A Commonplace Blog

The Hardball Cooperative, a blog written by ten fans and students of the game, hosts a symposium on the best and worst baseball novels of a...

Patrick Kurp closes a typically fine discussion of the Anglo-Russian novelist William Gerhardie by quoting him on style: A writer’s style i...

Danya Ruttenberg, ed., The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 320 pp. $19.95. Postmodernism, fe...

I have written my last word on hipster Jews—for now. The criticism that my view of choice and being chosen is “static,” though, continues to...

Hipster Judaism is not the first Jewish youth movement to seek the reinvention of Jewish culture. Perhaps the examination of an earlier “inn...

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency is a nearly century-old institution of Jewish life in America. Although it is a news service, describing itsel...

Independence Day is Saturday, when I am otherwise occupied. Here, then, two days early—in order to give you time to read them before Saturda...

American writers and artists were not silent about the Holocaust for two decades, but merely constructed its meaning differently. It was not...

In the letters section of the latest Commentary , a time-honored intellectual debate is rejoined. Was there or was there not a “two-decade s...

Like everyone else in the country, I have followed the revelations of Gov. Mark Sanford’s on-the-job adultery with stomach-turning fascinati...

I had not even received contributor’s copies of the July/August issue of Commentary including my essay “The Judaism Rebooters” before I was...

Light blogging today, because I have been doing something with books other than reading them—building a new bookcase for myself, using the n...

(1.) John R. Tunis, The Kid from Tomkinsville (1940). Roy Tucker, a rookie pitcher who wins fifteen straight for the Brooklyn Dodgers, suff...

To recognize the day I wanted to reel off the Five Books of fatherhood, but I came up nearly empty. There just are not five books—at least n...

Yesterday Buce took up Terry Teachout’s challenge to name fifteen mind-forming books in fifteen minutes. The most striking entry on his lis...

Via his co-blogger Carrie Frye, Terry Teachout passes on this quick game. Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’v...

For the fourth time. Australia’s leading literary award went to Tim Winton, whose surfing novel Breath manages the rare feat of being both...