Culture

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The rules of culture in the twenty-twenties are strange but consistent. One is that fame is a form of insanity. Another is that artists can be both ardently commercial and devoted…

I signed up for my London garden allotment so long ago that the application was by post and possibly in Linear B. In my borough of the city, there are about two hundred plots for just under three hundred thousand…

Early in the new movie “Bros,” our cranky hero, Bobby (Billy Eichner), a podcaster suffering from chronic relationship phobia, sits at his microphone and rants. “So, these big movie producers came to me and said, ‘We want you to write…

There is nothing more beautiful than beautiful and sensual poetry set to dynamic music. Today there are many musical performers, groups and bands that create really amazing songs and please the audience. But what to want, if you like the…

If you’ve made the trip to Columbus, Ohio for this year’s Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), you’ve either been vaccinated or tested. When you’re inside the convention center, you’re wearing a mask. You’ve also observed…

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, by Ronald Hutton, (Yale University Press: May 2022), 256 pages. Gerald Gardner was an old man with a great tuft of white hair on his head and another on his chin.…

In “Nuisance Bear,” the bears share space with the people who’ve come to see them, walking cautiously between parked vehicles, being watched and watching back. What’s a nature program without narration? The genre relies heavily on voice-overs to bridge the…

The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler, National Gallery of Art, until October 10, 2022 The partnership between Joanna Hiffernan (1839–1886) and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) in the first decade of the painter’s career created some of…

In the late twentieth century, the American psychic Jeane Dixon, nicknamed the Seeress of Washington, won a huge following after predicting, in a 1956 magazine article, that a man resembling John F. Kennedy would be elected President four years later—and…

We are living in an age of red-carpet ubiquity. Lately, the question of who will wear what on which award show step-and-repeat has become nearly as common as the question of who will take home a trophy. (The sixty-year-old Michelle…