U.S. state, based on narrative setting rather than filming location: a sort of cinematic travel guide for our large, fractured nation. New England yielded “The Fighter” (Massachusetts), “Far from Heaven”…

TV catchphrases aren’t meant to live forever. Even the most successful character slogans like “Dy-no-mite!” and “Don’t have a cow, man!”—which made the jump from in-series use to real-world use—gradually faded from the American lexicon except as fond memories of our pop-culture past. Of all the television-born crossover phrases, however, possibly none has flamed out…

Celebrity death: Is it stupid to care? The age-old question struck me again at the end of 2016, as George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds all shuffled off this mortal coil in quick succession. All year long, our popular culture had inhabited a heightened state of bereavement, perhaps on account of a few uncommonly…

Hey guys, do you remember the 90s? I sure do: the Pogs, the Beanie Babies, the Reebok Pumps, that Sears commercial where the deadbeat suburban husband finally submits to his wife’s entreaties to order a new air conditioner for their home, vowing to “call now”—and, most of all, the usage of the word “Not!” as…

On Dec. 16, Netflix released to streaming audiences the new film “Barry.” Purchased by the scarlet-hued home-entertainment colossus following its September premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, “Barry” marked 2016’s second indie drama about the early years of Barack Hussein Obama, who, by the looks of it, poses a threat of displacing Abraham Lincoln…

Shortly before Thanksgiving, internet content farms began releasing articles about how to avoid contentious political discussions with relatives during the holiday season, as if, in the absence of clever techniques of distraction, the carving knife intended for the turkey might soon turn into a weapon. In late November, we were fresh off a nightmare election;…

For some reason, all of the classic TV Christmas specials were produced in the mid-to-late 1960s, starting with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (1964) and continuing through “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” (1966) to “Frosty the Snowman” (1969). As a kid, I watched all three every year, along with “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (1965),…

When a school shooting or other domestic terrorism event has occurred, part of the nauseous standard operating procedure is to comb the attacker’s social media history for clues as to what caused him to perform the horrific deed: was he always violent, insane, antisocial, or was there, at some point, a normal human being bearing…

In the weeks and months following an election, it’s impossible—at least for me—to look at a map of our country without mentally filling in the appropriate color for each state: red or blue. A plurality of Americans voted Democrat, but most of the land belonged, as usual, to the Republicans, owing to the vast swath…

Last week, after vaguely apologizing for having stated so many times that there was no chance Donald Trump would win the presidency, I pledged to take a break from politics. But—hey, sorry, man—I still can’t get the election out of my head. Lately I’ve been considering the divisions that have formed among Clinton’s supporters in…

The closer this election gets—or at any rate the closer we pretend it is—the more articles I see lamenting the foolishness of Millennials who plan to vote for third-party candidates instead of Hillary Clinton. The New York Times has been publishing these articles almost daily, including one called “The Folly of the Protest Vote” that…

Sometime last year I came across a used hardcover copy of “The Top of the Hill” by Irwin Shaw in Now & Then Books in Bennington. Swayed by the dust jacket image (a pair of skis and poles planted upright in the snow) and a recollection that the author had been a guilty-pleasure favorite of…

What is the best part of fall? Is it the vibrant sylvan sunsets of changing leaves that adorn our hillsides, the crisp nights illuminated by communal bonfire, the cinnamon-spiced prepackaged snack foods falsely claiming to contain the flavor of pumpkin, or the symbolic destruction of youth enacted as sport on the hallowed fluorescent gridirons of…

By Brett Yates As we enter autumn, the fare at the movies starts to get a little more serious, which means that, from here on out, Hollywood’s offerings won’t consist solely of sequels and comic book adaptations. Some of the films out there—like the recently released “Sully” and “Snowden,” with their stern single-word titles demanding…