A collection of 71 posts
In the age of the smartphone, people ‘read’ more than ever before. But the reading of books, newspapers, and other long-form content has fallen dramatically—with detrimental effects for society.
English departments are increasingly ignoring the great works of the past, in favour of popular literary works that reflect activist themes and nonliterary works of political and social theory.
American individualism and the western, from Fred Zinnemann and John Ford to Larry McMurtry and Taylor Sheridan.
A look back at the 20th century’s most entertaining literary spat—one of the few such encounters that Orwell emphatically lost.
Homer’s epic provides a window on to a strange, paradoxical, fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar.
When critics start issuing dictates, they end up excluding broad swathes of art and culture as well as whole areas of human experience.
Prescient about the possibility of machine-generated writing, George Orwell’s life and work offer a deeper warning about the LLM era.
Why art and science serve different ends.
Emerald Fennell’s misbegotten adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ destroys the very structure of Emily Brontë’s classic story.
It appears that people now find comfort in the idea that the life of even the greatest of writers is no more satisfying than their own.
The century-old moral panics and persecutions by Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice are echoed today by cancellation campaigns from the moralistic Left and Right.
What the Adelaide Writers’ Week fiasco reveals about the moral economy of cultural elites.
What we can learn from the moral and literary failings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and James Baldwin.
The homogenisation of culture begins with the loss of language.
The ideological capture of college writing programs has ushered in an age of didactic, anodyne, and tedious books.