Politics
AMERICA IS IN DECLINE: SIGNS, CAUSES, AND IMPLICATIONS FOR GLOBAL POLITICS
Art & Design
Cézanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
July 18, 2026Matisse, in an essay written many years later for another Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition, appraised...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Review of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
July 18, 2026In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Gray Wolf Press. 2019. Hardcover, The most impressive...
Art & Design
Celebrating Galileo in Florence
July 18, 20262009 is officially “The Year of Astronomy,” commemorating Galilei’s first observation of the Moon through his...
Art & Design
Rodchenko & Popova: Defining Constructivism, at the Tate Modern, London
July 18, 2026In 1921, the Constructivists announced the end of painting. To mark its passing they held the...
Fiction Reviews
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton
July 18, 2026Though we hope that love will conquer in the end, we are all too aware that...
Fiction Reviews
Scarpetta by Patricia Cornwell
July 17, 2026There are flashes of wit – the description of the morgue as a “deconstruction site”, for...
Fiction Reviews
Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
July 17, 2026Much more serious, though, is the book’s take on the medieval world as a whole. Alongside...
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard
July 17, 2026Nevertheless, in my personal library there are 130 books on Pompeii. Of all these, this is...
China
Falling off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization by Alex Perry
July 17, 2026Perry describes a world without a middle class, a world in which, according to 2006 statistics,...
Art & Design
George Tooker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
July 15, 2026Tooker’s paintings are questions not answers. The drama takes place away from the picture plain, as...
Art
The Patron’s Payoff: Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art by Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser
July 15, 2026No less than the American financier who donates a museum wing on condition it bears his...
Fiction Reviews
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
July 15, 2026On the morning of March 2, 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a young Jewish immigrant who had fled...
Non-Fiction Reviews
The Irish Americans: A History by Jay P. Dolan
July 15, 2026America’s love affair with all things Irish – with J.F.K. and seedy bars in “The Departed,”...
Fiction Reviews
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
July 15, 2026Yet when an author treads into specific territories, the ground becomes awfully muddy. We’re happy to...
History
Moscow & St. Petersburg 1900-1920: Art, Life, & Culture of the Russian Silver Age by John E. Bowlt
July 15, 2026Writers of the caliber of Anton Chekov, Alexsander Blok and Anna Akhmatova, visionary artists like Mikhail...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Kentucky Clay, Eleven Generations of a Southern Dynasty by Katherine Bateman
July 15, 2026“In the South, stories are the effervescence of conversation, and no stories are more gripping to...
History
Erskine Childers and The Riddle of the Sands
July 14, 2026Set against the backdrop of a yachting trip to the German coast, the story weds a...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Frederick Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan
July 14, 2026Viewed in retrospect, post-Depression, however, he acquires a special poignancy. Here was a man who was...
Fiction Reviews
All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky
July 14, 2026How might we doubt that any long dead, wholly forgotten writer, who has re-emerged and within...
Non-Fiction Reviews
Dear President-Elect Obama, We Need Trains, Too!
July 13, 2026President-elect Obama said in his radio address on Saturday, January 10, that “We’ll put nearly 400,000...
-
Movies & TV
100 Greatest Gangster Films: The Godfather, #1
December 20, 2025The Godfather made careers, most notably those of Francis Ford Coppola and Al Pacino, despite the...
Movies
Catching Up With 2010: Percy Jackson The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
September 25, 2026For many years now Chris Columbus and I have had an understanding: He can suck as...
Movies
In Defense of The Social Network: Movie demonizes sexism, doesn’t glamorize it.
October 16, 2026Fiction vs. reality: Eisenberg and Zuckerberg. First things first: I’m in the business of paying close...
Fiction Reviews
Book Review: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
October 18, 2026Pasternak ranges the individualism of Zhivago against the heartless society that is being erected by the...
Movies
Catching Up With 2010: Marmaduke
October 9, 2026A scant few minutes into Marmaduke there’s a fart joke. Right after this fart joke Marmaduke...
Movies
All Of This Will Happen Again: Step Up 2 The Streets Revisited!
October 5, 2026Earlier this week we took a look at the first Step Up, the hit machine that...
After Image
Larry Rivers, NYU, and Child Pornography
September 27, 2026How should we respond, however, when sexual abuse is the subject of a piece and a...
Art
Art Review: Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936
October 14, 2026Chaos and Classicism tells the story of good intentions that went terribly wrong. After the carnage...
Movies
Movie Review: Step Up 3D
October 3, 2026Step Up 3D is a good movie. Not an instant classic, but a genuine celebration of...
Video Games
Video Game Review: Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
October 22, 2026Oddly enough, it’s this great multiplayer mode that most throws the rest of the game into...
The Fourth Wall
Mad (wo)Men: The Complexity of Womanhood in “Mad Men”
October 11, 2026The cast of AMC’s “Mad Men:” Vincent Kartheiser, Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Jon Hamm, January Jones,...
Top Posts & Pages
Trending
Contributors
