Category Culture

“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…

Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story On Wednesday, one of the great American voices—gritty, vehement, tender, and red-hot, containing, somehow, both the entire history and future of rock and roll—went silent. Tina Turner, who was born Anna…

The new documentary “I Love You, You Hate Me” uses Barney to examine a broader phenomenon.Photograph by Vinnie Zuffante / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty  What made Barney, the purple dinosaur and nineties kids’-TV sensation, so infuriatingly loathsome? Was it…

A curious aspect of today’s America is its combination of wealth and ugliness. In the past, money usually led to beauty: to classical, baroque, and art deco buildings, to the music of Biber, C.P.E. Bach, and Boccherini, to the art…

Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R.V. Young, (Catholic University of America Press: June 2022), 280 pages. “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express…

Jean-Marie Straub, one of the great filmmakers of the French New Wave and one of the most secretly powerful influences in the modern cinema, died on Sunday, at the age of eighty-nine, in Rolle, Switzerland. (Rolle is the same small…

How can someone be convicted of a crime with almost no proof of his guilt and abundant evidence of his innocence? I’m faced by that question in trying to understand how my friend Frank Morrissey was found guilty of forgery…