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
Chaucer’s Bawdy Broad More than six centuries after The Canterbury Tales first appeared, the Wife of Bath still has lessons to teach about love, sex, marriage, and—yes—feminism Charlotte Allen 20 Jun 2023 · 24 min read
Scenes from a Marriage In 2020, a British High Court judge ruled that actor Johnny Depp was probably a “wife beater.” Earlier this year, an American jury disagreed. Who got it right? Charlotte Allen 18 Jan 2023 · 70 min read
Didion in El Salvador There is a special kind of practical information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums. In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the Charlotte Allen 11 Feb 2022 · 16 min read
Brutal and Unreformed—Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ at 50 It is a luminous performance, and while David might have been the hero-protagonist of Straw Dogs, Amy is its doomed center—a prisoner of the primitive society in which she was raised. Charlotte Allen 15 Dec 2021 · 32 min read
Mailer and the Second Wavers “The Prisoner of Sex”—in both magazine and book form—was largely a baroque riposte to Kate Millett’s bestselling feminist polemic Sexual Politics. Charlotte Allen 22 Mar 2021 · 30 min read
Requiem for a Female Serial Killer—A Review Wuornos had maintained that all seven victims had become violent and either raped or threatened to rape her, and that she had killed them in self-defense. Charlotte Allen 8 Dec 2020 · 20 min read
Deception and Complicity—the Strange Case of Jessica Krug But the real scandal—not discussed much in the media—wasn’t Krug’s decade of duplicity. Charlotte Allen 25 Sep 2020 · 8 min read
Flannery O'Connor and the Ideological War on Literature What cancel culture has just mown down isn’t simply Flannery O’Connor or her works, but our ability to view them through any other lens except that of doctrine. Charlotte Allen 17 Aug 2020 · 13 min read
The Fight over Alternative Education Bartholet’s polemic is by no means simply directed at homeschooling all by itself. It is part of a larger—and relatively recent—specific animus among progressive academics and politicians against a range of alternatives to conventional public schooling Charlotte Allen 23 May 2020 · 16 min read
Higher Education's Medievalist Moral Panic Medievalists of Color promptly issued a statement of support, describing Ramboran-Olm as “a woman of color in an organization so dominated by whiteness that it has not yet ceased referring to itself by a name that attracts and empowers white supremacists.” Charlotte Allen 22 Oct 2019 · 13 min read
Tolkien—A Review The real-life Tolkien, who loathed trite allegory, would have cringed. Charlotte Allen 24 May 2019 · 7 min read
