Criticism

Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?

Critics mourn a bygone cultural era. But nostalgia for the new isn't new.
Louise Lawler’s yellowy dye-destruction print of Warhol’s “Round Marilyn”

Searching for Seamus Heaney

What I found when I resolved to read him

James Schuyler’s Genius

Why our greatest poet of the everyday has become a poet of the moment

The Elusive Poet of Desire

Why biographers can’t pin Cavafy down

Reading the Declaration of Independence as Holy Text

How the American creed emerged—and evolved—over 250 years

Terrence Malick’s Disciples

Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood

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Criticism

Books

Olga Tokarczuk’s Radical Tenderness

Reading the Nobel winner's oeuvre
February 16, 2021
Television

Act Your Age

Swapping bodies, swapping ages, and re-inventing youth
December 21, 2020
Film

In the Atmosphere

In Mati Diop’s Atlantics, every breath takes in the evaporated substance of history
June 1, 2020
Books

Speech Acts

Eunice de Souza, a post-Independence Indian poet, explores the glitches in poetic voicing
June 1, 2020
Books

The Unthinkable

How do you put into words the boundless pain of losing a child?
June 1, 2020
Books

Tove Jansson’s Genius

The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins
June 1, 2020
Books

Conspicuous Erudition

The new black poetry
April 1, 2020
Books

Metafiction and #MeToo

A new way to write trauma
April 1, 2020
Books

On Long Poems

Four recent books make length a virtue
April 1, 2020
Books

Furious Permissions

For Susan Sontag, style was nourishment
January 1, 2020