Alex Beam

Now I feel like I know a thing or two about Costco, and to know it is to admire it.

For Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, it’s the perfect moment to dial down the joy and happiness. Joy can lead only to trouble.

Where would you rather live? In Trump’s bleak dystopia or in Harris’s world, nurturing a sliver of hope for a better future?

LOTR is a work of literature, not propaganda. It belongs to no faction or ideology, despite fans’ and critics’ insistence on shaping it to their will.

Dogs have been on a heady run of late, no pun intended.

The Epsteins are simultaneously great and commonplace.

Suddenly plant sentience, or awareness, and the possibility of plant intelligence, and even legal rights for plants, are hotly debated concerns.

History is more like a succession of random events to which we later assign certain meanings. Its complicated perspectives are hard to see, in real time or even in hindsight.

It dawned on me that I could provide a useful public service: A Field Guide to the American Bore.

The American movie industry has essentially benched him. But I think Allen is a brilliant writer, and “Coup de Chance” is strikingly beautiful.

The good life has been a problem since time immemorial. In the mythological Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve experienced perfect bliss, and it was a drag.

It’s painful to admit that the war in Ukraine has turned out as Putin might have expected.

The brave new world of AI-powered job reviews sounds like the daily diary of the American nightmare to me.

It’s time to strike a blow against Americans’ obsession with self-denial.

Why is everyone rowing? Because it’s great, that’s why.

The program told me to “replace the word gizmo” in the column about gizmos. It also told me to “correct your spelling” of the word “vibecession,” in a column poking fun at the term vibecession.

Forget Travis Kelce. Tom Brady, a.k.a. the Greatest of All Time, is ready, rested, and available.

Is God listening? Hard to say.

More than 50 years ago, a gang of self-styled anti-Vietnam War revolutionaries robbed a bank in Brighton. One of the five gang members, a Brandeis University student, eluded law enforcement for an astonishing 23 years.

You can never prove a counterfactual argument, so how do I know that a four-year-long, conservative centrist Mitt Romney presidency would have forestalled the rise of Donald Trump?