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James C. Scott and the Art of Resistance
“In Praise of Floods” (Yale), a study of rivers by the late political scientist James C. Scott, arrives after a year of catastrophic…
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The Frick Returns, Richer Than Ever
The Frick Collection, on East Seventieth Street, is, by so many miles, the finest small city museum—less self-consciously eccentric than…
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It’s Always the Other Side That’s Been Brainwashed
It wasn’t so long ago that respectable psychologists didn’t really talk about “brainwashing.” The term had the slightly kitschy flavor of…
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The Second Season of “Wolf Hall” Surpasses Its Acclaimed Predecessor
In the first season of the Tudor-era drama “Wolf Hall,” Anne Boleyn’s brief queendom was undone by rumors. Just three years after she…
News
We’re Still Not Done with Jesus
The Passion and the Resurrection are, of course, at the heart of the Jesus story. Matthew’s account of the empty tomb, followed by ever…
Politics
The Gilded Age Never Ended
Today’s plutocrat, on the other hand, sees the cultural élite as part of the burdensome past. One prophetic peculiarity of Donald Trump’s…
News
“The White Lotus” Overstays Its Welcome
Given the number of murders that have taken place at White Lotus resorts since the HBO series began, in 2021, one wonders why visitors…
News
The Profile Hemingway Could Never Live Down
Throughout the profile, Hemingway, drinking hard, employs a kind of skin-tightening lingo that he called “Indian Talk.” It wouldn’t have…
Business
Giorgio Morandi Tried to Fit the World on a Table
As genres go, Italian still-life painting isn’t a ghost town, exactly, but it evokes more than its share of dust and tumbleweeds. It’s…
News
The Frustrated Promise of the Rape Kit
In 1975, a rape victims’ advocate named Linda Reinshagen shared a story with a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. A man on the South Side…
News
The Insidious Charms of the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic
No literary form captures the pathologies of contemporary American work quite like the humble—honored, grateful, blessed—LinkedIn post. In…
Politics
Washington’s Hostess with the Mostes’
Washington still cherishes a belief that it was long a place of bipartisan comity, of after-hours socializing during which fences were…
News
Why Zora Neale Hurston Was Obsessed with the Jews
Zora Neale Hurston was a philosemite. She believed that the Jews had been victims of stereotyping that started with Moses and that was…
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Tabula Rasa: Volume Five
This is the fifth article in the “Tabula Rasa” series. Read Volumes One, Two, Three, and Four. Bleb “Bleb” is worth eight points in…
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He Was a Genius for the Ages. Can We Give Him a Break?
Gottfried Leibniz was not the first philosopher to think that we live in the best of all possible worlds. He may have been the unluckiest,…
News
Every Mandala Tells a Secret
There was more flaying than I expected, though not necessarily more than I wanted, at “Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet.” Any…
Business
Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome?
Like countless other people around the globe, I stream music, and like more than six hundred million of them I mainly use Spotify.…
Culture
Audra McDonald Triumphs in “Gypsy” on Broadway
In the nineteen-thirties, Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps the world’s most famous stripper, helped transform burlesque from a vulgar pastime to…
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Family Discord and Holiday Music in “Cult of Love” and “No President”
The first image of Leslye Headland’s family drama,“Cult of Love,” on Broadway at the Hayes, looks like a Christmas card. Behind a gauzy…
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Paul Valéry Would Prefer Not To
One way of being a modernist writer is to pay attention to the most saliently modern objects and experiences. So it is that Proust…