Jonathan Leaf is a writer and playwright based in New York. He contributed cultural criticism, book reviews, and arts coverage to The Weekly Standard over nearly two decades, writing frequently about theater, literature, and notable cultural figures.
Elon Musk is in the news. (Again.) The latest announcement came last Thursday when Musk’s Boring Company signed a contract with the city of Chicago to build an "express loop" from O'Hare Airport to the city's downtown. In one important way, the deal is wholly unlike most of Musk's other projects—it…
Eric Rohmer was 50 when his mother died in 1970. They were in regular contact, and he often took his two sons from Paris to see her at her home in Tulle. But she went to her grave convinced that her eldest child was a classics teacher at a provincial lycée. She had no idea that he had been editor…
Eric Rohmer was 50 when his mother died in 1970. They were in regular contact, and he often took his two sons from Paris to see her at her home in Tulle. But she went to her grave convinced that her eldest child was a classics teacher at a provincial lycée. She had no idea that he had been editor…
Was there ever a successful Marxist author whose parents weren’t affluent? From Bertolt Brecht to Frantz Fanon to Che Guevara, there's a pattern: privileged youth, largely unmerited prominence, then increasing indifference from readers and audiences after death. As the falseness of the writing…
For Republican presidential candidates planning to run against Hillary Clinton, the critique of her record these days often begins and ends with Benghazi and her email server. This is partly because these are so damning but partly because there’s a near-universal assumption that Clinton has no…
In 1967, Milan Kundera was the most famous writer in Czechoslovakia. His novel The Joke, probably his best, had run through a printing of 150,000 copies—in a nation of 15 million. Among the century’s masterworks, The Joke exposed the incessant absurdity and routine vindictiveness inherent in a…
Literary critics have one big fault, and film critics have another. The best critics of the novel undervalue story-telling even as they push the merits of literary gruel: dull, highbrow tomes filled with “ideas.” The result is excessive praise for Mrs. Dalloway and not enough for The Natural,…
Critics, often, are merely bad historians. And just as poor recorders of the past repeat tattered untruths about Christopher Columbus or the Industrial Revolution without bothering to investigate their warmed-over gaffes and inaccuracies, so do arbiters of literature echo the nonsensical opinions…
On the morning of April 16, 2012, at the very minute that the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama was being announced, the playwright J. T. Rogers’s telephone rang. A 43-year-old married father struggling to pay his rent each month, he picked up the receiver with nervous anticipation. Caller ID…
Here’s a story of movie star vanity. In 1998, word appeared that Al Pacino had optioned the rights to Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar (1955). Sporadically over the next few years, reports came out linking the actor with various actresses who wished to play the title role of a woman, barely…
It’s possible to be underrated though employed by the New Yorker. Peter de Vries was. Another sufferer from this affliction was the cartoonist, born 100 years ago this year, for whom de Vries wrote more than a few captions: Charles Addams (1912-1988). Both men committed the not-always-extenuated…
The centenary of Mary McCarthy’s birth falls on this year’s summer solstice, and August is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her most famous novel, The Group, which sold more than five million copies by the time of McCarthy’s death in 1989, and continues to sell.
Mark Twain once said that it was more interesting to talk to Civil War veterans about battles than to chat with poets about the moon as the versifiers had not ordinarily been to the moon.
Not so long ago, Charles Dickens was the 19th-century British novelist. The others—Austen, the Brontë sisters, Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, Hardy—were his contemporaries and predecessors and successors and rivals. They were judged against him and considered in his light. In the view of Edmund…
Jonathan Kozol is back. The leftist education expert has been promoting his latest book--Letters to a Young Teacher--preaching his gospel on NPR stations, at radical churches, and at book stores across the country. He is a seductive figure in the pulpit, spreading a message of antagonism to every…
ON OCTOBER 10--the day before the Norwegian contingent of the Nobel Prize committee gave the prize for peace to Jimmy Carter--the Swedish side of the Nobel committee named Hungary's Imre Kertész the winner of the prize for literature. How obscure is Kertész? The Contemporary Authors Index, which…
Tom Stoppard A Life by Ira Bruce Nadel Palgrave Macmillan, 384 pp., $29.95 TO WRITE ONE BRILLIANT and very funny play is an accomplishment. To write two or three, as Oscar Wilde did, is extraordinary. To write five or six, as George Bernard Shaw did, is prodigious. So think what that says about Tom…
In 1972 an international film critics' poll, conducted by Sight and Sound magazine, determined that two of the ten greatest films ever made had been written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Almost thirty years later, as the ballots for this decade's Sight and Sound poll go out, the Swedish…