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
Art and Culture
A collection of 721 posts
Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part II: Fanaticism and Failure (1966–2022)
After half a decade of critical adulation, Godard’s career slumped into doctrinaire Maoism, bitterness, incomprehensibility, and irrelevance. It never recovered.
Charlotte Allen
· 36 min read
Desire and Ambition
Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.
Brad Strotten
· 11 min read
Jean-Luc Godard in Retrospect Part I: Abstraction Hero (1930–65)
A brief five-year period produced nearly all the Godard movies that film aficionados still remember, but even these celebrated works have dated poorly.
Charlotte Allen
· 33 min read
The Delta Variant
John Landis’s 1978 comedy classic ‘Animal House’ is a time capsule from an era when humor and campus politics were very different.
George Case
· 9 min read
Under Attila’s Gaze
In the ninth instalment of ‘The So-Called Dark Ages,’ Herbert Bushman describes a Roman diplomat’s famous fifth-century journey into the heart of Hunnic territory.
Herbert Bushman
· 28 min read
Against Agency
Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.
Marilyn Simon
· 8 min read
Sex and Smashed Steel
A look back at J.G. Ballard's ‘Crash’—one of the the 20th century’s greatest and most disturbingly prophetic novels.
Benjamin Kerstein
· 25 min read
Narcissism for All
Forty-five years ago, Christopher Lasch identified what has become a defining feature of modern activism—“the ever-present, neurotic need to be recognized and affirmed.”
Julia Friedman
· 10 min read
Mystic Without a Church
Werner Herzog’s new memoir provides a look back on the magisterial and occasionally maddening career of a cinematic visionary.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai
· 17 min read
Where Do Works of Art Belong?
An Artist's Response to James Kierstead’s “The Elgin Marbles: Playing for Keeps"
Megan Gafford
· 12 min read
93 Years of Shatner
A tribute to an irrepressible TV star’s ability to live long and prosper.
Kevin Mims
· 21 min read
Is G Flip A Woman?
If we siphon off all female diversity into categories like 'non-binary' we narrow the idea of what it means to be a woman.
Holly Lawford-Smith
· 7 min read
The Metamodern Shift in the Culture Wars
Metamodernism conveys the experience of living in a world in which we feel comfortable oscillating between different perspectives.
Peter Clarke
· 6 min read
An Unlikely Cinematic Triumph
Efforts to produce a worthy film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ seemed doomed to failure—until Denis Villeneuve gave us his two-part blockbuster.
Allan Stratton
· 14 min read