Quillette (Page 1)

Two firefighters, next to a fire truck, by the side of a highway, across from a blaze.

Three Hard Truths About California’s Fire Crisis

Climate change makes fires more dangerous. Government competence matters. And preventing catastrophic fires requires expensive, unpopular measures.

Claire Lehmann

12 Jan 2025 · 7 min read

How Santa Ana Winds Are Fuelling the Deadly fires in LA

It’s very hard to extinguish a fire under these conditions.

Jon Keeley

10 Jan 2025 · 4 min read

A portrait of a beautiful young Chinese actress with a fringe.

A Perfectly Charming Chinese Girl

Against long odds and in the face of exclusionary casting, Anna May Wong bequeathed us an extraordinary cinematic legacy.

Thomas Doherty

9 Jan 2025 · 11 min read

The photo shows a young Dylan in stetson and cowboy outfit in a saloon.

Unmasked and Anonymous

A brief history of Bob Dylan on screen.

Benjamin Kerstein

1 Jan 2025 · 18 min read

Ghosts of Electricity

The magisterial incomprehensibility of Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna.’

Thomas Larson

30 Dec 2024 · 8 min read

Timothee Chalamet is a white man in his 20s, at a microphone, wearing dark glasses, with curly brown ha

Printing the Legend

The naysayers are dead wrong about James Mangold’s remarkable new film about Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.

Ronald Radosh

26 Dec 2024 · 15 min read

Luigi Mangione is a man in his twenties with dark hair. He wears an orange jumpsuit and bears his teeth in a grimace.

Moral Permission to Murder

Dostoevsky and the assassination of Brian Thompson.

Julia Friedman / David Hawkes

23 Dec 2024 · 6 min read

A cartoon black cat with big eyes on what looks like a gondola in Venice.

The Eerie Beauty of ‘Flow’

Gints Zilbalodis’s beautiful dystopian story feels like the start of a new era in cinema, or at least the invitation to one.

Roy Wayne Meredith III

4 Dec 2024 · 5 min read

An actor in Roman costume with a gold crown. He is a man in his 50s, blonde hair, blue eyes wearing purple and gold.

Savage Entertainment

A new version of Tinto Brass and Bob Guccione’s notorious 1979 film ‘Caligula’ provides a valuable record of one of the most fascinating disasters in cinema history.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

14 Nov 2024 · 30 min read

Adam Driver as Caesar Catilina and Nathalie Emmanuel as Julia Cicero.

Megalopolis: Bloated, Outré—and Brilliant

Like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, it’s chaos alright—but it’s a dazzling chaos.

Ralph Leonard

13 Nov 2024 · 8 min read

Adam Driver is a white man in his early 40s.

Decline and Folly

‘Megalopolis’ and the rise and fall of Francis Ford Coppola.

Oliver Jia

13 Nov 2024 · 13 min read

A family photo collage featuring a happy girl toddler in a summer dress and black and white photos.

The Baby Gate. A Memoir.

So that’s how a fatherhood ends. A few UPCs, like those you find on packs of toilet tissue, delivered via email.

Steve Salerno

8 Nov 2024 · 23 min read

Michael J. Fox in Bright Lights, Big City, in a suit, at a restaurant, talking to an older man, holding wine.

‘Bright Lights, Big City’ at Forty

Jay McInerney’s debut novel was the first work of fiction to explore yuppie culture, and its success changed American publishing.

Kevin Mims

6 Nov 2024 · 16 min read

A creepy blurred photo of a person's face and a furry hood.

The Psychologisation Pandemic

Denial of “invisible” suffering is bad science and worse ethics.

Samuel Kronen

4 Nov 2024 · 18 min read

A woman in a yellow coat stands in front of a row of lockers. She is attractive, fifties, carries an expensive handbag.

All Hail the New Flesh

For all its decorative asides about predatory male sexuality, ‘The Substance’ is most coherently understood as a morality tale about the folly of feminist illusions.

Charlotte Allen

1 Nov 2024 · 11 min read