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

Music

The Last Valkyrie

Music in review
January 1, 2019
Books

Bondage and Freedom

Frederick Douglass
October 1, 2018
Film

Life Unamplified

The small-scale satisfactions of Brett Haley’s Hearts Beat Loud
October 1, 2018
Books

On "Don’t Call Us Dead"

Poetry in Review
October 1, 2018
Music

Racialized Timbre

Listening to listening with musicologist Nina Eidsheim
October 1, 2018
Books

Ventriloquizing and the Novel

The nesting structure of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry
October 1, 2018
Books

Finding Proust’s Duchess

Clear-sighted literary commentary, and a guilty-pleasure read
July 1, 2018
Books

On "Poet in Spain: Federico García Lorca"

Poetry in Review
July 1, 2018
Books

On "The Mars Room"

Fiction in Review
July 1, 2018
Music

On The New York Philharmonic’s 175th Anniversary

Recordings in Review
July 1, 2018