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

The Saunterers’ Club

In pursuit of a more wayward Thoreau
May 23, 2023

Cancel Culture and Other Myths

Anti-fandom as heartbreak
March 27, 2023

Nothing Is a Memory

Remembering Bernadette Mayer
March 27, 2023

The Journalist and the Photographer

Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures
March 27, 2023

The Renegade Poetic Fortune-Telling Machine

On Joel Dias-Porter
March 27, 2023

All at Once, the Multiverse Is Everywhere

Why today's movies, TV shows, and literature love branching timelines and many worlds
March 9, 2023

The Mother's Rage

Elena Ferrante and the torment of maternal love
February 28, 2023

On Anton Shammas's "Arabesques"

Revisiting the first major book in Hebrew by an Arab writer
February 20, 2023
Books

Wong May's Poetry of Exile

In search of a language of unbelonging
February 6, 2023

White Noise, New and Improved

How Noah Baumbach transformed a classic satire
January 9, 2023