Making Fiction Boring
The ideological capture of college writing programs has ushered in an age of didactic, anodyne, and tedious books.
Adam Szetela
· 14 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 829 posts
Ballad of a Song and Dance Man
An unorthodox new book by one of America’s finest nonfiction authors tries to make sense of Bob Dylan.
Ronald Radosh
· 20 min read
The Honour and the Duty
Yossi Cohen has written a bracing and lively memoir about his time as head of Mossad.
Michael M. Rosen
· 6 min read
Rewarding Rejectionism
A new book by two former peace processors makes clear that statehood was never the goal of the Palestinian cause.
Shany Mor
· 12 min read
Fifty Years of KISS: ALIVE!
A "live" album recorded in 1975 saved both KISS and their label from bankruptcy, transforming a struggling cult band into a merchandising juggernaut—even though most of it wasn't actually live.
Jacob Bielecki
· 17 min read
A Subterranean Celebration
How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture.
David S. Wills
· 13 min read
Out of the Past
A new book looks back on the making of Billy Wilder’s American classic.
Graham Daseler
· 11 min read
Seasons in the Sun
Sex, money, murder, and the decline of Mike White’s wildly popular HBO series ‘The White Lotus.’
Charlotte Allen
· 29 min read
Better Than Bobby Fischer
Danny Rensch never became the world’s greatest chess player. But his improbable rise from traumatised cult child to dot-com wunderkind represents an even more impressive achievement.
Jonathan Kay
· 15 min read
The Good War No More
Jon Lee Anderson’s powerful new book on Afghanistan reminds us that the justness of a cause is no guarantee of its success.
Brian Stewart
· 6 min read
Lifting Weights
Jordan Castro’s new novel ‘Muscle Man’ offers a wry and meme-literate vision of blokey intellectualism.
Brad Strotten
· 5 min read
Rage Is Now the Machine
Angertainment capitalises on ordinary democratic conflict by selling it back to us as spectacle.
George Case
· 7 min read
Art and The Search for Immortality
Art can’t give us immortality, but it can give us something better. It can give us what Roy Batty longed for: more life.
Angel Eduardo
· 4 min read
The Multipolarity Mirage
What realists like Emma Ashford deride as America’s “reactionary defence of the status quo” is in fact a prudent effort to preserve a world order of unparalleled value.
Brian Stewart
· 27 min read
Fragments Against the Ruins
In his deliberately archaic new rendition of Homer’s epic, Jeffrey Duban takes a defiant stand against the modernisation of classical literature in defence of a disappearing tradition.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 17 min read