Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer and cultural critic who contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2012 and 2017. His pieces for the magazine frequently explored art, literature, and cultural topics, covering subjects ranging from Picasso and Egon Schiele to animated film and architecture. He is also known as a novelist and essayist whose work engages with intersections of religion, literature, and culture.
Bill Cosby. Bill O’Reilly. Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. Charlie Rose. Matt Lauer. John Conyers. What drives these men to engage in such terrible behavior? The Book of Genesis may offer us some answers.
New York
New York
‘Why don't men and women really like one another nowadays?" asks Connie in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Like D. H. Lawrence's creation, the groundbreaking Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) also felt let down by the ignis fatuus of true love—that elusive will o' the wisp that too often fails to…
Madrid
Williamstown, Mass.
Every generation has its geniuses, but some endowments of genius are greater than others. As Harold Bloom once wrote, we can assume that we’ll see another Stravinsky or Louis Armstrong, a Picasso or Matisse, a Proust or even a James Joyce. But “to hope for a Dante or Shakespeare, a J. S. Bach or…
In Hermann Hesse’s short story “The Painter,” a young artist experiences the pain of having his works shunned. Because his paintings are so unpopular, the artist becomes reclusive. He decides to stop depicting love, heroes, and celebrations in beautiful pictures that give pleasure to others.…
'Hey, Krusty!” says Bart, surprising his childhood idol while the clown is opening an animal shelter for animals put out of work by Cirque du Soleil. “Wha . . . have you been going to Temple?!” a bewildered Krusty the Clown asks Bart, wondering why this far-from-pious boy is suddenly sporting a…
“If we had a keen vision of all ordinary human life,” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, “it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence.” To read Philip Roth has been to hear your own heart beat; for over…
Italian Futurism may be one of the less-acclaimed early-20th-century artistic movements, but its striking aesthetic interpretations of the human being and radical ideological manifesto have left a legacy that must still be reckoned with. All of these aspects of Futurism are on full display at this…
If John Cheever was the Chekhov of the suburbs, Paul Gauguin was the Cheever of the South Pacific. A nonconformist whose iconoclastic art would be used as a motif in the literary art of another artistic iconoclast (namely, Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus), the Parisian-born Gauguin gravitated to…
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) defined the genre of the American macabre, and his name has become synonymous with literary horror. He has had many imitators but few genuine literary successors—only Jorge Luis Borges and H. P. Lovecraft have come close. Cities across the Eastern seaboard, from Boston…
In some locales, wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, beautiful days are only experienced in the winter. But this is easily belied by the magnificent Edward Hopper exhibition on display at the Whitney Museum this summer. Beyond a showcase of artistic beauty, it is a much-deserved homage to an American…