Author: J.L. Wall

I’m not certain where this line of thought is going quite yet — but it’s going somewhere.  Elsewhere, I offer the beginning of a thought about a concept somewhere between Forster’s “Prophecy” (as an...

In an attempt I will likely regret to move the continuation of the Civil War/War-Between (Among?)-the-States/War of Northern “Aggression”/War of Southern Interests in the Preservation of Chattel Slavery (did I cover all potential names...

So claims Jeff MacGregor in a fascinating series of notes on Derek Jeter, baseball, the beautiful, the sublime, and American nostalgia against lies, damned lies and statistics.

(This post is part of an ongoing series about Western culture and politics, and how the potential brokenness of one affects the other.) Since we’re talking World War I in poetry this Veteran’s/Armistice Day,...

Or so thinks the anti-anti-exceptionalist right.  Others (well, mostly just Larison) have already done a good deal of talking about American exceptionalism and Republican rhetoric of late, so I’m going to be brief.  Andrew notes...

Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi will no longer be represented in Congress by William Faulkner.

I noted, the other week, the concern with a politicized authenticity in the right’s New Elite rhetoric.  Israel—maybe I should rather say Zionism; I’m not certain, but you hopefully get the point—has a political...

The TSA is again stepping up security measures, and promises that no one will sneak a bomb aboard an airplane by pretending to be well-endowed.  Jeffrey Goldberg explains.

R.R. Reno has written an essay that asks some important questions and sent me thumbing through my copy of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: In this atmosphere, the pressing question about politics was...

I’ve had this theory pretty much since Tennessee first announced him as their football coach.  While I thought he’d already provided some evidence, he went out of his way this weekend to make the...

The Paris Review has put all of their author interviews — ever — online.  The New York Times claims this is new, so if it isn’t just blame it on my naive trust of...

Hello there, world: I’m the other new guy.  Allow me to introduce myself. I graduated in June from Northwestern University, where I studied English and Classics, and am more or less jealous that Rufus...