Art and Culture - Quillette (Page 2)

McCartney at 80

Four score years of ordinary genius.

Christopher J. Snowdon

18 Jun 2022 · 22 min read

Has Olivia Manning’s ‘Fortunes of War’ Finally Found Its Moment?

The Ukrainian war has made Manning’s writing more relevant now than at any time since it was written.

Robin Ashenden

2 Jun 2022 · 11 min read

The Wobblies’ Return

A lovingly restored 1979 film excavates the lost history of American radicalism.

Thomas Doherty

1 Jun 2022 · 9 min read

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

20 May 2022 · 14 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

17 May 2022 · 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

12 May 2022 · 10 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

5 May 2022 · 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 [https://edwest.substack.com/p/children-of-men-is-really-happening?s=r] 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

Kevin Mims

22 Mar 2022 · 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 and David Hawkes

9 Mar 2022 · 14 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

20 Feb 2022 · 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 [https://www.amazon.

Kevin Mims

18 Feb 2022 · 12 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 [https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934/], 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

David S. Wills

12 Feb 2022 · 9 min read

Didion in El Salvador

There is a special kind of practical information that the visitor to El Salvador acquires immediately, the way visitors to other places acquire information about the currency rates, the hours for the museums. In El Salvador one learns that vultures go first for the soft tissue, for the eyes, the

Charlotte Allen

11 Feb 2022 · 16 min read

Fatal Vision: Joel Coen’s ‘Macbeth’

“I am in this earthly world, where to do harm / Is often laudable, to do good / Sometime accounted dangerous folly.” So says Lady Macduff in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Moments later, she and her entire family—innocents all—are slaughtered. The triumph of Joel Coen’s film adaptation is that it

Marilyn Simon

19 Jan 2022 · 7 min read

Bitter Fruit: Marshall McLuhan and the Rise of Fake News

In Orson Welles’s classic movie Citizen Kane [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033467/], the eponymous hero publishes a statement of principles on the front page of his newspaper, “I’ll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. ... They're going

Graham Majin

18 Jan 2022 · 15 min read