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David Cameron's Big Lie
Cameron's was a career of vaulting ambition allied to utter mediocrity and the result is a 700 page forgettable memoir.
Helen Andrews
Gloriously devastating review from Theodore Dalrymple.
33h
The Debutante Ball in the Global Age of Instagram
Until the mid-90s, the newly rich attempted to assimilate by emulating the old families. They joined country clubs, sent their children to riding lessons and boarding schools, and set up foundation…
Helen Andrews
"One of the debutantes showed up with a tattoo of a sinking Mayflower on her right shoulder, just visible above her white strapless dress."
34h
Let us now praise famous lit bros
The "lit bros" — soft, emotionally manipulative man-children -- are the popular villains of the contemporary literary scene. Yet their heroes, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, were the leading figures of an entire generation of writers...
Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov
The former Poet Laureate of the United States, Nemerov gives us a lucid and precise twist on the commonplaces of everyday life. The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. "Howard Nemerov...
Helen Andrews
“These fruits of material progress have provided the leisure and the means for a level of spiritual values never before reached,” said President Eisenhower’s pastor in 1957, inspiring Howard Nemerov to write a poem about it. books.google.com/books?id=IEY5C… pic.twitter.com/W76k8kDJsJ
55h
The Strange Life of the Modlins
The world left their art behind, until a young man found a series of photographs blowing along a street in Spain.
The Medium Is the Mistake
James Poniewozik is the chief television critic of The New York Times, and his new book, Audience of One, tells a double story: the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of television. Poniewozik wants to show us that TV has everything to do with the...
The Resurrection of the Greatest Sci-Fi Writer You’ve Never Read
He was beloved by Neil Gaiman and Robert Jordan, and so good that he won a World Fantasy Award for a Christmas card. How did John M. Ford disappear?
Come to Me - Bogdan Rusev
A review, and links to other information about and reviews of Come to Me by Bogdan Rusev.
Classic Album Review: The Clash Strike a New Chord with London Calling
The Clash's game-changing masterpiece London Calling turns 40 later this year. Read Nick Burns' full classic album review.
Uruguay's detective of despair
A critic with the time and inclination could make his name proposing an epidemiological model of world literature, with disease vectors representing the way themes and stylistic tics migrate across continents, then mutate and adapt to their host...
'Porgy and Bess' and America, Then and Now
The Metropolitan Opera in New York is presenting George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess this season, and a couple of essays in the Playbill, by Matt Dobkin and by Helen Greenwald, remind us of an unusual feature of the opera, which is Gershwin’s...
Tell Me About Your "Sober Jobs" (And More, On Work in Recovery)
I'm working on a piece for America magazine about the role of work in 12-Step/recovery culture, and how recovery movements can reshape a Christian theology of work. As part of this project, I would really love to talk to anyone who's had a...
LRB · Thomas Meaney · Who’s your dance partner?: Europe inside Africa
The Sahara is one of the few places on earth no one has been foolish enough to try to conquer. There have, however, been attempts, over the centuries, to govern it. In Ghat, one of the last Libyan towns in the Fezzan before the desert takes over,...
Helen Andrews
The first half of this piece is excellent. Whoever paid to send Thomas Meaney to north Africa got their money's worth.
20d
The End of Brazilian History?
A new book by Perry Anderson masterfully recounts the rise and fall of the Brazilian Left. Where it goes wrong is its treatment of the Right.
How to Be an Anti-Intellectual
A lauded book about antiracism is wrong on its facts and in its assumptions.
Dechristianity by the numbers | Damian Thompson
In 1959, Lou Groen, president of the Cincinnati Restaurant Association, opened the first branch of McDonald’s in the area. Immediately he ran into a problem: sales of hamburgers dropped sharply every…
Against the Superhero Regime
In the Martin Scorsese and “Joker” controversies, hints of resistance to the rule of comic books.
Helen Andrews
Ross in top form on "the tragedy of a movie system that can only simulate grown-up art inside the comic-book machine."
26d
Q&A With Angelo Codevilla
No one runs America. That’s the terror and the beauty of American life in a nutshell, the answer to the secret of how 300 million people from many different places can live together between two oceans, sharing a future-oriented outlook that...
2
Helen Andrews
"The Roman patricians call these unfortunates 'clients.' Their relationship with their clients is precisely your relationship with the unfortunate and the poor... [Their] grievance serves your instrumental purpose. Their grievance is your happiness."
28d
The Inhospitable Wilderness of António Lobo Antunes’s “Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water”
Nick Burns wades into the “inhospitable wilderness” of António Lobo Antunes’s experimental new novel, "Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water."