Narrated

Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida

How French Intellectuals Ruined the West

Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained.

7 May 2024 · 17 min read

A black and white portrait of Henry Wallace with a background of colourful Soviet-era stamps.

Misadventures of a Stalinist Stooge

Benn Steil’s engrossing new biography of Henry A. Wallace is a timely cautionary tale and a masterpiece of 20th-century American history.

Ronald Radosh

25 Apr 2024 · 23 min read

A still of Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Leaud in Le Chinoise. They are sitting at a table reading and smoking cigarettes.

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)

After half a decade of critical adulation, Godard’s career slumped into doctrinaire Maoism, bitterness, incomprehensibility, and irrelevance. It never recovered.

Charlotte Allen

16 Apr 2024 · 36 min read

A woman and two men, snapping their fingers. Image from Band à Part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964)

Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)

A brief five-year period produced nearly all the Godard movies that film aficionados still remember, but even these celebrated works have dated poorly.

Charlotte Allen

10 Apr 2024 · 33 min read

The author, pictured on a bridge in Amsterdam, in 1993, a few weeks before she was attacked.

Toward Ruin or Recovery?

The modern feminist response to rape is failing women, and it is failing victims of rape most of all.

Larissa Phillips

20 Mar 2024 · 34 min read

History Matters

A restoration of history, in all its complexity, is critical to escaping the polarized, rigid, and often insane political environment we now inhabit.

Joel Kotkin

14 Sep 2023 · 15 min read

Ending the Hunger Games

New pharmaceuticals appear to offer a genuine solution to the problem of excess appetite, that uncontrollable urge to eat more than we need to that keeps so many of us fat.