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I’m one of those people who really loves dogs. If we’ve ever met in person, you may have seen me stop a conversation,... Read More

The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out. Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not... Read More

I work in a blue-chip gallery, and it’s not unusual that I’m asked if I grew up in Newport when I say that I’m from Rhode... Read More

For over fifty years conservatives have viewed entheogenic drug use through a post-Sixties leftist lens as a fast track to madness and... Read More

Some books become good friends. They not only stimulate our minds, but they also speak to our very souls. The Individualists:... Read More

When I read biographies, early lives leap out the most. Leonardo da Vinci was a studio apprentice to Verrocchio at 14 years old. Walt Disney... Read More

There are many ways to measure the ascendance of rightwing antiliberalism across the democratic world since the middle of the 2010s. In... Read More

The backlash to mass feminism is not surprising. Decades of cultural programming have assured us that men and women are interchangeable human... Read More

The internet is an endless trove of art and culture. It’s easy to think that it’ll be around forever. Young people are often... Read More

It starts with a Facebook message, usually. The name and picture seem vaguely, but not immediately, familiar – was there a... Read More

ALEX CARVER’S RECENT BODY OF WORK, made over the past few years, fixates on the torture of human bodies. His painted figures are... Read More

Where does it start, this writing business? Forget the initial idea story, the hours spent mapping out the plot, the characters, the... Read More

Towards the end of the first century AD, a Roman emperor met the family of Jesus Christ. Domitian had this failed Messiah’s relatives... Read More

It’s a law of nature: every year brings a gust of theories about Vincent van Gogh. His life has been scrutinized for so long that we... Read More

We can spend all of our lives paying for some decisions. In the case of a nation, the process of coming to terms with such decisions and... Read More

Few writers have been more hard-working or prolific than George Orwell: alongside six novels and three books of reportage, he bashed out... Read More

In 1994, shortly before his retirement, Justice Harry Blackmun announced a shift in his thinking about the death penalty. After years of... Read More

It was C. S. Lewis who said that “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are... Read More

Given their similar spellings, a young student might be forgiven for confusing the words “anarchism” and... Read More

It has been nearly six decades since President John F. Kennedy was cut down on the streets of Dallas by rifle shots fired by Lee Harvey... Read More

One of the musical highlights of the original, animated Little Mermaid is a scene in which Ariel, newly human, tries to get Prince... Read More

When the pandemic temporarily closed restaurants in March 2020, I had been waiting tables since I graduated college. I was free for a month... Read More

Growing up in Missouri, Christopher Yost had boxes of Marvel comic books, which his mother bought at the grocery store. None of his friends... Read More

A punch-drunk love of American language swells throughout the Coen brothers’ films: the rapid-fire New York dialogue in The... Read More

Taylor Swift, Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm native, is allegedly dating Matty Healy, who was, up until news broke of their purported... Read More

The Obamas have found a way to stay culturally relevant. In 2018, Barack and Michelle Obama founded Higher Ground Productions and arranged a... Read More

Sometime in 2004, the British pop music tabloid New Musical Express set aside a whole page in its table of contents to display a... Read More

Before Katherine Dunn published her celebrated novel Geek Love in 1989, she was a struggling single parent in Portland, Ore., paying rent by... Read More

There’s a crude dividing line that you can run down the middle of rap music. On one side, gangsta rap, which deals with bitches, money... Read More

In an era of sentences that trend not only towards our laziest tendencies but also towards the speed and rhythm of our economy: the elevator... Read More

Although enrollments in college history courses have plunged in recent years, interest in the subject remains high, to judge from both the... Read More

In the mid-1830s two ambitious Parisian chemists, Édouard Laugier and Auguste Laurent, set out to answer a question that had perplexed... Read More

Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing... Read More

In the years before the French Revolution saw heads roll down the boulevards, revolutionaries murdered in the bath, and endless numbers of... Read More

The best George Cruikshank print is, of course, the one he captioned “A radical reformer … a neck or nothing man!” A vast,... Read More

A new film about desire, “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” fails to satisfy, but a recent production of Shakespeare does. Read More