Category Culture

The writer-director hyphenate is the boon and the bug of independent filmmaking. Directors working with their own material are apt to create a more unified and personalized movie. But, because the writing of a script is mainly done at an…

It’s no surprise that we keep finding and building cool things. But the things that we find and build can still surprise us. 2022 was another year full of science and technology advances. It’s too soon to identify the most…

You would think that the most controversial claim made at the recent National Conservatism Conference—that the re-Christianization of American culture is the greatest hope for preserving the republic for future generations—would have been made by a Christian.  It wasn’t. It…

It’s hard to write both reasonably and responsibly about Olivia Wilde’s new film, “Don’t Worry Darling” (which opens Friday), because the movie gets much of its meaning from a plot twist, occurring midway through, that delightfully surprised me and that…

David Crosby, one of the most iconic and enduring voices of the nineteen-sixties, died last week, at the age of eighty-one. He was a founding member of the Byrds and of Crosby, Stills, and Nash (sometimes Crosby, Stills, Nash, and…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story The artist David Choe first became known for his graffiti in the streets of Los Angeles, where he painted edgy, expressionistic murals in a mode he calls “dirty style.” For years,…

In a dimly lit basement in the Cambridge University Library, a conservator recently removed two reddish-brown, leather-bound notebooks from a moisture-controlled glass display case. The notebooks—one labelled “B” and the other “C”—belonged to the nineteenth-century naturalist Charles Darwin. In the…

Nixon often divides the world into “thinkers” and “actors,” but she is an actor with a talent for channelling thinkers.PHOTOGRAPH BY CLAUDE MEDALE / CORBIS VIA GETTY When Cynthia Nixon was eleven years old, she auditioned for a workshop with…

Cy Twombly put so much effort into hiding his talents that it’s no wonder the art world took ages to appreciate them. Between the early fifties and his death, in 2011, he tried very hard to seem not to be…

Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, by Pete Hegseth with David Goodwin, (Broadside Books: June 2022), 288 pages. As we look at all the various forms of societal incompetence and unrest that currently afflict us, whether…