American Culture

The collapse of institutional credibility and what is filling the vacuum. Media consolidation and the narrowing of acceptable framing. The resurgence of identity — religious, political, generational — as an organizing force in consumption, law, and employment.

How narratives achieve dominance, who benefits when they do, and what the record shows when they are tested against events.

  • America Is Done Tipping. What Happens Next?

    At some point in the last five years, the tip prompt migrated off the restaurant check and onto everything else. It is now on the screen at the coffee counter where you pick up a drink that was waiting when you arrived. It is on the self-checkout kiosk at the grocery store. It is on…

  • Americans Have Almost Stopped Drinking. The Data Are Remarkable.

    A new Gallup survey released this week found that 59 percent of American adults say they drink alcohol — the lowest figure Gallup has recorded since it began tracking the question in 1939, tying a similarly low result from last year. For context: in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, roughly 71 percent of…

  • America Has Almost Stopped Reading for Pleasure. The Data Are Alarming.

    In 2004, roughly one in three Americans — 28 percent — read for pleasure on any given day. By 2023, that figure had fallen to about one in six. A peer-reviewed study published last year in the journal iScience, drawing on data from more than 236,000 Americans surveyed over two decades, documented what researchers called…

  • The World Cup Was Held in America. Here’s What It Revealed About Us.

    The 2026 FIFA World Cup ended Sunday in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Spain defeated Argentina 1-0 in extra time at MetLife Stadium, the home of the Jets and Giants temporarily transformed into the center of the world’s most watched sporting event. Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the second half of extra time, ending…

  • Someone Just Paid $50 Million for a T. Rex. We Don’t Know Who.

    A Tyrannosaurus rex fossil sold at Sotheby’s on Tuesday for $50.1 million. The buyer has not been identified. Sotheby’s described the specimen, named Gus, as one of the largest and most complete T. rex fossils ever discovered. The previous auction record for a dinosaur fossil was $31.8 million, set in 2020 when a specimen named…

  • The Sky Over Boston Turned Yellow. This Is What Summer Looks Like Now.

    If you were in Boston on Tuesday and looked up, the sky was the wrong color. A brownish-yellow haze had moved in overnight, the kind of color that the atmosphere is not supposed to produce. Residents in Maine reported similar skies. Meteorologists at the National Weather Service described the visible source: smoke from wildfires burning…

  • America Is Finally Getting Rid of Daylight Saving Time. Here’s What Took So Long.

    The House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act this week, and President Trump has signaled he will sign it. If the Senate follows — and there is bipartisan support for doing so — the United States will end the twice-yearly clock change and settle permanently on daylight saving time. Americans who have spent their…

  • The Country Turned Two Hundred Fifty and Watched a Wedding

    A republic that fought a king spent its 250th birthday treating a wedding like a coronation. That is not hypocrisy.

  • The Blue Light at Two in the Morning

    Teenagers are losing sleep, and maybe meaning, to a feed engineered to be hard to leave. The mismatch is not a flaw in the child. It is ancient wiring meeting a machine.

  • There Is Already a Design for the $250 Bill

    The Treasury says it has prepared a 250 dollar note bearing a living president’s face. The law that forbids it was written for a reason older than this argument.