The Wobblies’ Return
A lovingly restored 1979 film excavates the lost history of American radicalism.
Thomas Doherty
· 9 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 726 posts
Undiminished by Decadence
I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s and I’m happy to report that, for the most part, television and mainstream cinema today are orders of magnitude better than they were in my salad days.
Kevin Mims
· 15 min read
The End of War Poetry
Among literary forms, war poetry is unusual for having enjoyed a universally acknowledged and tightly defined golden age.
Simon Evans
· 9 min read
Art Is Not Therapy
Something is flattened when our understanding of art is asked to serve the logic of a medical diagnosis, which sees the messiness of the human condition as a malady to be cured.
Jasmine Hu-Hollingshead
· 11 min read
Get Ready for the Return of the Abortion Novel
The abortion novels that proliferated in the late 1960s were filled with characters who are forced by carelessness and circumstance to make the most agonizing of personal choices.
Kevin Mims
· 26 min read
Heading Into the Atom Age—Pat Frank’s Perpetually Relevant Novels
NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. British journalist Ed West recently published an excellent essay entitled “Children of Men Is Really Happening,” in which he tied together the shrinking fertility rate wreaking demographic havoc across the globe and the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, which is also wreaking havoc across
Kevin Mims
· 11 min read
Against De-Materialization: Tom Wolfe in the Age of NFTs
You cannot lose, you cannot win: the present includes the past and the future. ~Marshall McLuhan I In the summer of 1970, TV-Ontario filmed Tom Wolfe in conversation with Marshall McLuhan on the lawn of McLuhan’s home in Toronto’s Wychwood Park. Towards the end of their amicable chat,
Julia Friedman, David Hawkes
· 15 min read
The Transmogrification of Harvey Weinstein
I was a good friend of Harvey Weinstein during his early years as a concert promoter, before he became Harvey Weinstein, movie mogul. We subsequently drifted apart, and while Harvey went on to find astronomic success in Hollywood, I worked as the chief psychologist at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for
Daniel Kriegman
· 36 min read
Authentic Immediacy—A Tribute to the Political Fiction of Frederick Forsyth
When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative: The Union of
Kevin Mims
· 13 min read
“A Pleasure to Burn”: We Are Closer to Bradbury’s Dystopia Than Orwell’s or Huxley’s
For decades, it has been common to call authoritarian new laws, norms, or government actions “Orwellian.” In 1984, George Orwell so brilliantly portrayed a nightmarish future that his name became synonymous with almost anything one wishes to describe as oppressive. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, meanwhile, provided a rather
David S. Wills
· 9 min read
Didion in El Salvador
While Joan Didion felt compelled to write about Latin American culture and politics because everyone else was doing it, she didn’t understand them very well.
Charlotte Allen
· 17 min read
Fatal Vision: Joel Coen’s ‘Macbeth’
In Shakespeare’s play, the Weïrd Sisters undoubtedly spur Macbeth toward evil by tempting him toward his dark ambition.
Marilyn Simon
· 8 min read
Bitter Fruit: Marshall McLuhan and the Rise of Fake News
McLuhan’s phenomenal success stemmed from being in the right place at the right time.
Graham Majin
· 16 min read
The Schenker Controversy
History is complicated, people are complicated, and Schenker himself was a complex individual.
Timothy L. Jackson
· 21 min read
The Universal Structure of Storytelling
Storytelling is then—in every era and every culture—a dramatization of the everlasting war between the princesses and the tigers.
Jonathan Gottschall
· 11 min read