One of the profounder tragedies of adulthood is the loss of time for “big books,” those famous doorstopper novels we tell ourselves every year that we’ll read someday. In high school, I went through a phase familiar to many bookish teenagers—binging on classics one after another, from David Copperfield and The Canterbury Tales to more difficult fare like The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina. But eventually, college and law school drew my attention away to other projects, and it was... Read more

Ever since I can remember, I’ve had a deep and abiding love for natural history museums. I don’t mean the revamped modern ones featuring splashy touchscreen displays, video screens, walls of informational text, and an overabundance of cartoon dinosaurs. I mean the old kind—the ones that haven’t dumped their dioramas featuring hundred-year-old taxidermy, their rows of dusty glass cases collecting interesting specimens, and their dimly lit displays of precious minerals. In many cases, these museum collections tend to spill over... Read more

A few days ago, my wife and I settled in to watch Shaka King’s film Judas and the Black Messiah, which chronicles the little-known story of an FBI informant tasked with penetrating into the inner circle of Fred Hampton, leader of the Black Panther Party in Chicago during the 1970s. As a Black man himself, the informant is profoundly conflicted about the role he plays in Hampton’s eventual killing—a guilt that, the film leads us to believe, contributed to his... Read more

A couple of weeks ago, Nathan J. Robinson—whom I consistently find to be one of the most interesting writers around, even though I frequently disagree with him—penned a provocative meditation on a subject that’s near and dear to my heart: the beloved real-time strategy game Age of Empires. For those unfamiliar, Age of Empires is a late-1990s computer game that operates rather like an elaborate form of chess. Players control a small village of medieval townsfolk, who farm and fish... Read more

As a general rule, most right-of-center theological and political commentators don’t think very much of video games. Such thinkers tend to link modern gaming with the downfall of young men, characterizing such recreation (along with online pornography) as a dopamine-triggering substitute for genuine accomplishment. I’ve long thought this is an unfortunately facile take, one that contains elements of truth but that also tends to undervalue the genuine power of participatory storytelling (but that’s a subject for another time). In any... Read more