“Daddy!” Lev shouted several times. “Look! A spider!” He was right. There was a submerged spider in the bath with him. I spotted the gray clump halfway to the bottom and reacted like an arachnid paramedic, scooping it up in my hands and placing it on the enameled ledge of…

In August 2017, Hal Dion walked into his living room, slightly perturbed. Shaking his head of white hair and his matching moustache, he waved the latest issue of New York magazine, a subscription he still received despite living in Los Angeles for three decades. In those pages appeared an article…

I’m not really bothered by cultural appropriation. I can easily shake it off. Cultural misappropriation, on the other hand, has often caused me minor concussions, largely from the effects of banging my head against a wall. …

The calamitous presidency of Donald Trump is finally coming to a close. His Twitter account got a head start, a custom-tailored version of David Chase’s Cut to Black. As a skeptical, cynical pessimist when it comes to politics, I have doubted that he would ever experience a reckoning. Trump, who…