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

On Emancipation

What Hollywood has done to a much-circulated image of American slavery
December 9, 2022

The Darker Side of Bambi

What Felix Salten's tale teaches us about the lives of men
November 30, 2022

Whose Trans Realism?

Nevada and the fiction of fucking up
November 14, 2022

A Ritual for Mystery

Clarice Lispector’s crônicas
October 31, 2022

Hilary Mantel

Remembering a singular prose stylist
September 27, 2022

The Stakes of Dictee

An introduction to a famously difficult work
September 1, 2022
Ideas

Hard Wired

How evolutionary psychology ended up at the heart of the culture wars
June 1, 2022
Books

The Tim Seibles BOOKBIOBOARDGAME

Tracing a poetic lineage
June 1, 2022
Books

Why So Serious?

Sang Young Park’s angrily funny work charts a new path for gay fiction
May 16, 2022
Film

Making a Home In the Multiverse

Everything Everywhere All At Once reinvents the immigrant family drama
May 9, 2022