Arts and Culture - Quillette

Quillette Cetera Episode 19: The Elephant Man in an Era of Cancel Culture

Crowds love the irreverence of The Marvellous Elephant Man Musical, but activists want it boycotted.

Zoe Booth

2 Oct 2023 · 1 min read

Narcissism and Fraudulence

Intensive con artistry may be a narcissistic strategy for the avoidance of self-knowledge.

Anthony Eagan

12 Nov 2022 · 12 min read

Remix and Float Downstream

Giles Martin has reinvigorated the Beatles’ masterpiece, a record brimming with ideas, confidence, and insouciant courage.

Christopher J. Snowdon

8 Nov 2022 · 11 min read

French Nobels

Dynamite, literature, and the rise of the engaged intellectual.

Robert Zaretsky

30 Oct 2022 · 9 min read

FDR and the Holocaust

A widely praised new series by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein distorts the historical record to rehabilitate a flawed US president.

Ronald Radosh

27 Oct 2022 · 25 min read

Poetic Justice

How an octogenarian artist defied curatorial bureaucracy.

Julia Friedman

25 Oct 2022 · 8 min read

A Strange and Brutal Country

Adam Curtis’s new BBC series provides a unique insight into Russia’s late-twentieth-century collapse.

Christopher J. Snowdon

24 Oct 2022 · 6 min read

The Real Star of MAS*H

A personal tribute to the overlooked genius of writer W.C. Heinz.

Kevin Mims

11 Oct 2022 · 13 min read

Peter Straub, 1943–2022

Farewell to another of the Big Six novelists from the Golden Age of American horror fiction.

Kevin Mims

12 Sep 2022 · 13 min read

The Striver’s Curse

A review of Arthur C. Brooks’s new book, ‘From Strength to Strength.’

Ari David Blaff

16 Aug 2022 · 6 min read

Go Ask Beatrice: Notes on a Dishonest Decade

An outstanding new book tells the story of a wildly successful literary hoax. But it was just one of many.

Kevin Mims

2 Aug 2022 · 28 min read

Guilty and Insane

Dissociative Identity Disorder and the riddle of human responsibility.

Daniel Kriegman

29 Jul 2022 · 19 min read

Lost Soul Behind Bars

The untold story of Upheaval, a prison band that recorded one of the most sought-after soul singles of the 1970s.

Max Wilson

28 Jul 2022 · 21 min read

The Western Reinvented. Again.

It has been 30 years since a Western last won the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards. That was in 1992 and the film was Unforgiven [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/], directed by Clint Eastwood, who also starred in it alongside Morgan Freeman, Gene Hackman, and Richard Harris.

Kevin Mims

25 Mar 2022 · 8 min read

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts—A Review

A review of Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts [https://amzn.to/3zNvGiO] by Jed Perl. Knopf, 176 pages. (January, 2022) Plug “relevance” into the search field of the website for Artforum, and 16 results pop up from 2021 alone. Relevance is the dominant aesthetic criterion of our

Franklin Einspruch

12 Jan 2022 · 7 min read

Quillette Cetera Episode 19: The Elephant Man in an Era of Cancel Culture

Narcissism and Fraudulence

Remix and Float Downstream

French Nobels

FDR and the Holocaust

Poetic Justice

A Strange and Brutal Country

The Real Star of M*A*S*H

Peter Straub, 1943–2022

The Striver’s Curse

Go Ask Beatrice: Notes on a Dishonest Decade

Guilty and Insane

Lost Soul Behind Bars

The Western Reinvented. Again.

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts—A Review

The Real Star of MAS*H