A Country in the Making
Sean Penn’s surprising new documentary explores “extreme history” in war-torn Ukraine.
Brian Stewart
· 6 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 718 posts
The Communication Revolution
Like the first iPhone, Gutenberg’s Bible opened up avenues of development that entrepreneurs have been exploiting ever since.
James Hannam
· 10 min read
Champlain Gives It Another Go
In the twelfth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes France’s halting efforts to create a permanent Canadian settlement in the early 1600s.
Greg Koabel
· 30 min read
‘Augie March’ Turns 70
An Interview with Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader.
Riley Moore
· 12 min read
Strange New Sci Fi
If truth is the first casualty of war, then perhaps good fiction is the first casualty of culture war.
Johnny Schmidt
· 17 min read
Huns to the North. Romans to the South
In the second instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ podcaster Herbert Bushman describes the events that sparked the fateful Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire.
Herbert Bushman
· 25 min read
Charles Darwin: The Best Scientist-Writer of All Time
The Voyage of the Beagle is a literary masterpiece, as well as a scientific one.
Lawrence M. Krauss
· 9 min read
History Matters
A restoration of history, in all its complexity, is critical to escaping the polarized, rigid, and often insane political environment we now inhabit.
Joel Kotkin
· 16 min read
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss
The uproar over a fleeting outburst of uninhibited joy is ludicrous.
Heather Mac Donald
· 9 min read
A Cartographer for the Ages
In the eleventh instalment of his series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes how Samuel de Champlain fundamentally redirected France’s transatlantic colonial project
Greg Koabel
· 22 min read
Israel’s Everywoman at War
Helen Mirren’s Golda Meir offers a profile of greatness in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Michael Oren
· 16 min read
Our Lost Classical Learning
The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past.
Brian Kaller
· 7 min read
But is it a Bernini? A Tale of Contested Identity in the Art World
How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps.
Jonathan Salem-Wiseman
· 11 min read
Remembering ‘Exodus’
A perennially controversial bestseller turns 65.
Kevin Mims
· 18 min read
Misreading Middle-Earth: Tolkien and the Contemporary Reader
Fantasy is more popular than ever, and this is the direct consequence of Tolkien’s success. But the genre has survived by adapting, and in an age of secularism, that process has involved evaporating the religious themes Tolkien cared about so deeply.
Josh Allan
· 10 min read