A collection of 768 posts
A "live" album recorded in 1975 saved both KISS and their label from bankruptcy, transforming a struggling cult band into a merchandising juggernaut—even though most of it wasn't actually live.
How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture.
A new book looks back on the making of Billy Wilder’s American classic.
Sex, money, murder, and the decline of Mike White’s wildly popular HBO series ‘The White Lotus.’
Danny Rensch never became the world’s greatest chess player. But his improbable rise from traumatised cult child to dot-com wunderkind represents an even more impressive achievement.
Jordan Castro’s new novel ‘Muscle Man’ offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism.
Angertainment capitalises on ordinary democratic conflict by selling it back to us as spectacle.
Art can’t give us immortality, but it can give us something better. It can give us what Roy Batty longed for: more life.
In his deliberately archaic new rendition of Homer’s epic, Jeffrey Duban takes a defiant stand against the modernisation of classical literature in defence of a disappearing tradition.
Van Morrison turns eighty.
The Beatles phenomenon is being mined for more meaning than the people at its centre ever intended to convey.
A new boxset edits out one of John Lennon’s most controversial songs.
Other plots may attract both right and left-wing authors, but successful geopolitical thrillers are always informed by a conservative view of the world.
Amid literary subcultures, competition has always been fierce and unrelenting and has become even more so in our age of elite overproduction. On social media, these embittered rivalries play out in public amid a chorus of backbiting worthy of Chekhov.
Love is transformative—and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is clear-sighted about the fact that that transformation can be for the worse.