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Only a country that despises itself could produce entertainment like Marty Supreme. Director Josh Safdie loves grunge, and... Read More

Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years. My four decades of experience at one... Read More

“Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.”... Read More

To encounter a priest at an artist’s garden party in Brooklyn seemed like a very strange thing in the spring of 2022. The artist... Read More

All the glowing reviews for the four-hour-and-forty-one minute version of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill — originally... Read More

Big anniversaries are coming up in 2026: 200 years since the deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, 250 since the signing of the... Read More

We interviewed them. You listened. Here are the authors whose books we’ve loved reading this year. Read More

For too many Decembers, I told myself while decorating our tree that I really ought to re-read the gospels – or at least the dramatic... Read More

You reach a point in life where you become sort of embarrassed to be who you are. You look back at your aspirations and wonder if maybe they... Read More

My family and I were living in London, in the spring of 1973, when I had to make the trip personally to purchase tickets for Tom... Read More

Like many Americans, I grew up with a family tradition of attending The Nutcracker every Christmas season. As the temperature... Read More

Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die (2012) is a memorable pop album for any number of reasons, but lyrically, it is most fundamentally marked by... Read More

This year, the Claremont Review of Books is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a hefty double issue, which will be coming... Read More

New research published by the UK's Office for National Statistics finds that "33% of Britons aged 16 to 29 reported feeling lonely... Read More

The cast of Steven Spielberg’s upcoming, allegedly UFO-themed new project Disclosure Day includes the well-known likes of Emily Blunt,... Read More

Some comeback! The past 12 months were supposed to turn things around for struggling cinemas. But instead of heralding a dramatic return to... Read More

Educated guesses, smart takes and back-of-the napkin math on what entertainment industry insiders will be talking about in the next 12 months. Read More

We get the world we praise and support. If you honor and reward a behavior, you get more of it. If you don’t support what you need... Read More

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and raised within the liberal Protestant culture of New England. Abraham Joshua Heschel was... Read More

As I made my way past the window displays and Salvation Army Santas on Fifth Avenue, I happened upon a sign that read “This Holiday... Read More

The scene: Wednesday night, Mulberry Street in Soho, New York City. In an event space that Airbnb transformed into an underground ping-pong... Read More

There’s a kind of nausea or vertigo I get when confronted by an extremely large number. Kant called it the mathematical sublime, the... Read More

In November 2025, a user of AI assistant Claude 4,5 Opus discovered something unusual: an internal file describing the model’s... Read More

Twenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle... Read More

You know about the annual meeting in Davos, where anonymous shareholders and genderless bureaucrats mingle at private chalets. Like knowledge... Read More

BRIGHT ORANGE BLIMPS over Los Angeles, branded Nahmias jumpsuits. A belated NYFF premiere via a “secret screening.” Pictures of... Read More

The movies are dying — or at least my desire to see new wide-releases. A myriad of reasons feed into that cynicism, but ultimately,... Read More

Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme, and two of his sons served in WWII. “It is no wonder, then, that some of the most striking... Read More

An essentially illiterate man, someone who’d never read a novel or even a newspaper article all the way through without difficulty,... Read More

As 2025 draws to a close, I’m going to invite Critic readers to join me in one New Year’s Resolution for 2025: I will not... Read More