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
Art and Culture
A collection of 841 posts
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
History Lessons from the Toronto Mob Targeting a 19th-Century Gay Icon
Allan Stratton
· 15 min read
How D.B. Cooper and the Golden Age of Air Piracy Changed Aviation Fiction
Frank Sinatra's “Come Fly With Me” was the best-selling album in the United States for five weeks in 1958, but the irony of its popularity (or, perhaps, the source of its aspirational appeal) is that practically none of us could take up the offer to "glide, starry-eyed&
Kevin Mims
· 33 min read
High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism—A Review
A review of High White Notes: The Rise and Fall of Gonzo Journalism by David S. Wills. Beatdom Books, 555 pages. (November 2021) I. In High White Notes, his riveting new biography of Hunter S. Thompson, journalist David S. Wills describes Thompson as America’s first rock star reporter and
Kevin Mims
· 26 min read
Does Christine Brown Deserve to Burn in Hell?
In the pitiless moral universe of writer-director Sam Raimi’s 2009 horror film ‘Drag Me to Hell,’ guilt isn’t easily absolved and debts must always be paid in the end.
Jamie Palmer
· 12 min read
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Meaning of Human Suffering
Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.
Samuel Kronen
· 27 min read
Cancelling the Beat Generation
Almost from its inception, the Beat Generation seemed to be doomed to failure. In and around Columbia University, a ragtag group of bohemians coalesced based upon an odd array of mutual interests. Two of them were homosexuals, one bisexual, and all were interested in drugs and subversive literature. William S.
David S. Wills
· 9 min read
Rocker Crocked. Pistol Shot.
To say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions.
Simon Evans
· 9 min read
Revisiting ‘Wake in Fright,’ A Peculiarly Australian Kind of Hell
Five decades after its release, Wake in Fright remains a brutally captivating reminder that modernity is just a thin veneer over the darker recesses of the human heart.
Ryan Anderson
· 16 min read
The Truth about Autogynephilia
Sexual tastes you do not share are inevitably hard to comprehend. But autogynephilia is especially so, since it is rare and even more rarely spoken of.
Helen Joyce
· 17 min read
Mrs. Dalloway: Secularism and Its Enchantments
Woolf’s depiction of these inner rhythms would be refined in the novels that followed—To the Lighthouse and The Waves—but Dalloway was the true birth of this form.
Jared Marcel Pollen
· 13 min read