Alien Nation: On Gabriel McKee’s The Saucerian: UFOs, Men in Black, and the Unbelievable Life of Gray

The calls came in around 10:40 on the night of August 25, 1955. Thomas McGuinn, the dispatcher on shift in the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office, had been on the job for three years, but had never encountered anything like this. Sgt. Ralph Weber and patrolman Ernest Nehrer were watching a “big, bright, round” object above the Fernald atomic plant — where uranium ore was processed for nuclear weapons.

The Art of the Critic: On Henry James and the State of Literary Criticism

“The floods of tepid soap and water which under the name of novels are being vomited forth in England, seem to me,” Henry James wrote, “to do little honour to our race.” In February 1884, 40-year-old James dismissed contemporary British novels in a letter to American novelist and editor William Dean Howells. James then went on to laud Howells as “the great American naturalist” before tempering his praise: “I don't think you go far enough, and you are haunted with romantic phantoms and a tendency to factitious glosses; but you are in the right path, and I wish you repeated triumphs there.” James had opinions. He also had the language — and the critical sensibility — with which to effectively, and lyrically, express those opinions.