Nic Rowan
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Articles by Nic Rowan
When You’re in a Hole, Stop Digging
Film When You’re in a Hole, Stop Digging Despite its ambitions, Digger is a deeply stupid movie. Featured in the Nov/Dec 2026 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Digger, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Legendary Pictures, 129 minutes By the time this review is published, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Digger will be a punchline comparable to Michael Cimino’s disastrous western Heaven’s Gate or Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s unpopular remake of The Wages of Fear.
A novel by late French filmmaker Eric Rohmer debuts in English
About 15 years before he made any feature films, the future leading French director Eric Rohmer (1920-2010) tried to become a novelist. His timing could not have been worse. It was August 1944, during the Liberation of Paris. “The bullets were still flying,” Rohmer recalled, and he dared not look out his window, for fear of catching a stray. So he stayed at his desk. “Is it even possible to write about what’s unfolding at present?” he asked himself.
Put Out More Flags
Culture Put Out More Flags The American flag is as alive as the country it represents. Featured in the September/October 2026 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... American Icon: The US Flag in Art National Gallery of Art, June 6–December 6 In 1954, Jasper Johns had a dream of himself painting an American flag. When he woke up, the artist executed his first work on the theme, in encaustic. More flags soon followed.
The Dusty Dinosaurs off Route 12
Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. You’re reading Dispatch Culture, our weekly newsletter exploring the world beyond politics. To unlock all of our stories, podcasts, community benefits, and our newest feature, Dispatch Voiced, which allows you to listen to our written stories in your own podcast feed, join The Dispatch as a paying member. Click sign up to start receiving your newsletters.
Lost Treasures: ‘The Very Fine Clock’
Muriel Spark and children’s literature may seem like an odd pairing, but one morning in the mid-1960s, the Scottish novelist tossed off three such stories in a London hotel room. Spark, waiting for a visa to go to the U.S., was then at the peak of her popularity. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” had been published in 1961. It would become a successful Broadway play in 1968 and, in 1969, an even more successful film. Spark had written two novels in the interim and was at work on another.
The House Does Not Need You
Ray Bradbury is often credited with the gift of prophecy. What most people mean by this is that he had an uncanny understanding of fear. The Martian Chronicles, a series of short stories first published together in 1950, is the most compact expression of his gift. Its penultimate chapter, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” is barely a story; it is just a description of what we would now call a “smart house,” left behind after an atomic blast has destroyed San Francisco.
‘Like a Cat Loves a Bird’ Review: Multiples of Muriel
When the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark published her autobiography, “Curriculum Vitae,” in 1992, she claimed it was to “put the record straight.” Others had previously written or spoken about her life—all wrong, she said. Spark’s book covers her life from her birth in 1918 to the publication of her first novel, “The Comforters” (1957).
Everything Was Glorious, Everything Was Shabby
“Total Eclipse of the Heart” was one of the first pop songs I ever loved, but the first time I heard it, it was in Estonian. (Don’t ask.) Later, I heard a parody in which somebody sang a narration of the events of the song’s very silly, very eighties music video. That was when I realized that the Estonian song I vaguely remembered had some kind of larger existence. And so it was that I finally listened to the version that everybody knows, the one sung by Bonnie Tyler.
The Brighter Side of the Grave
The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome is perhaps the only tidy place in the Eternal City. The hedges are trimmed, the paths cleared, the marble headstones washed white. When I visit this spring to see the tomb of John Keats, a maintenance worker is making his rounds, quietly dusting the individual gravesites with a miniature leaf blower. He pauses as I walk by, as if in deference to my reflections on the young English poet whose name, as his headstone says, was writ in water.
The Pope at the End of the World
Rome—A stranger wandering the city might be forgiven for thinking that Pope Francis is still alive. His face is everywhere: printed on the T-shirts, prayer cards, and rosaries sold in those junky kiosks; smiling in the trattorias and gelaterias; sketched hastily on the tenement walls outside the tourist districts. You can even find a 2026 Pope Francis calendar in a used bookstore, printed months after he had departed the Chair of Saint Peter.
One year with Leo
One year with Leo Vol. 11 | No. 10 | May 15, 2026 On the cover: Pope Leo XIV smiles during a meeting with Algerian Catholics at the Basilica of Our Lady of Africa in Algiers on April 13. One year into Leo’s pontificate, what does it mean for U.S. Catholics to have an American pope? On Page 10, Nic Rowan reflects on that question and a recent trip with his young family to see Leo.
An American Tries Undertourism
On overtourism’s opposite. Photo by Gian Luca Pilia via Unsplash. Photo by Gian Luca Pilia via Unsplash. Turn any article into a podcast. Upgrade now to start listening. Members can share articles with friends & family to bypass the paywall. Forget about wading in the Trevi Fountain. When you visit Rome, you can hardly see it. All day the anxious masses press against each other: shouting, shoving, shouldering through the crowd to snap a selfie with the monumental Baroque extravaganza.
Former California priest named new new bishop in Hawaii
Pope Leo XIV appointed Jesuit Father Michael T. Castori, 65, rector of the Arrupe Jesuit Residence at Seattle University since 2025, as the new bishop of Honolulu May 6, 2026. He will succeed Bishop Clarence "Larry" Silva. (OSV News/courtesy Bishop-designate Michael T. Castori) Pope Leo XIV has appointed a Jesuit priest as the new bishop of Honolulu to succeed Bishop Clarence "Larry" Silva, who has led the Hawaii diocese for two decades. The new bishop-designate, Father Michael T.
Pope Leo to visit France in September, French bishops announce
Attendees to a Marian procession hold candles in Lourdes, France in 2022. (OSV News /Tamino Petelinsek, courtesy Knights of Columbus) Ahead of the first anniversary of his election to the chair of St. Peter, it was announced that Pope Leo XIV is officially expected to visit France in late September, the French bishops' conference confirmed May 6. During the visit, French bishops suggested Pope Leo will travel to Paris and to the Marian Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes.
Leo was the American pope. A year later, he's everyone's pontiff
Pope Leo XIV delivers his urbi et orbi (to the city and the world) message from the main balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on Easter at the Vatican April 5, 2026. (OSV News/Vatican Media, handout via Reuters) The day after Pope Francis died, my wife and I bought plane tickets to Rome. We weren’t interested in being there for the conclave. Like professional football, that extravaganza is best enjoyed on television.
An Afternoon with Randi Weingarten
“It’s a bitch,” says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “And I thought it would kill me.” But writing a book didn’t kill her. Here she is, on the fifteenth floor of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, holding forth to about 20 graduate students. The fruit of her nearly deadly labors sits on the table before her. Signed copies are for sale in the back.
Ghostwriter in a Hurry
Books Ghostwriter in a Hurry Pity the hack who works for Gavin Newsom. Featured in the May/June 2026 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, by Gavin Newsom. Penguin Press, 304 pages. Let’s start with the acknowledgments, usually the best place to begin in a political memoir. Here the author admits that he is less composer and more collaborator.
‘Like, Follow, Subscribe’ Review: The Online Family Circus
When Julie Jeppson started chronicling the lives of her children on YouTube, she discovered something uncomfortable: Pain sells. The stay-at-home mother of eight first began posting videos online, or vlogging, for extra income in 2016. But after she and her husband split up in 2022, the gig became a full-time job. Now she has more than 200,000 followers and several brand sponsorships.
Finding the Blue Hour
One of my favorite scenes in any of Éric Rohmer’s films occurs in his picaresque Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Two young women are spending the night in a barn. One is from Paris; the other is a country girl. The second tells the first that there is only one time during the whole day when you can hear real silence: l’heure bleue. But it is not really an hour, she explains.
The Decline of the American Mall
One of the most quoted scenes in Don DeLillo’s comic novel White Noise involves a shopping spree. The book’s hero, a professor at a small Midwestern college, finds himself facing a midlife crisis and a creeping fear of death. A trip to the local mall revives his spirits. “I shopped with reckless abandon,” he says. “I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies.
D.C. Is a Sewer of Incompetence
A sign near the Potomac River warns of dangerous water in Cabin John, Md., Feb. 18. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today. There’s no polite way to say it: The Potomac River is oozing liquid feces, the result of one of the largest sewage spills in American history.
The Potomac Sewage Spill Shows D.C. Awash in Incompetence
Human waste poured into the Potomac River unimpeded for a week. Not a great argument for statehood. A sign near the Potomac River warns of dangerous water in Cabin John, Md., Feb. 18. Photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters Free Expression is a daily newsletter on American life, politics and culture from the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. Sign up and start reading Free Expression today.
How the face of terrorism changed in the 1970s
When Leila Khaled hijacked Trans World Airlines Flight 840 to Tel Aviv in 1969, jihad was the furthest thing from her mind. The 25-year-old member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a strict Maoist. Her aims in bringing down the airplane were entirely political. And by the standards of most terrorists, she was not even particularly violent. More than shooting, she was interested in lecturing.
Ukraine’s Fading Western Dream
Ukraine Ukraine’s Fading Western Dream On one writer’s journey from Europe to Ukraine. Featured in the January/February 2026 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Warsaw/Kiev—The sun has already set by the time I arrive at the Warsaw East train station. It set hours ago, at 3:45 p.m., a brilliant burst of red that gave way abruptly to deep black. Every November day is like this in Eastern Europe. There are no lingering twilights.
Dead Christmas
Culture Dead Christmas It’s the most wonderful time of the year in Washington, D.C. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... One of the many funny bits in Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan is his label for the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day: “orgy week.” During this time, the bright young things of the Upper East Side argue philosophy in their parents’ drawing rooms, raid their parents’ liquor cabinets, and carry on their parents’ dying social traditions.
The Lamp Magazine | Lounge Lizard
Not too long ago, I treated myself to a luxe experience that I would rather not enjoy again. I was flying overnight, overseas out of Dulles International Airport in the hinterlands of the Washington, D.C., suburbs. It was the last day of the federal government’s forty-three-day shutdown, and I expected more than my usual allotment of airport frustration.
On Christmas reading
Every time I resolve to read through a lengthy work of literature, I am reminded of the funniest scene in Temporary Kings, the penultimate book of Anthony Powell’s 12-volume novel cycle, A Dance to the Music of Time. A wealthy industrialist is informed by his doctors that he has less than a year to live.
Doctor Death’s Messiah
Sign in or Subscribe Now for audio version When Jack Kevorkian set out for California in 1976, he had every intention of leaving medicine behind in Michigan. The last two decades had been ones of disappointment and defeat. He was nearly fifty, unmarried, and stalled out in his career as chief pathologist at a large hospital in Detroit. So, like many others facing midlife crises in that hangover decade, he packed up his few belongings and headed west to devote himself to art.
Inventing the American Ghost Story
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When I was in college, the house across the street from mine was said to be haunted. I never entered that house, but every time I walked in its shadow, I felt a little queasy. There was something unsettling about the place. Older students claimed to have held séances in the living room. Younger ones believed that these had opened a door to another world, one whose terrors were unleashed at night. Maybe there was something to that.
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Kingdom of Contradiction
Books Kingdom of Contradiction Everything Saudi Arabia has, it has earned—or taken. Featured in the November/December 2025 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, by David Commins. Yale University Press, 384 pages. The first cars came to Riyadh in 1923, more than a decade before oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia. Two teams of camels dragged them across the ad-Dahna desert to Ibn Saud’s palace, where they were kept for his private use.
Dan Brown’s conspiracy of cuccess
Back in the ’80s, the film critic John Simon devised a classification system that neatly explains why Woody Allen’s comedies charm disparate audiences. “A highbrow moviegoer can laugh,” Simon wrote, “a middlebrow, empathize; a lowbrow, gape, awestruck.” Something similar could be said about the appeal of Dan Brown’s novels. The highbrow can chuckle condescendingly at their supposed erudition. The middlebrow can engage with them in earnest. And the lowbrow can simply marvel.
Knickknack diaspora
Until it closed last year, Monarch Novelties was the only souvenir store in Washington, D.C., that sold campaign memorabilia exclusive to the three presidential elections of the 1960s. The store was an oddity, a decaying building on 14th Street that, for more than 80 years, trafficked in eccentricities: not just Kennedy– and Nixon-era nostalgia but also carnival trinkets, defective bingo sets, and false teeth.
The Other Side of the Camera
I have not seen the videos of the death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. I won’t watch them. I also have not seen the videos of Iryna Zarutska’s death on the Charlotte metro. I won’t watch those either. In fact, when any video depicting a violent death makes the rounds on social media, I avert my eyes, log out, do anything not to see it. I know many people feel that it is necessary to watch these videos, if only to stay informed. I used to feel that way too.
Things That I Have Heard Blasting Headphone-free From Phones While Traveling on the Aboveground Section of the New York Subway Lines of Queens
6:06 A.M., a man, mid-forties, who looks just like J. B. Smoove twelve years ago, blasting Alicia Keys’s “If I Ain’t Got You” and smiling. 2:36 P.M., a woman, early twenties, applying makeup, phone on the seat next to her playing Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” 5:05 P.M., a man, mid-thirties, slight, with Middlemarch in his lap, watching lip-sync videos on TikTok. 5:25 P.M., a nurse, late twenties, in full scrubs, standing in the middle of a packed train watching And Just Like That . . ., full volume.
If the Belt Still Fits
I think I have finally aged out of being a child prodigy. I’ll admit my hopes have been waning these past few years, but I thought I might have an explosion of talent that would put me into the winner’s circle, like how some people gain a half-inch or so of height over the course of their twenties. Unfortunately, I remain five-foot-eleven, not a hair taller than I was at seventeen; and I have yet to emerge as the leading talent in any of my various professional or personal spheres.
Ridable Land
I’ve had the Turkish verb üşüşmek stuck in my head for a week. It’s a very ancient word: Clauson’s Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth Century Turkish has as its first citation of the üş- root an eleventh-century lexical text, the Divan-i Lugati’t-Türk. Unlike so much of the modern Turkish vocabulary, it’s not an import from Persian or Arabic. It means to crowd or press together—an evocative and useful bit of language.
The Empire of the Atom
I found the gateway to the end of the world after a long bus ride across Central Asia, that captivating region of dereliction, enormous skies, beauty, and despotism, containing as it does the blue, beautiful wonders of Samarkand and the great stretch of desiccated mud which within living memory was the Aral Sea, so deep and wide that steamers crossed it. Then the rivers that fed it were plundered to plant cotton, and the sea died.
A Second Persepolis
Culture A Second Persepolis Great nations fall. Nothing but wind remains. Featured in the September/October 2025 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The final shot of The Red Balloon is one of the most exhilarating in any movie. In the moments leading up to it, a young boy sits on a hill in Paris, holding in his hands a deflated party balloon. He had loved that balloon, and, strange to say, it had loved him in return.
Less Than Angels
Bryan Johnson has this theory about long-distance air travel. It is designed to kill you. Think about it: When you fly overseas, what happens? Almost as soon as you sit down, you are offered an alcoholic drink. Then, right after takeoff, you are given a hot meal, that thick salty airplane sludge intended only to be enjoyed at thirty thousand feet. And this is just the beginning.
On America’s Birthday, Consider ‘Old Things in Heaven’
Culture On America’s Birthday, Consider ‘Old Things in Heaven’ The death of the oldest tree in Washington, D.C. prompts reflection on America’s age. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Around this time last year, the oldest tree in Washington, DC came crashing to the ground. The Northampton Oak was likely planted around the time of the Mayflower Compact, and it stood in Chevy Chase, on the DC side of the border with Maryland, for more than 400 years.
Will Hochul Sign New York’s Assisted Suicide Bill?
Politics Will Hochul Sign New York’s Assisted Suicide Bill? The governor has studiously avoided taking sides—but now the decision is hers. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... The New York state senate on Monday approved a controversial assisted suicide bill that has been circulating in Albany for nearly a decade. The Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) Act is now on Kathy Hochul’s desk—forcing her to take sides in a fight from which the Democratic governor has consistently shrunk.
Joe Biden, Rex Nemorensis
Politics Joe Biden, Rex Nemorensis For how much longer will the former president be king of the wood? Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Not long before the presidential election, I wrote a column in these pages characterizing Joe Biden as a “temporary king” in the tradition of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough.
A Mob Once Killed a Circus Elephant in Lansing
The Lansing Elephant Incident is not especially famous, but it is one of the more bizarre episodes of mass violence in Michigan history. To this day, it remains inexplicable. The trouble began on a cool September night in 1963. The circus was in town and had pitched its tents at the Logan Square shopping center. The crowd was rowdy. When the 12-year-old Indian elephant, Little Rajjee, came into the ring, onlookers antagonized it fiercely.
My Visits to Countries Nobody Has Ever Heard of
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... A few months ago, President Donald Trump made passing reference in a long address before Congress to Lesotho—“a country nobody has ever heard of.” His remark stuck in my mind, not just because I have heard of Lesotho, but because I have been there. Well, sort of. I have never actually traveled to the landlocked country completely encircled by South Africa and recognized as a sovereign state by the United States since 1966.
Fight for Old D.C.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Let it never be said again that Washington, DC is a city without any native culture. The fact that its professional football team, against all odds, is at last returning to the site of RFK Memorial Stadium puts that myth to rest. The Commanders may have shed their true name, but they have regained their old city. That the team is returning from the suburbs at all is incredible. The trend runs almost exclusively in the other direction.
One Half-Tipsy Yank with a Typewriter
Culture One Half-Tipsy Yank with a Typewriter F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby at 100. Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Shirley Hazzard once observed that at a certain age memory protects one from the burden of experience. A vivid scene, with the interval of several decades, becomes little more than a word, a gesture, perhaps the way the light fell on a certain afternoon long ago.
The Sit-down Comic
Art The Sit-down Comic A new exhibition on Franz Kafka misses the point. Featured in the May/June 2025 issue Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... When David Foster Wallace popularized the idea at the turn of this century that Franz Kafka was a funny man, he probably did not know that he was inaugurating a major revisionist project.
The Chimera
America’s uncertain foreign policy. Published March 10, 2025 This weekend, for the first time, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the Trump 2016 campaign. Or a moment from the campaign, anyway. Whenever candidate Donald Trump talked about building a border wall and took flak for it from Mexico or the Democrats or whoever, he’d bellow, “The wall just got 10 feet higher!” In the end, the wall did not get 10 feet higher. By the time he left office in 2021 there was barely any wall to speak of.
The Souls of Serfs and Subjects
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and ‘loyalty.’ Published March 10, 2025 • Updated March 9, 2025 C. S. Lewis argued that every particular sinful disposition is related to “some good impulse of which it is the excess or perversion.” The appetite for justice becomes wrath, the desire to achieve material prosperity becomes avarice or envy, the normal sexual drive becomes an abnormal one, the impulse toward achievement or excellence becomes pride, the mother of sins.
Why Are Young Conservatives Converting to Catholicism?
Published March 9, 2025 Last Easter, more than 1,300 people joined the Catholic Church in Washington, D.C.—many of them young conservatives. With Catholicism gaining influence in right-wing politics and leaders such as Vice President J.D. Vance embracing the faith, is Catholicism becoming the backbone of the conservative movement?
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