The Man Who Wasn’t There
Richard Morton Jack’s comprehensive new biography of Nick Drake offers a glimpse of a brilliant but troubled soul.
Matt Hanson
· 10 min read
Abiding Legends
Richard Matheson, George R. Stewart, and the birth of the Calipocalypse.
Kevin Mims
· 23 min read
Art over Man: The Roger Waters Test Case
When we create art, we are our best selves, better than the selves we are outside of art.
Thomas P. Balazs
· 9 min read
The Birth of Quebec
In the twentieth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Samuel de Champlain and Récollet missionaries established a fledgling French colony in what we now call Quebec City.
Greg Koabel
· 17 min read
‘Superintelligence,’ Ten Years On
AI catastrophe is easy to imagine, but a lot has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to pan out.
Sean Welsh
· 12 min read
England’s Daydreaming
Robyn Hitchcock’s new memoir takes us back to 1967—a year the British singer-songwriter never outgrew.
Dave Thompson
· 12 min read
France’s Founding Fathers: A Review of ‘House of Lilies’
In a new book, Justine Firnhaber-Baker tells the story of the Capetian dynasty (987–1328), whose rulers stitched a set of medieval duchies and counties into a single kingdom.
Charlotte Allen
· 20 min read
The Roots of Progressive Radicalism: Nellie Bowles vs. Musa al-Gharbi
In two new books, a journalist and an academic offer competing explanations for the extremist ideological tendencies within left-wing cultural, academic, activist, and political institutions.
Jonathan Kay
· 16 min read
Recycling Plastic Is a Dangerous Waste of Time
The recycling industry—and the world at large—has yet to fully reckon with a bombshell study that dropped last year.
Frank Celia
· 17 min read
Too Much Chocolate
Fifty years of Robert Cormier’s “classic” young-adult novel is more than enough.
Kevin Mims
· 9 min read
Roger Corman: A Filmmaker’s Filmmaker
An account of all the lives Corman touched, the careers he helped to jump-start, and the genres he pioneered would fill several books.
Jacob Bielecki
· 12 min read
George Orwell’s Error
Had he lived long enough to witness the fruits of liberal capitalism, perhaps Orwell would finally have accepted the failure of socialism.
Christopher J. Snowdon
· 13 min read
Blood, Sweat, and Gasoline
The story of Hollywood’s most unlikely blockbuster franchise, Mad Max.
Allan Stratton
· 21 min read
The Perfect Trifecta
The new attention economy will always privilege the lowest common denominator in performance art, as it does in everything else.
Julia Friedman
· 8 min read
Unbowed but Gravely Wounded
Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, ‘Knife,’ describes the assassination attempt its author survived and offers a moving contemplation of mortality.
Paul Berman
· 15 min read