Blood, Sweat, and Gasoline
The story of Hollywood’s most unlikely blockbuster franchise, Mad Max.
Allan Stratton
· 21 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 735 posts
The Perfect Trifecta
The new attention economy will always privilege the lowest common denominator in performance art, as it does in everything else.
Julia Friedman
· 8 min read
Unbowed but Gravely Wounded
Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, ‘Knife,’ describes the assassination attempt its author survived and offers a moving contemplation of mortality.
Paul Berman
· 15 min read
The Problem with Utopias
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
Ewan Morrison
· 15 min read
Imposing Order on Grief
Rob Henderson's 'Troubled' is a disjointed book, but provides valuable testimony to the importance of a stable childhood.
Iona Italia
· 23 min read
A History of Stunts
Ryan Gosling’s new film is a love letter to an under-appreciated art.
Allan Stratton
· 9 min read
Analyst or Moralist?
The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.
James Jackson
· 11 min read
Less Than Half ‘A Man in Full’
One of US television’s most experienced and talented writers has made a mess of Tom Wolfe’s second novel.
Kevin Mims
· 24 min read
Showdown in Champagne
In the tenth instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ Herbert Bushman describes the epic 451 C.E. battle that pitted Attila the Hun against Gaul’s Roman and Gothic defenders.
Herbert Bushman
· 18 min read
The Religious Instinct in a Godless World
The religious urge is born into nearly every child. And when we do not inherit a belief system, we build our own temples.
Megan Gafford
· 12 min read
How French Intellectuals Ruined the West
Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained.
Helen Pluckrose
· 18 min read
The Paranoid Style in Shakespeare Denialism
Against conspiracist trends, there is an obligation on defenders of a liberal society to uphold the integrity of its intellectual methods.
Oliver Kamm
· 25 min read
Disorder in Heaven
The end of greatness in heavyweight combat sports.
Alexander Blum
· 7 min read
The Wendat World
In the nineteenth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Indigenous societies greeted the French influx of the early seventeenth century.
Greg Koabel
· 23 min read
American Carnage
Alex Garland’s spectacular new film ‘Civil War’ is a warning of what can happen to democracies when civil society collapses.
Allan Stratton
· 7 min read