Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 61–80 of 168 articles
Fado — from the Latin fatum, meaning fate — emerged in the working-class neighbourhoods of Lisbon in the early nineteenth century as the music of sailors, prostitutes, and the urban poor.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-15
Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten blacklisted during the McCarthy era, continued writing screenplays throughout the 1950s under pseudonyms and front names.
William Ashford · 2024-10-15
Ernest Hemingway's working notebooks, held at the John F.
James Alderton · 2024-10-14
Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find accomplishes in twenty-three pages what most novels about American violence cannot achieve in three hundred: it makes the reader complicit in dismissing a grandmother's spiritual awakening as mere survival strategy, then forces them to confront the possibility that grace arrives in the moment before death — administered, grotesquely, by a serial killer.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-14
Blaise Pascal observed in the seventeenth century that all of humanity's problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-13
The United Nations Security Council chamber in New York, designed by Arnstein Arneberg in 1952, seats delegates in a horseshoe arrangement facing each other across an open floor.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-13
Patrick Bringley worked as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for over a decade, standing in the same galleries for eight hours a day, five days a week.
James Alderton · 2024-10-12
The assumption that art collecting requires wealth is both historically recent and factually incorrect.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-12
The first conversation took place at Peter Harrington in Mayfair, London's oldest rare bookshop, where a first edition of The Great Gatsby — Scribner's 1925 printing, dark green cloth boards with gilt lettering — sat in a vitrine priced at two hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds.
William Ashford · 2024-10-11
Chet Baker's singing voice — a barely-there whisper, intimate as a confession, with no vibrato and no attempt at projection — violated every convention of mid-century male vocal performance.
William Ashford · 2024-10-11
Aristotle considered leisure — scholē in Greek, the etymological root of 'school' — not as the absence of work but as its purpose.
William Ashford · 2024-10-10
When Commodore Matthew Perry forced open Japanese ports in 1853, the cargo that flowed westward included not only silk and porcelain but ukiyo-e woodblock prints — mass-produced images that Japanese merchants used as wrapping paper.
William Ashford · 2024-10-10
Lord Chesterfield's Letters to His Son, published posthumously in 1774, remain among the most read correspondence in English not because of their advice — much of which is manipulative and class-obsessed — but because of their prose.
James Alderton · 2024-10-09
Susan Sontag's On Photography, published in 1977, argued that the camera does not preserve memory but replaces it — that the act of photographing an experience substitutes a permanent image for the fluid, evolving process of genuine recollection.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-10-09
Between 1970 and 1987, Andy Warhol shot approximately twenty thousand Polaroid portraits using a Big Shot camera — a fixed-focus, close-range camera designed for passport photos and discontinued shortly after its 1971 release.
Marcus Wei · 2024-10-08
Brutalism spent decades as architecture's most hated movement.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-10-08
Wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness, has no direct Western equivalent — and that conceptual gap is precisely what makes it valuable.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-07
The French New Wave — the cinematic movement launched by critics-turned-directors at Cahiers du cinéma in the late 1950s — matters at dinner parties not because name-dropping Godard signals sophistication but because the movement's innovations are so thoroughly embedded in contemporary visual culture that understanding them illuminates everything from television editing to TikTok aesthetics.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-07
Miles Davis's most revolutionary contribution to jazz was not what he played but what he chose not to play.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-10-06
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen, published as twelve issues in 1986-87 and collected as a single volume, deconstructed the superhero genre with a narrative complexity that literary fiction rarely achieves.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-10-06