Category Culture

Bravo in the Flesh

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Thousands of romantics, driven to the desert. This year, the reality-television network Bravo held its third annual fan conference, BravoCon, in Las Vegas, dumping the Javits Center, its previous locale, for…

The Cassette-Tape Revolution

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story For a middle-school music-appreciation class in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the late nineteen-seventies, our teacher asked each of us to bring in a piece of recorded music to play…

Siskel, Ebert, and the Secret of Criticism

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, who went on the air together for the first time in 1975, have been off the air for a long time now. Siskel died in 1999,…

The Freedom to See Rome Anew

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story A few years back, I returned from a trip to Rome with a coffee-table book of photographs of the city taken over the decades. In the months that followed, I leafed…

Mastery and Command – The American Conservative

Peter Weir’s cult classic suggests that something is lost in a world without hierarchy. When Robert Peel was appointed Under-Secretary for war and the colonies for Great Britain in 1810, in the middle of the greatest war it had seen,…