Holding Out for a Hero
From Achilles to Anakin Skywalker, the messiah myth has evolved from religious prophecy to cautionary tale.
Stewart Slater
· 12 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 773 posts
The Feminist, the Filmmaker, and the Führer
Susan Sontag’s 1974 essay about Leni Riefenstahl and fascist aesthetics displayed the critic at her most stiflingly moralistic and aristocratic.
Annalisa Zox-Weaver
· 25 min read
I Will Find a City
Jonathan Gould’s new Talking Heads biography recalls a once-thriving and now disintegrating independent media network that could elevate eccentrics with potential.
Matt Hanson
· 7 min read
Making Fiction Boring
The ideological capture of college writing programs has ushered in an age of didactic, anodyne, and tedious books.
Adam Szetela
· 14 min read
Ballad of a Song and Dance Man
An unorthodox new book by one of America’s finest nonfiction authors tries to make sense of Bob Dylan.
Ronald Radosh
· 19 min read
Fifty Years of KISS: ALIVE!
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.
Jacob Bielecki
· 17 min read
A Subterranean Celebration
How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture.
David S. Wills
· 13 min read
Out of the Past
A new book looks back on the making of Billy Wilder’s American classic.
Graham Daseler
· 11 min read
Seasons in the Sun
Sex, money, murder, and the decline of Mike White’s wildly popular HBO series ‘The White Lotus.’
Charlotte Allen
· 29 min read
Better Than Bobby Fischer
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.
Jonathan Kay
· 15 min read
Lifting Weights
Jordan Castro’s new novel ‘Muscle Man’ offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism.
Brad Strotten
· 5 min read
Rage Is Now the Machine
Angertainment capitalises on ordinary democratic conflict by selling it back to us as spectacle.
George Case
· 7 min read
Art and The Search for Immortality
Art can’t give us immortality, but it can give us something better. It can give us what Roy Batty longed for: more life.
Angel Eduardo
· 4 min read
Fragments Against the Ruins
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.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 17 min read
Beautiful Visions
Van Morrison turns eighty.
David Cohen
· 11 min read