Lauren Weiner is a writer and critic who contributed essays, cultural commentary, and book reviews to The Weekly Standard from 1998 to 2018. Her work for the magazine frequently explored historical subjects, literature, and the arts, with a particular interest in Baltimore and Maryland history. She also wrote on politics and American culture more broadly.
The Portrait of a Lady, one of the greatest novels in the English language, ends rather inconclusively. “I have not seen the heroine to the end of her situation,” wrote Henry James in his notebooks. On the other hand, he added, the work “is complete in itself—and the rest may be taken up or not,…
Neither our presidents nor our pundits should try to be hip. I still have not recovered from the chief executive’s slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon. Now comes Monica Crowley’s critique of the Obama administration, which is so hip it hurts.
The man often called the poet laureate of radio’s golden age died a few weeks ago at 101. His name was Norman Corwin, and he was a consequential figure who also happens to be unknown to most people.
The first men to die in the American Civil War fell on this day, 150 years ago, on Pratt Street in Baltimore. Troops en route to Washington were confronted downtown by rioters, and the fighting cost four federal soldiers and 12 civilians their lives.
Is it becoming modesty in a city, or just cluelessness, to cede to others the celebration of literary lions bred in that city’s midst?
Eating with the Enemy
Now It's My Turn
Cuba, The Morning After
Roscoe by William Kennedy Viking, 288 pp., $24.95 THE CRITIC William Pritchard probably did not mean to lay down a law of literary excellence when, in his recent study of John Updike, he spoke of "a reader who knows what fairness is and wants fiction to observe something like ideal balance." The…
Left-wing historians used to say that their anti-Communist opponents greatly exaggerated the American Communist party's Cold War ties to Moscow -- and thereby impugned a political organization that did so much for progressive causes.
Just after the Civil War, American women believed their political emancipation was at hand. Though they were still excluded from the ballot box, women already occupied a more advanced position in the United States than in any other country. Political exclusion of women would very shortly go the way…