Strong Opinions
When critics start issuing dictates, they end up excluding broad swathes of art and culture as well as whole areas of human experience.
Stephen Akey
· 10 min read
Art & Culture
A collection of 855 posts
Why Soccer Is Boring
How the beautiful game convinced the world that boredom is sophistication.
Robert Lynch
· 10 min read
The Truth Does Not Belong to Eight Billion People
Total disclosure, as Spielberg imagines it, is a beautiful thing to watch. It is also a fantasy.
Yaniv Regev
· 6 min read
Dangerous Liaisons and the #MeToo Wars
Nearly 250 years on, Laclos’s novel of seduction and treachery continues to scandalise.
Cathy Young
· 21 min read
The Art of Looking
A tribute to David Hockney (1937–2026).
Julia Friedman
· 10 min read
Colbert and Cancellation
The #CancelColbert saga in 2014 established the paradigm for countless hashtag controversies that followed.
Kevin Mahnken
· 6 min read
Lists, Damn Lists, and Critical Correctness
Love them or hate them, lists are now firmly established—along with cats and porn—among the apex predators of the modern internet.
Dave Thompson
· 12 min read
Never Neverland
The new Michael Jackson biopic and the campaign to whitewash the King of Pop’s reputation.
Andrew Hammel
· 32 min read
Homeric Heresies
Outrage over a black Helen of Troy misunderstands the long Western tradition of radically reinventing classical myths.
Cathy Young
· 11 min read
A Man for All Seasons
Susan Owens’s handsome new monograph reconsiders the life and career of the English landscape painter John Constable.
Graham Daseler
· 9 min read
A Deceitful Propaganda Campaign Marketed as a ‘Prank’
CBC-funded TV producers using fake names are ambushing Canadians who take a positive view of their country—including an 82-year-old Ontario grandfather who invited the film crew into his home.
Jonathan Kay
· 10 min read
Frampton Comes Alive! at Fifty
The improbable story of rock’s greatest live album.
Jacob Bielecki
· 13 min read
Staring at the Sea
It would be very difficult to make a great film from a source as flawed as Camus’s novel, but Ozon has managed to make a very good one.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 19 min read
In the Air Tonight
How Phil Collins created the pop sound that defined the 1980s.
Jacob Bielecki
· 12 min read
Infinite Ingenuity: Andy Weir’s Optimistic Vision in ‘Project Hail Mary’
The new film 'Project Hail Mary' based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel, celebrates scientific problem-solving on a cosmic scale. There are striking parallels with David Deutsch's radical optimism.
Iona Italia
· 14 min read