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
For enthusiasts of Haruki Murakami, last month brought two major events in two different countries. One is the publication, in Japan, of his latest novel, “Machi to Sono Futashika na Kabe” (“The City and Its Uncertain Walls”). The other is the release, in the United States, of “Saules Aveugles, Femme Endormie” (“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”), an animated feature based on several o... Read More
Some arguments are best suited for t-shirts, not books: any attempt to expand on them weakens them. Rarely is this phenomenon displayed more starkly than in Philip Ewell’s idea of “music theory’s white racial frame,” now stretched to book length in his recently published On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone. Over the past few years, Ewell’s verbal, tweeted, and... Read More
Salman rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, purports to be the summary of a long-lost, 24,000-verse epic poem from 14th-century India. The hero and author of the poem is Pampa Kampana, who as a girl becomes the conduit for a goddess, channeling her oracular pronouncements and wielding her magical powers. She later causes a city to rise overnight from enchanted seeds, presides as its queen, and li... Read More