RealClearBooks Articles

18. We get a little abstract and we make up a bunch of words and phrases in order to describe what Joan Mitchell was doing on the canvases she painted in 1964, a kind of annus mirabilis for Joan Mitchell in which she obliterated herself and therefore also became most herself. BEFORE JOAN MITCHELL moved out to Monet’s part of France, before Jean-Paul Riopelle ran off with the dog-walker and while she was still in the heyday of her greatest period of artistic ferment, around 1964, she painted a number of canvases that are mostly just centers. I love these paintings so much that I...

Marlon Brando was a great man: a genius, a visionary, a generational talent, and perhaps the best actor to ever live. Few would disagree, claiming it self-evident. But the latest biopic on Brando’s turbulent life can’t seem to decide either way. Waltzing with Brando was a years-long passion project for Billy Zane, a prolific actor in his own right, who both produced the film and starred as Brando. Yet rather than focus on Brando’s acting career, or even his litany of scandals and controversies, the film zeroes in on his fanatical pursuit to build a utopian resort on his...

Connecticut’s leaders are considering a risky play: using taxpayer and pension funds to keep the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun in-state. It may sound like an investment in community pride, but in reality, it would gamble with the state’s financial stability.    In August, the Sun — who have played at Mohegan Sun Arena since 2003 — were purchased for a record $325 million by Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca, who intends to move the team to Boston. The sale requires WNBA Board of Governors approval. In response, Gov. Ned Lamont has floated a...

This week marks the seventh anniversary of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This anniversary should also mark the day a United States Senator betrayed his oath to the Constitution. The true story of Gold Bar Bob’s Washington, D.C., is more scandalous than any Netflix series. For the first time in American history, a United States Senator was caught acting as a foreign agent. In exchange for cash, gold bars, and a new Mercedes-Benz, former Senator Bob Menendez betrayed his nation—a nation that provided his parents a safe place to give him birth on January...

In a world that is, technically speaking, more connected than ever before in human history, Americans find themselves isolated, atomized, and without a feeling of greater purpose. Like a fish without its school, humans have lost an integral protective layer: community. At this point, myriad studies have revealed the detriments of loneliness, both physiologically and psychologically. That is, when we are without this important protective layer – typified by one’s neighborhood, friends, and family - we become vulnerable to a slew of maladies, not to mention the potential erosion of...

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions—at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human connection. The Grand Valley paintings, born from a memory not her own, become a focal point for understanding Mitchell’s approach to abstraction and landscape. Meis...

Alice sat in the darkness of the cabin, waiting for the door to open. On the island she had not been waiting for anything. She’d walked where she pleased, over sandy shore and through the forest, wandering like an aimless ghost among the trees. She listened to the whistling of birds and spent her days sitting on the shore to regard the unending entertainment of waves that crashed and receded. The cabin possessed few such entertainments. She had felt along every inch of it, mapped every joint in the boards with her fingers. Her days on the island had been divided by the sun and moon, by...

In 1856, Lieutenant Henry Aaron Bird makes a startling discovery: a speechless, shipwrecked young girl, living a feral existence on a remote Pacific island. When he exhibits her as a “wild girl” in the chaotic sprawl of early San Francisco, this golden-haired child without a past will be seen by the populace as a scientific curiosity, a titillating image of female savagery, or, for many, a symbol of the unspoiled body of that young country. For Bird, she is a fragile ward in need of protection, whom he keeps drugged and confined when not using her to further his reputation. But...

Middle-age metabolism. If there is a more ferocious and vindictive beast that can be encountered in the autumn of life, I pray I never encounter it. The cruel markers of bodily decline in the infancy of old age accumulate like interest on a bad 2008 loan, drowning the borrower in corporal compounding interest: sore backs without cause, mottled vision and poor hearing, the augmenting allure of a midday nap. One day, we travelers of middle age awaken to discover all the nagging advice about stretching, sun block, and eating right was grounded in something resembling sound medical advice. Early...

In the age of modernity, we find ourselves confronting a familiar affliction: bleakness. Our lives are marked by disillusionment. We doom-scroll, our eyes glazed over, while once useful dopamine receptors quietly shoot their last remaining endorphins. The YouTube rabbit hole is not so much an experience in enjoyment as much as it is a reflex of our current era. We watch videos of others cosplaying luxurious livelihoods all while sitting in a darkened room hoping for something more. And then what few icons we may look to as heroes the world often tells us are evil. To put it simply: in the era...

When in November of 1849 Charlotte Brontë sent the gift of her second novel to the writer Harriet Martineau, she enclosed a note, writing that “Currer Bell offers a copy of Shirley to Miss Martineau’s acceptance, in acknowledgement of the pleasure and profit she”—then stopped, drawing a line through “she” and replacing it with “he” before continuing. Martineau, like her friend Elizabeth Gaskell, already doubted that Currer Bell was a man, claiming that passages in Jane Eyre about sewing could only have been written by a woman, “or an...

Somewhere on the southern edge of Greece, on the island of Rhodes, a tall man with a sunburned face and a body as if sculpted by centuries of salt and wind stood at the helm of a little, ridiculous-looking steel boat called Yellow Submarine, advertising rides to children. Having missed all the other regular ferries, I decided to board it. 'I came this far,' he said with a grin, 'because I'm escaping from my wife.' Then he turned to my Ukrainian friend, who fears boats but not Russian bombs, as she froze at the dock while six-year-olds jumped aboard. The captain caught her hesitation, pointed...

By all accounts, the new Superman film has been a major success. Released on July 11, 2025, it grossed $122 million on its opening weekend, marking the biggest debut ever for a standalone Superman movie. Still, the film has sparked debate after director James Gunn described it as a story about immigration. “I mean, Superman is the story of America — an immigrant that came from other places and populated the country,” he said. As a permanent resident who first came here as a student, I would go one step further: The story of Superman...

David Gergen was the right kind of fellow. Born in 1942 in Durham, North Carolina, his father chaired the mathematics department at Duke University, and served as director of a research office affiliated with the U.S. Army. As an undergraduate at Yale University, Gergen was regarded as a “likeable, well-informed guy,” according to a fellow member of Manuscript, his senior society. He served as managing editor of the Yale Daily News, producing articles and commentary that were “intended to make the system’s manifest good even better.” In 1967, he earned a law...

I was two years into college when I picked up the book “Real Education” by the much-maligned conservative Charles Murray. Even after the roughly 17 years since its publication, I found that the book surprisingly offered an educational perspective more conducive to student success than the more recent “College for All” movement I was surrounded by growing up.   In his book, Murray centers his discussion around four educational truths: ·       Academic ability...

The instruments of darkness tell us truths ~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth Preface Paterson, NJ Paterson is often described as physically static; a time warp rooted by a skyline of once vital mills. Some are brick and some are sandstone and all of them are vacant. Urban revitalization and other missions to lift this once great manufacturing hub, this mighty producer of silk, have been fitful. What has always anchored the city—its beating, iconic heart—are the Great Falls of the Passaic River. The falls are wonderous. They were both muse and motivation sparking Alexander...

Last year, Charli XCX lit a neon-green fire under the pop world with Brat — a brash, chaotic album that redefined what pop could sound like in 2024. The summer became dominated by the British singer’s viral success, seeping into the mainstream of American politics and everyday life. This summer, a thoughtful new star opens up the Brat universe to a broader audience: Addison Rae. Known first as a TikTok star, Rae spent the past year making the case that she’s more than a viral personality. With her belting scream on a remix of ‘Von...

Paterson, New Jersey, 1979: Jamie Palmieri is an up-and-coming patrol officer, three years out of the academy and frustrated with his slow rise to detective. That all changes one frigid night in January, when a double homicide at a local bar leaves the owner and a young woman dead. In the wake of the Rubin "Hurricane" Carter proceedings and the city's lingering distrust for the police, Jamie is told to expect a "no one saw a thing" investigation. But as Jamie traces a series of small leads, he's sent on a path where the tables turn suddenly - with the still-unknown killer now stalking Jamie...

On a sunny day in Alexandria’s historic Parker-Gray neighborhood, I knock on the door of a large brick house painted yellow with green trim. “You’re right on time,” says R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. His home is less than a mile from the banks of the Potomac River and only a few blocks from the offices of The American Spectator, the magazine Tyrrell founded in 1967. Dressed in khakis and brown tassel loafers, the pocket square a silken plume rising from the breast of his navy-blue blazer, Tyrrell motions past the sitting room to his library, where a large portrait of...