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

The Sublime Modes of Sheila Heti

The novelist as philosopher
March 1, 2022
On Craft

The Art of Control

Peter Bogdanovich’s masterful restraint
February 21, 2022
Television

Has Anyone Talked About How It Feels

Oprah Winfrey’s reign
September 20, 2021
Books

How to Continue

AIDS elegies after Ashbery
September 20, 2021

Now Is Pretty Creepy

What Miranda July's performance art reveals about our technologically mediated lives
September 20, 2021
Books

Machado de Assis’s Afterlives

The Brazilian novelist’s overlooked politics
June 28, 2021
Books

No-No Man

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s nihilist masterpiece
June 28, 2021

The Subject of Pain

On Louise Bourgeois
June 28, 2021
Books

Incalculable Loss

How writing can help make sense of grief
May 19, 2021

It Me

The trouble with memes
May 19, 2021