A collection of 209 posts
Maus was important to my life, but there's nothing wrong with protecting kids from encountering the world’s worst horrors before they are old enough to understand them.
Few novels become institutions, to have departments rigged up around them, whole constituencies and spheres of scholarship, as works of lifelong study, fascination and confusion. Ulysses, whose publication centenary will be observed on February 2nd, is one such book. Like Marx’s Kapital, Joyce’s door-stopping opus has kept academics
French conservative radio host Éric Zemmour is mounting a presidential run, seeking to steal the mantle of right-wing populism from Marine Le Pen. Not only does the 63-year-old firebrand want to limit the number of immigrants who can come to France—a standard campaign promise for politicians of this type—
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&
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
Americans turned on their radios, department stores set up loudspeakers, and judges suspended trials so that everyone in the courtroom could hear what Francis was about to say.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior.
So sexual conflict is pervasive, and the evolutionary perspective adds a lot of clarity to where and why men and women get into conflict and the particular manifestations it takes in the human case.
The world of literature has expanded its horizons in recent decades, and the quality of writing from voices that may not have been published in decades past is something for which we should be grateful.
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.
I. On April 18th of this year, Blake Bailey, 58, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, was abruptly dropped by his literary agency, the Story Company. His book had been published on April 6th, and climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. But then allegations emerged that while
In the 1980s, when political correctness was slowly brewing in parts of academia, Isaac Asimov claimed democracy was under attack.
Chastising the followers of Marx for ignoring workers’ actual experiences, Weil was almost a nominalist, and she awaited insights, as opposed to going in search of them.
The whole was something closer to verbal jazz.
Living under a totalitarian regime one knows censorship in and out. One can smell it from far away and I smell it in this terror of political correctness—or, if we turn it around, in the danger of expressing different, unpopular views.