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What Happened to Your Face?
One of the things Wittgenstein implies is that we don’t theorize the faces we see. I might talk of “reading” your face, but it isn’t like…
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a critic at large
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Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers
Since the fifteenth century, most adaptations of Homer have taken the form of translation, which has never been easy. Homer wrote a very…
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The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
Before ChatGPT, there was the Plot Robot, Auto-Beatnik, and a century’s worth of schemes for automating authorship. Source link
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The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event
America’s influence went beyond haberdashery. Several of the world’s leading revolutionaries had spent time in the country. The…
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St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It?
This revisionist view of Paul has reached a climax with Nina E. Livesey’s recent book, “The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary…
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The Unseen Work of One of Iran’s Greatest Filmmakers
For the director Mani Haghighi, his country’s rich cinematic tradition is a family affair. Source link
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How Arsenio Hall Shook Up Late Night
Late night isn’t just a time slot. It’s a concept, a temporal metaphor for what we can get away with under the cloak of night, when the…
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The Perverse, Tender Worlds of Paul Thomas Anderson
Early on, there are slow-moving but tense confrontations between Dodd and Freddie in which Hoffman and Phoenix appear to be competing over…
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The Sexologist Who Unlocked the Female Orgasm
Hite was not like other sexologists, with their academic affiliations and institutionally approved methods. She was not much like Alfred…
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How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News
St. Bride’s, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists’ church. Having weathered not a few disasters—the…
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When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills
Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268…
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The New York Shooting That Defined an Era
“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed…
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How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex
The latest and most vigorous addition to this genre is “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone” (Norton), by Quill Kukla, a…
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Is the Dictionary Done For?
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word…
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How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as…
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What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?
Still, Master Betty ruled the little province of Parnassus devoted to underage thespians until the advent of Shirley Temple—and it’s some…
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The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as…
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Pan-African Dreams, Post-Colonial Realities
Two new books, on Kwame Nkrumah’s promise and Idi Amin’s tyranny, capture the soaring hopes and bitter aftermath of Africa’s age of…
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Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book…
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The Autocrat of English Usage
In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part…
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What to Make of the Mother Who Made You
It is hard to overstate the literary impact, in 1997, of Arundhati Roy’s début novel, “The God of Small Things.” A family drama set in a…
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How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The…
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Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?
Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century…
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The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could…