Culture

Of all the disturbing scenes in “Tár,” Todd Field’s movie about the downfall of a world-famous conductor, I was most haunted by a frame of the titular character laughing. Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is driving a young cellist named Olga…

Modern people simply suffer from a lack of time, so there is little time for leisure. But what to do if you want to go out, for example, to go to the cinema, but you are constantly busy? There is…

A woman, as it turns out, is actually a very difficult thing to define. Contra savvy conservative pundits, the meaning doesn’t just evade gender studies majors at Harvard but also straight white men, middle class women, and backwoods hillbillies. And…

Under Elon Musk’s chaotic first month of ownership, Twitter has seen twin exoduses. Last Wednesday, having already slashed nearly half of his staff, Musk abruptly e-mailed remaining employees an ultimatum: either stay at the company and commit to being “hardcore,”…

You may have noticed things look a bit different around here. Welcome to The American Conservative’s new website. For twenty years, TAC has been getting it right. As the American right was lining up to support a disastrous regime change…

If written today, “In Search of Lost Time” might well be an Internet novel. The Web has become the first port of call in any search for what we’ve once seen or even felt. It’s our externalized memory—in the never-fading…

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” the play that made Tom Stoppard’s name, in 1966, begins with a perfect stage image: Ros and Guil, those identikit functionaries borrowed from “Hamlet,” are passing the time by flipping coins. Their fate having been…

The photographs that Tina Barney calls “The Beginning” (which form the basis of a show at the Kasmin gallery through April 22nd) are set in a marina and on a golf course, in private pools and on broad summer lawns,…

No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, by Anthony Esolen, (Regnery: May 2022), 204 pages. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Heron, once called me a sexist. I had claimed that boys were better than girls at all…

On March 20, 2018, the spring equinox, I posted my first Instagram entry. My daughter, Jesse, had suggested that I open an account to distinguish mine from fraudulent ones soliciting in my name. Jesse also felt the platform would suit…