Books and Arts

Hannah Yoest on the work of Jon McNaughton, the painter of populist rage.

Also: Are English professors to blame for Donald Trump?

Also: The early days of Buckley’s National Review remembered.

Muhammad Yunus, the father of microcredit, thinks he knows how to fix capitalism, end poverty, and even get rid of carbon emissions. Here's what he’s missing.

Let’s start with the obvious: Andre the Giant, subject of a new documentary from HBO, was huge. The wrestler seemed almost to have stepped out of legend or myth. Billed at a whopping 7-foot-4 and 477 pounds, he was a veritable Grendel, with deep-set eyes, frizzy hair, and a protruding jaw. Dubbed…

Also: The monasteries of Meteora.

Also: Why are there so many mirrors in Victorian paintings?

B.D. McClay reviews 'Sharp'—a book about controversy-courting creators, critics, and cultural commentators.

Drawing on the wisdom of history, philosophy, and literature to inform foreign policy.

Musings from Susan Kristol on two new translations of the ‘Odyssey.’

Let it be said at the outset that James Lewis's The Burr Conspiracy is a superb work of contemporary historical craftsmanship. The question for everyone interested in its subject is how to understand it.

Why is Steven Spielberg devoting so much of his time to making cartoons? Ready Player One, his mammoth new movie, is the third film he's made since 2011 using motion-capture animation. The first two—The Adventures of Tintin and The BFG—were simultaneously hyperactive and dispirited. Spielberg is…

Whenever I need to check out of the world, I head to a place called Satan's Creek. I go there to catch-and-release—or maybe catch-and-ogle—God's most perfect creatures: wild brook trout. They come small in these mountain runs. An 11-incher would be considered trophy-size. Still, bringing one to…

The key to reading history of Nazi Germany, a wise professor once explained to me, is to attempt to understand the logic and mentality of those who embraced the Nazi movement without ever losing sight of what an ultimately absurd and fundamentally evil project theirs was. This is the approach…

Pope Francis's pontificate did not begin with doctrinal controversy. It began with the appearance of an amiable Argentine on the balcony of St. Peter's and endearing stories about a pope who rides the bus and pays his own hotel bills. His papacy seemed to pre­sent an opportunity to draw together…

When French president (then-candidate) Emmanuel Macron waxed lyrical about his passion for the composer Gioachino Rossini in spring 2017, the transatlantic chattering classes gushed in admiration (and made snide comparisons to Donald Trump). But when British foreign minister Boris Johnson was…

One of the reasons most art writing is not worth reading—and there are several reasons—is the irritating habit of critics of personalizing their subject and making it all about themselves. It goes without saying that this tendency is to be strenuously resisted, if not punished, but I am about to…

The Death of Stalin is a blacker-than-black comedy about the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and how they jockey for power after the demise of Joseph Vissarionovich in 1953. The movie is sometimes gaspingly hilarious—and at all times audacious and…

By January 2009, nearly a half century had passed since the Soviet Union sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit. In the midst of the handoff from the Bush administration to the Obama administration, a member of the incoming transition team at NASA, frustrated by how static the agency had become,…

Until the 19th century, the relationship between the function and the physiology of the nervous system was largely a mystery. Physicians believed in the vital importance of the brain but knew little about its structure and purpose. For hundreds of years, conventional wisdom in medicine followed the…

It's been a while since we talked; have you caught up yet? The second season of Jessica Jones was bonkers; did you manage to make it through The Punisher and The Defenders? What about the new season of Black Mirror—that one episode where they warned against the dangers of technology outpacing our…

Rejected by more than two dozen publishers in the early 1960s, A Wrinkle in Time was itself a work of its own time and entirely out of time—a sophisticated and original intellectual coming-of-age story featuring speculative science fiction, anti-Communist dystopia, and Christian hermeneutics. There…

Suppose, for a moment, that you are a young person with no more knowledge of what the world was like before you were born than most young people nowadays. And suppose, further, that out of idle curiosity you took it into your head to read a really old book like, say, Edith Wharton’s The Age of…

Being a writer-editor-pundit in Donald Trump’s Washington is a 24/7 job. In the last year, I’ve had countless nights of missed dinners and lost sleep, along with a few canceled concerts and ruined respites. But there was one mission from which not even a Trump tweet starting a nuclear war could…

Since the birth of the modern age, conservatives of various stripes have lamented—often with good reason—the cultural decline of post-Enlightenment society. Such critiques have emphasized different defects: the shrinking of human beings to mere seekers of comfort; the loss of reverence for…

David Hollinger’s new book, Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America, is a comedy of unintended consequences, the thesis of which is a joke—a serious joke, a very intellectual joke, but funny, with a sting. It goes like this: “The Protestant foreign…

The Herbert Hoover of historical memory is a distant person, mostly recalled as the president who presided ineffectually over the early years of the Great Depression. Kenneth Whyte’s fine full-life biography reminds us that Hoover was himself a man of action and a remarkable American success story.…

What would Leonardo have done with radiography? What might Michelangelo have accomplished had 3-D modeling been available? What heights of the mind would a neo-Platonist like Piero della Francesca have witnessed if he had lived long enough to see calculus?

Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were a husband-and-wife televangelist team who rose to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s before their ministry was brought down by scandal, trickery, and bankruptcy. They lived extravagant lives in front of the camera, inviting viewers into their beautiful homes for…

It's rare—vanishingly rare—to get the feeling in a movie theater that the people who made the film you’re seeing know exactly what they’re doing, know exactly what they’re trying to achieve scene by scene, know exactly what plot they’re telling, know exactly the characters they’re putting on…

A revisionist account of the great wit’s post-prison life.

What evangelicals gain and lose by doing business with the president.

In 2003, when J. M. Coetzee was announced the recipient of that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the news wasn’t met with outraged cries of “Who?” or “Why?” With nine brilliant novels under his belt, along with a haul of prestigious literary awards—including a hitherto unprecedented two Booker…

Black Panther is the least superhero-y of the Marvel superhero movies. T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), its protagonist, gets some unearthly abilities from drinking the juice of a plant, but I can’t tell you what they are really, and the movie is delightfully uninterested in exploring them. What’s more…

To someone watching snowboarding for the first time, it might look like a mix of skiing, surfing, and skateboarding. Some competitive snowboarding events are races and feature obstacles or emphasize speed; others award higher scores for better tricks. They are fairly recent additions to the Winter…

In 1960, already a movie buff, educated by Bill Kennedy, the ex-film-actor host of CKLW’s programs featuring old Hollywood classics, I took the bus from my east-side Detroit home to the Fox Theatre downtown. I vividly remember watching Victor Mature, all muscles, and Hedy Lamarr, all allure, in…

In 1885, nearly broke from bad investments and dying of cancer, Ulysses S. Grant spent his final days writing the bestselling memoir that gave his family financial security after he was gone. The story of Grant’s swan song seems memorably American, touched by the mythic national themes of boom and…

In October 1797, 42-year-old John Marshall arrived in Paris with Charles Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry, the three of them constituting an official American commission charged with defusing tensions arising from the larger war between England and France. Both belligerents were seizing American ships…

Who didn’t love Ron Howard’s Splash back in 1984? Tom Hanks falls in the ocean and nearly drowns but is rescued by the beautiful mermaid Daryl Hannah. She follows him to New York, and they have a romantic idyll until she’s captured by the authorities. “Nobody said love’s perfect,” says Tom’s…

The Good Place is the most unexpectedly profound show on television. NBC’s afterlife sitcom, which just concluded its second season, stars Kristen Bell as an impostor in paradise and Ted Danson as her supernatural overseer. It begins by skewering shallowly sentimental ideas of heaven and then…

One night over dinner, Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner decided to write a satire skewering the postbellum culture of excess. They took their novel’s title from a line in Shakespeare’s King John: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily . . . is wasteful and ridiculous excess.” The…

Renowned professor of psychology at Harvard and a prolific writer, Steven Pinker is the author of several prize-winning books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature. This week Pinker releases a new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case…

In December 2015, newly elected Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari declared that the terrorist group Boko Haram had been “technically defeated” after intensive military efforts. The Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF), a consortium of military units from Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and…

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Many of America’s cities are struggling. Once-strong communities have experienced post-industrial collapse, rampant unemployment, and brain drain. Crumbling infrastructure, the opioid crisis, and a host of lesser pathologies have contributed to instability and frustration among citizens and leaders.

If it takes a special talent to make a boring topic interesting, there’s an inverse talent possessed by those who take interesting topics and make them boring. In American Niceness, Carrie Tirado Bramen, associate professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, takes a fascinating topic—one long overdue for…

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,…

Roger Federer has a wonderful serve and all the strokes. He’s the right height, 6-foot-1, and the right weight, 187 pounds. He’s fast and light on his feet. On the court, he no longer has a weakness, now that he slugs one-handed backhands rather than slicing most of them. There’s one more essential…

Will exposed creep Louis C.K. try to make art that honestly confronts what he did—or will he go the way of Woody Allen?

Ursula K. Le Guin, who died on January 22 at the age of 88, lived most of her adult life in Portland, Oregon, where she and her husband Charles—who taught French at the local university—quietly brought up their three children. I suspect that Le Guin, who herself majored in French at Radcliffe, must…

In the late 1930s, or perhaps it was as late as 1940, my father and uncle, the screenwriters Philip and Julius Epstein, sought to join the American armed forces. The Army turned them away; it apparently considered their anti-fascism premature. That, at any rate, is family lore, and I have every…

In October 1956, shortly after being honorably discharged from the Army at age 23, Lee Edwards found himself in Paris. There he fell into the rhythms of expatriate life, smoking Gauloises, frequenting cafés, and writing fiction. It was in French newspapers that he read of the Hungarian revolt…

“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” a scrap of verse by the English journalist William Norman Ewer, has over the years had many answering refrains. “Not odd, you Sod / The Jews chose God” is one; “What’s so Odd / His son was one” is another; and a third goes “This surely was no mere…

Not everybody likes Alsatian wine. Good. That means more of it for me. The slim, green adolescent bottles with sloping shoulders and no hips are distinguished by pollen-yellow labels, often bearing medieval-style lettering. Something happens to grapes in this region of France that makes them taste…

“You dirty son of a bitch.  .  . somebody’s got to beat you up and I hereby appoint myself.” Thus Edward Lansdale recalled addressing the CIA station chief in Saigon in the mid-1950s, when Lansdale was a CIA operative under cover of assistant air attaché at the American embassy. Whether or not his…

B.D. McClay on 'Eternal Life,' the new Dara Horn novel that takes the long view of longing.

The Post is about a little-known and relatively minor incident in the annals of newspapering—how the Washington Post made itself a player in the Pentagon Papers story, the biggest scoop of 1971, after it was beaten to the punch by the New York Times. And it merges that account with a female…

It’s not every day that a quarrel breaks out among friends over something that happened in 1858. But so it was in the second week of January when First Things published online a review from its February issue of the memoirs of Edgardo Mortara, a man born into a Jewish family in Bologna in 1851 who…

We are living in an era of political panic. Some of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters in 2016 were motivated to overlook his shortcomings by desperate fear that our system of government was near death and only the most extreme measures could save it. A poll conducted by PRRI and…

In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its…

It was a measure not only of his robust good health but the vitality of his public commitments that Bruce Cole’s sudden death last week came as such a shock to so many people—and that they were shocked to discover that he was 79. He seemed so much younger. Bruce had become one of the key figures in…

By any traditional standard, Israel won its 50-day war against Hamas in 2014. It incurred far fewer casualties than its Palestinian adversary. It rooted out much of the Gaza Strip’s terrorist infrastructure, including tunnels the militant group had burrowed to transport fighters into Israel. And it…

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a “reboot,” whatever that means, of a 1995 Robin Williams movie about kids magically transported inside the world of a board game. Sony Studios knew that the new Jumanji was likely to be a hit from the reaction of preview audiences, but no one expected it would…

Writing history, and especially the history of the ancient world, is an uncertain business, in which the truth is as elusive as in metaphysics. Modern historians of the classical world necessarily rely heavily on the works of the ancients. And the supreme historians among the ancient Greeks had to…

In a recent conversation with an administrator who spent years at one of Manhattan’s most prestigious prep schools, I brought up the subject of gifted education. “I don’t know what you mean,” she responded without a trace of irony. “Every child is gifted in his or her own way.” In a culture where…

The most potent form of nostalgia is for a time you never knew in a place you do and imagine was at its peak before you came along. For me, that would be the 1950s in New York City, set to the cool, light strain of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s “Take Five.” I can never get enough…

Zichron Ya'akov, Israel

In the sundry debates about the Western canon that periodically vex our culture, attention is always focused on those who have been excluded from it, with the implicit assumption that some malign force is behind that omission. Far less discussed but no less important is the question of who has…

In 1878, Chester Alan Arthur held one of the most powerful and lucrative patronage positions in the federal government: collector of the Port of New York. Thanks to the percentage system by which he was paid, Arthur took in about $50,000 per year at a time when the president earned half as much.…

In a career that spanned the first half of the 20th century, Henry Louis Mencken became not only one of America’s most memorable prose stylists, but also one of its most prolific ones.

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Hans Keilson was not quite 23 years old when, in December 1932, he came home from his hospital job to news from his mother. “Someone named Loerke called,” she said. “He called to congratulate us. He’s going to recommend your novel for publication.” The call had been from the poet Oskar Loerke, on…

The unexpected risks of lives spent online.

I met Chris Gibson early in his first congressional race, at a campaign breakfast my family hosted at our house in upstate New York in April 2010. The sun was out that morning but winter was still in the air, as it often is there at that time of year. The fields and orchards of the Hudson River…

Enough with the whiny movie critics complaining about the new Star Wars movie. Like them, I was fully prepared to hate the thing when I arrived at the screening, but that prejudice was overcome by the movie’s wondrous look and by its fascinating, multilayered plot.

From time to time I’m forced to confront the ugly little corollary to my heart-leaping, car-singing, year-round love of Christmas music. Forced usually by Muzak, and more times than ought to be strictly necessary by enthusiastic choirs at midnight mass, I admit that there are Christmas songs that I…

Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”…

Nearly half a century ago, when I was a preschooler in Soviet-era Moscow, two thick magazines appeared in our home. They had plain, pale-tan covers, but I could tell they were quite special to my parents. In those magazines’ pages was a riveting story—what I could understand from my precocious…

In December 1943, Winston Churchill contracted pneumonia on a visit to North Africa and found himself banned from work and laid up in bed. While convalescing, he asked his daughter Sarah to read him Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It proved just the tonic. “What calm lives they had, those…

Joe Hagan has written what promises to be the standard biography of Jann Wenner—standard, because it’s hard to imagine anyone working up the energy to take another stab at it. Fifty years ago, at the age of 21, Wenner founded Rolling Stone magazine, and he’s been editor in chief ever since. Thanks…

The second season of the Netflix show The Crown, released on December 8, is compellingly watchable television, a luscious treat for any recovering Downton Abbey addict or sedulous follower of the British royal family. The series is also an intelligent consideration of some crucial years of…

In a March 2016 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Donald Trump declared that if he became president, he would “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” His choice of phrase—“eternal capital”—perhaps bears some…

The propulsively entertaining but problematic new movie I, Tonya reminds us that it’s been nearly a quarter-century since the figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was whacked on the back of the knee by a baton-wielding goon. The attack was the outcome of an insane white-trash conspiracy to give Kerrigan’s…

A beautiful simplicity seems to unfold when Ronnie O’Sullivan constructs a century break, potting 100 points’ worth of balls on a single visit to a snooker table. No one ever described snooker as an easy game, but when O’Sullivan begins to flow, he makes each moment look natural. Obvious, almost.…

Pollsters, pundits, and public intellectuals identify declining levels of trust in America’s civic institutions as a threat to social and political order. Public opinion data bear out that trust has indeed waned in recent decades. The great majority of citizens in the early 1960s broadly viewed the…

Of the many things that a young fellow, barely knee-high to a grasshopper, might aspire to be when he grows up, one that doesn’t often come to mind is “grifter.” Yet in my early 20s, intoxicated by the demimonde allure of pulp novels by Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, I was reminded of a time…

Back in 2013, in my last weeks as a high school senior, with plenty of free time on my hands, I wrote a survival guide for future students. This tome, full of wit and wisdom, remains unpublished, safely stored on a laptop buried somewhere in my closet. Which is just as well. I now realize Tina Fey…

Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an…

Fiction finds itself in a curious position in 2017, when the favored form of disparagement is to accuse opponents of peddling fake news. But fake news is a nearly perfect characterization of a good novel or short story, and fiction writers have proudly refined its production to an extent that makes…

Some historians talk about a “reading revolution” in the middle of the 18th century, during which literacy rates rose and people came increasingly to prefer reading silently over reading aloud—mainly novels, a relatively new literary form. In The Social Life of Books, Abigail Williams, a professor…

In Umberto Eco’s medieval whodunit The Name of the Rose, the narrator, a Benedictine novice, comes to realize that “books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves.” Armed with this newfound awareness, he sees the monastery library in another light—not as a quiet, cloistered retreat…

Ever since Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960, book buyers have been treated to the quadrennial offerings of presidential-campaign tell-alls. Many of these offer very little beyond cheap political thrills—White’s 1960 book reads like JFK fan fiction—but the genre is not without…

As a rule, I favor a strict separation between music and politics. Politics need not worm its way into every nook and cranny. Of course, sometimes composers like to impose politics on their music. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies declared that a string quartet of his was about the Iraq war: a depiction of…

Stephanie Green writes on the flowers and fame of Bunny Mellon, Jackie Kennedy’s confidante.

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was relieved of his duties in June 1781 as court organist to Prince-Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, the 25-year-old had every reason to believe he would achieve great success on his own. Conditions in Salzburg, the city of his birth, had become unbearable, owing in…

In 1991, George Weigel arrived in Prague to research The Final Revolution, a book that told the story of Pope John Paul II’s influence on the collapse of communism. That book would show that Weigel understood John Paul from the inside, as the pope thought he needed to be understood, and would pave…

About two-thirds into Laura Dassow Walls’s extraordinary new biography of Henry David Thoreau, she relates an anecdote that tells us more about the man than many a scholarly tome. On one of his many walks in or around Concord, Mass., a passerby accosted him: “Halloo, Thoreau, and don’t you ever…

When legendary editor Judith Jones returned stateside in the early 1950s after years of living in France, she was dismayed to find that there was little joy in American cooking:

Friends of The Weekly Standard are so prolific that it can be easy to lose track of all their projects—so we wanted to take this opportunity to highlight a few recent books by some of our cherished and most frequent contributors.

At this very moment, I trust, a novelist somewhere is trying to weave Russia’s election-year meddling into the stuff of fiction. (I wish Keith Thomson would take it on.) Meanwhile, one of the most interesting literary stories of the last decade has gone mostly unnoticed—and this too, so it happens,…

We’re all taught in school about the scientific method—an idealized version of how researchers think up hypotheses, conduct experiments, study the evidence, and confirm or disconfirm their original hypotheses. In Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes…

The Russian Revolution, the centennial of which has just passed, changed the world in more ways than one can count. But one little-noticed way in which it affected American intellectual life was by giving us Ayn Rand.

Last summer, to prepare for the upcoming movie version, I reread Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Christie was the bestselling writer of the 20th century and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous works. But I found it almost agonizingly tedious. It reads more like…

B.D. McClay on adultery, friendship, and the story of a life—a review of Sally Rooney's novel 'Conversations with Friends.'

It would be hard to invent a more pallid or inadequate title than Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer for the exhibition that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Divinity, of course, is always an asset and Michelangelo is a name to conjure with. But neither of the words that…

Now it can be told: In 1968, I was one of those who got “clean for Gene.” I cut my hair and put on a jacket and tie to campaign for Senator Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primaries of that year. Those of us who did so understood without having to have the matter explained to us that we were…

In the new Justice League movie, Batman, Wonder Woman, and other superheroes from DC Comics join forces to (what else?) save the world. While Superman is not a leading character in the film, it all takes place in his shadow. If last year’s Batman v Superman depicted a world coping with the fact…

On March 20, 1974, a new French restaurant opened on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was called Le Cirque (The Circus), and it soon became the hottest ticket in town. It was partly known for its lavish meals—where Daniel Boulud and David Bouley, among others, earned their fame as chefs. But Le…

Midway through the remarkable new documentary Jane comes a scene that could stand for its whole improbable story. Twenty-something Jane Goodall, not yet a credentialed scientist but doing the work of several, sits with a telescope on the floor of an African forest watching chimpanzees in a tree,…

The moment its doors officially open, the new Museum of the Bible, with its prime real estate in the capital, will be the nation’s most prominent institution dedicated to educating the general public about Judeo-Christian ideas and history. But it is far from the first attraction built by…

What role does the Bible play in Americans’ lives? A century ago the answer to that question would have been straightforward: It was the most important book in the home, perhaps read daily, and the place where major events in a family’s history (births, deaths, marriages) were recorded. It was…

If I tell you that Martin McDonagh is one of the most imaginative writers of our time, I expect you will immediately think he writes science fiction or fantasy—because the word “imaginative” has now devolved into a subset of the fantastic, the surreal, the unearthly. That is not the case with…

The generic, everyday name is “bear can.” The original model of the bear-resistant food container, pioneered by Garcia Machine Inc., is a black cylinder with countersunk lid, unsmashable, too large to be carried off in a bear’s mouth, with a blank surface that offers no purchase for paws or claws.…

When the series Enterprise went off the air in 2005, the consensus was that the whole Star Trek enterprise (so to speak) was exhausted: The show’s ratings were too low to keep it on the air and the franchise’s two most recent movies were critical stinkers that fared poorly at the box office.

We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was…

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright,…

"You are no good." These were not the words Gregor Piatigorsky, a nervous performer, needed to hear as he warmed up before playing a concerto with the New York Philharmonic. The man who uttered them, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, then said, “I am no good.” The effect on Piatigorsky was immediate…

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We can speak of “settled law.” Not so with biography. The verdict is always out on appeal, and the subject accountable to more litigation. Discovery yields new evidence, and additional litigants take up the case. This is especially so with Ulysses S. Grant.

The first season of the Netflix show Stranger Things, released last year, immediately plunged its protagonists into danger. In the first episode we see 12-year-old Will Byers, one of a quartet of Dungeons & Dragons-playing nerds, waylaid by a dark shape on his way home along the wooded back roads…

Robert Skidelsky, whose biography of John Maynard Keynes is unlikely ever to be surpassed, judged that his subject “never needed a Jehovah, because he had never experienced despair.” Skidelsky was speaking of religion and morals, a department where Keynes was a typical Bloomsbury hedonist. In…

In the unpredictable and often baffling way that hip, new meaning can glom onto even the stuffiest of words, “curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4…

In 1971, when Congress passed the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, the aim was to protect the animals from “capture, branding, harassment, or death.” The law hailed wild horses as “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West.”

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Marvel-ous Creator

Marvel-ous Creator

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. possessed the most sparkling intelligence of his generation of historians. He may not have had the most subtle or profound mind, but his was the most effervescent disposition, and no one could surpass him in sheer energy, knowledge, and skill as scholar and writer.…

In recent months, Palestinians and several figures on the British left have called on the United Kingdom to apologize formally for its imperialistic audacity in issuing the Balfour Declaration—the November 2, 1917, pronouncement in which Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour stated that “His…

ArtPrize is a queer sort of gallery show. There is no gallery, for one thing. Nor is there any particular curator. Instead, there is an urban core with a big pot of prize money in the middle of it.

There is nothing natural about tolerating the views of others. If someone stands, as today’s righteous say, on “the wrong side of history,” why refrain from shutting him up? Yes, Justice Holmes warned against “attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught…

As the major league playoffs continue on into the World Series, there is lots of talk—complaining, really—about the lengthening time it takes to play, and therefore watch, a baseball game. The average time of a baseball game is now three hours and five minutes. I don’t know if the average time of a…

As the major league playoffs continue on into the World Series, there is lots of talk—complaining, really—about the lengthening time it takes to play, and therefore watch, a baseball game. The average time of a baseball game is now three hours and five minutes. I don’t know if the average time of a…

In the world of art, Johannes Vermeer is a name to conjure with, and any exhibition of his work qualifies as a blockbuster. For the first time since 1996, a major exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries is coming to the National Gallery of Art. Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting debuted…

In 1637, René Descartes recounted a “fable” of how he came to think well. From his youth, he had read the books of the ancients, exercised his rhetorical skills, and observed the debates of philosophers and theologians. But in all this learning he found no rest or certainty, only endless disputes…

Until his death on October 14, Richard Wilbur had spent nearly half a century as America’s greatest living poet. A writer of opulent forms and playful wit, whose rhymed and measured stanzas combined the intellectual complexities of modernist verse with the familiar pleasures of an older tradition,…

Half a century ago, fashionable young moviemakers looking for new ways to separate themselves from old Hollywood fuddy-duddies—and to épater la bourgeoisie even though it was that very bourgeoisie they needed to become rich and powerful—sank their teeth into the notions that America and capitalism…

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Most of us think of jazz as a genre predicated on extemporization—the horn man breaking into an inspired chorus set apart from the rhythmic structure of the song, the pianist using an established chord progression for extended flights of improvisatory fancy.

For their latest collaboration, a 10-part documentary that premiered last month on PBS, filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have chosen a subject from living memory. The Vietnam war was a defining event for a generation of Americans. It was also one of the most politically divisive wars in U.S.…

In the past 100 years, no visual artist has contributed more to the sum total of human happiness than Alexander Calder. If you think about it, this generating of happiness, to the extent to which it retains any cultural prestige these days, is seen as the domain of musicians and writers far more…

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

This summer, the Cleveland Indians won 22 consecutive baseball games—a seemingly impossible streak that elated fans of the team and captivated non-fans. The Indians won large and they won small. They won the 22nd game in a comeback, getting a hit with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

In the past 100 years, no visual artist has contributed more to the sum total of human happiness than Alexander Calder. If you think about it, this generating of happiness, to the extent to which it retains any cultural prestige these days, is seen as the domain of musicians and writers far more…

What does it do to casually assumed theories of cultural equality if a civilization is founded on the idea that the gods require the ritualized butchering of human beings? When Mel Gibson released his twilight-of-the-Maya epic Apocalypto in 2006, some scholars of Mayan culture felt that the film’s…

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

In recent years, John McPhee’s writing has become more retrospective, a natural sensibility for a man now 86 years old. A case in point was his 2010 book Silk Parachute, a collection of essays and reportage that also stood out for its uncharacteristically personal tone. From the title essay, a…

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

This summer, the Cleveland Indians won 22 consecutive baseball games—a seemingly impossible streak that elated fans of the team and captivated non-fans. The Indians won large and they won small. They won the 22nd game in a comeback, getting a hit with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the…

“When I was in law teaching,” recalled Antonin Scalia in a speech just days before his 1986 nomination to the Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing what is called ‘teaching against the class’—that is, taking positions that the students were almost certain to disagree with, in order to generate some…

I used to have this annual argument at Christmas with my brother-in-law, a well-regarded film editor in Hollywood. I would arrive brimming with complaints about a movie like Argo, said to be “based on actual events” but with an entirely fictitious Keystone Kops-like airport chase scene. I would…

The 1973 tennis match between the 29-year-old female champ Billie Jean King and the 55-year-old former champ Bobby Riggs was many things. It was one of the great “pseudo-events” of all time, fitting perfectly Daniel Boorstin’s definition in his 1962 book The Image as “dramatic performances in which…

I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed reading a collection of speeches. This may be due to the fact that most or maybe all I’ve read are political, and political speeches, even those authored by literate and capable politicians, lose their significance almost immediately. But perhaps the more important…

“When I was in law teaching,” recalled Antonin Scalia in a speech just days before his 1986 nomination to the Supreme Court, “I was fond of doing what is called ‘teaching against the class’—that is, taking positions that the students were almost certain to disagree with, in order to generate some…

I used to have this annual argument at Christmas with my brother-in-law, a well-regarded film editor in Hollywood. I would arrive brimming with complaints about a movie like Argo, said to be “based on actual events” but with an entirely fictitious Keystone Kops-like airport chase scene. I would…

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted watercolors throughout his European childhood. Like his family, the dependents of the peripatetic Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, watercolors were portable and picturesque. Sargent continued to paint watercolors in the 1870s as a student in Paris and in the 1880s…

On September 9, at the beginning of the women’s final of the U.S. Open, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys walked onto the court carrying flowers. The rest isn’t worth overanalyzing: Stephens won the match in a rout as Keys struggled with her nerves and her mobility. It’s that they were both there…

On September 9, at the beginning of the women’s final of the U.S. Open, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys walked onto the court carrying flowers. The rest isn’t worth overanalyzing: Stephens won the match in a rout as Keys struggled with her nerves and her mobility. It’s that they were both there…

In Brad’s Status, a 47-year-old man takes his 17-year-old son on a tour of Boston’s colleges. A onetime journalist whose award-winning website went bust during the financial meltdown, Brad Sloan runs a nonprofit in Sacramento that seeks to match donors with other worthy nonprofits. His wife works…

What happened to Hillary Clinton en route to her appointment with destiny? Her new book, What Happened, portrays her as a lifelong fighter on behalf of noble causes, a woman whose quest for the power she deserved was thwarted by a cabal as vast as the one she once said had been after her husband…

Remembering Jerry Pournelle (1933-2017).

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

Barbecue is a Southern food, and a special one. The food writer Jeffrey Steingarten says it is “simply the most delectable of all traditional American food." It originated in the 18th century in eastern North Carolina with whole-hog barbecue, in which the entire pig is cooked. While that tradition…

Now that the latest season of Game of Thrones has ended, fans of the show may be wondering: What now? How do I fill the void? One could, of course, reread George R. R. Martin’s books, or check out Maurice Druon’s The Accursed Kings, a series of seven historical novels that partly inspired Martin.…

Stephen King’s It was the bestselling book of 1986 and the source material for an enormously successful two-part miniseries on ABC in 1990 that has been shown regularly on cable TV ever since. The ridiculously overlong novel reads like King is parodying himself; the miniseries is obvious and…

Even if you hold no religious beliefs, you might want to consider adopting some simply for the sake of your wedding. That’s the conclusion I reached after attending several secular nuptial ceremonies in the years after college. There was little worse than listening to vows that had been made up by…

In 1954, when I was a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I paid tribute in an editorial for the Daily Tar Heel to a distinguished predecessor at that illustrious student paper, William T. Polk, who had died unexpectedly. Jonathan W. Daniels, the journalist and editor who…

The October Horse

The Cambridge spies—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross—who burrowed into the heart of the British establishment and betrayed its secrets to the Soviet Union have been the subjects of dozens of nonfiction books and inspired numerous novels, including some by…

Every schoolboy ought to know—but probably doesn’t—the famous couplet from Rudyard Kipling’s “Tommy”: “Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep / Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.” George Orwell, though he held that Kipling did not “understand the…

Remembering Pulitzer-winning poet John Ashbery, last of the New York school.

Eccentric Culture

Kurt Andersen may be right in supposing that what looks like Americans’ increasing inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is the big topic of our times, and there are at least 2 or 3 of his 46 chapters in Fantasyland in which he does justice to his subject. His rapid tour d’ horizon on New…

Beautifully designed and thoughtfully edited, this is both a celebration of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s writing and a gust of fresh wind in the continuing movement to secure her place in American literature. Millay (1892-1950) authored 10 books of poetry in her lifetime and was hailed as one of the…

The publication of a new translation of the Aeneid by poet David Ferry at the age of 93 is an outstanding achievement. Having also translated Virgil’s other masterpieces, the Eclogues and Georgics, Ferry has spent two decades in the company of this great Roman poet.

Few Americans noticed, but this past June, Muammar Qaddafi’s longtime spy chief Abdullah Senussi was apparently released from prison in Tripoli, where he had been sentenced to death in July 2015 for decades of officially sanctioned murders of his fellow Libyans. If Senussi was not…

Empire

To one who spends time in the archives of the first quarter-century of the American republic can avoid references to one Jonathan Robbins. Probably in reality the Irish tar Thomas Nash, the pseudonymous Robbins scarcely ranks up there with other major figures of the period. But then why is his name…

Last week, Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market in a merger valued at $13.7 billion. And while consumers are already seeing lower prices at the organic chain (often referred to as Whole Paycheck), there’s much concern over the deal’s impact on jobs. As a Bloomberg headline put it, “Amazon Robots…

To read the second and final stanza of Catherine Chandler’s “Chasubles”—“Summer’s a smiling charlatan / camouflaged in green / where violet truths lie mantled in / the seen and the unseen”—one might think American religious poetry is now much as it was in Emily Dickinson’s day. The reclusive maid…

In 1996, Hamas gunmen shot to death David Boim, a 17-year-old American citizen waiting for a bus in the West Bank. At the behest of Boim’s parents, attorney Nathan Lewin filed suit against charitable organizations in the United States who solicited funds for Hamas. The unorthodox decision to seek…

Few Americans noticed, but this past June, Muammar Qaddafi’s longtime spy chief Abdullah Senussi was apparently released from prison in Tripoli, where he had been sentenced to death in July 2015 for decades of officially sanctioned murders of his fellow Libyans. If Senussi was not…

 A friend sent me news that E. B. White’s saltwater farm on the coast of Maine is up for sale, and my mind leapt back nearly 20 years—an impressive leap for a mind in my condition—to a visit I’d made there to mark the 100th anniversary of White’s birth in 1899. I was on assignment for a magazine, a…

The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…

Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…

While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the…

Much ink has recently been spilled because of America’s statues of Confederate generals; in Charlottesville, wicked men flying Nazi flags caused blood to be spilled as well. In hopes of avoiding further violence, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, recently removed its Confederate statues in the…

While vacationing this past June at the Outer Banks, I stopped one afternoon at a small bookstore in the sleepy coastal town of Buxton. After navigating past romance, mystery, and local fiction to the classics corner (Moby-Dick and the Odyssey make the best beach reading), I was arrested by the…

The classic books about presidential campaigns don’t fixate on chronology. They only use chronology—the run from primaries to conventions to debates to the election—to tell a bigger story, one that transcends the campaign.

In mid-October 1956 I became a visitor to the Middle Ages: I matriculated at Oxford. Robed in gown and white tie (mysteriously called “sub-fusc"), I stood with other freshmen before the celebrated classicist Sir Maurice Bowra, who intoned ritual sentences of Anglo-Latin (no broad "A"s) and we…

The Fourth Amendment is in a sorry state. The constitutional provision intended to protect us and our property from unreasonable searches and seizures has been weakened over decades—a fact that ought to be of acute concern at a time when surveillance technology is increasingly intrusive and…

Much ink has recently been spilled because of America’s statues of Confederate generals; in Charlottesville, wicked men flying Nazi flags caused blood to be spilled as well. In hopes of avoiding further violence, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, recently removed its Confederate statues in the…

Because there are so few of them, any movies about Americans living east of Los Angeles and west of Chicago will nowadays be labeled “important” on first sight. Taylor Sheridan, who grew up on a Texas ranch and moved to Wyoming after 20 years of intermittently rewarding acting work in L.A., has…

Charlize Theron first appears onscreen in her mostly terrific new action thriller, Atomic Blonde, trying to heal her wounded body in an ice bath. She has bruises all over her back. Her face is swollen, one of her eyes blackened. She pulls herself out of the tub, dresses laboriously, and limps into…

 I spent a dreary half-week in Helsinki a few years ago. It was mid-March. Short days, empty streets, damp snow blowing off the harbor. The Finns I met said: “Come back in July. There’s nothing like a Scandinavian summer.”

There was a time when I was surprised that many Americans—even fans of Turner Classic Movies—seemed to think that Alfred Hitchcock was a roly-poly Englishman who somehow ended up in Hollywood and got his start making movies there. The way the story goes, Hitchcock crossed the pond and made Rebecca…

Garry Apgar introduces his book by stating that Mickey Mouse “has been a part of our mental and emotional universe for over eight decades." Walt Disney launched the phenomenon in 1928 with his revolutionary sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, nurtured MM to stardom during Hollywood's heyday in the…

Henry James grew up with Thomas Cole’s View of Florence from San Miniato in the family parlor. Aspiring to become a painter, James took lessons from John La Farge; he had to settle for prose. The rest of his life he sought the company of expatriate painters like Frank Duveneck, James Whistler,…

It was in the mid-1980s that I first heard the term “politically correct,” from an older housemate in Berkeley. She had a couple glasses of wine in her and was on a roll, venturing some opinions that were outré by the local standards. I thought the term witty and took it for her own coinage, but in…