David Roberts || Sparks From Culture

David Roberts || Sparks From Culture

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Belle Burden's memoir Strangers and the torture of hindsight
Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers is a post-mortem on the sudden rupture of her seemingly idyllic twenty-year marriage.
 • David Roberts
DEFCON 2 for risk of nuclear war
This week, in between watching Oppenheimer, I also watched Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minster, give an important speech at the Davos conference.
 • David Roberts
When the rich bring the ick: Ozymandias in Manhattan
when an extremely wealthy hedge fund executive and his wife choose to splash their extravagance in our faces.
Revisiting Willy Loman in the age of Trump
I wrote the post below in the summer of 2023, trying to understand the continued appeal of Trump through the lens of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s…
 • David Roberts
My two cents about my inheritance
My wife Debbie and I needed to decide how or whether we might share our wealth with our adult children. To guide us, we had the good and the bad of my…
 • David Roberts

December 2025

Binge-gifts for you from Debbie and me
Life’s better when you have books and TV shows you like. For my wife Debbie and me, 2025 was a “productive” year for reading fiction and watching TV…
 • David Roberts
I spend $28,000 on Substack subscriptions
An interview about my Substack extravagance by the excellent Anne Kadet of the terrific CAFÉ ANNE.
 • David Roberts
Imagine There's No Scarcity
I am an example of a wealthy person for whom the “economic problem” of want has been solved...
 • David Roberts
A Note Thanking My Readers
 • David Roberts
0:54
A Positive View On Falling Fertility
I’ve been angered by the presumption of many that falling fertility represents a collective moral failure of our liberal society and an individual moral…
 • David Roberts

November 2025

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