Seven Novels That Changed How We Think About Fatherhood
Cormac McCarthy's The Road, published in 2006, stripped fatherhood to its essential function: keeping a child alive in a world that offers no reason to continue.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-10-05
Culture
Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 81–100 of 168 articles
What Renaissance Portraiture Reveals About Modern Vanity
When a Florentine merchant commissioned a portrait from Ghirlandaio or Bronzino in the fifteenth century, the transaction was explicitly one of social performance.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-10-05
How Documentary Films Replaced the Long-Form Magazine Profile
The long-form magazine profile — a ten-thousand-word immersion in a single subject's life, published in venues like The New Yorker, Esquire, or Vanity Fair — defined a certain kind of literary journalism from the 1960s through the early 2000s.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-10-04
The Myth of the Tortured Artist and Why It Persists
The Romantic equation of suffering with creativity — the idea that great art requires personal torment — has survived two centuries of contradicting evidence because it serves multiple interests simultaneously.
Catherine Avery · 2024-10-04
The Vinyl Revival Is Over. The Listening Revival Is Just Beginning.
Vinyl sales peaked commercially in 2023, with revenue exceeding the one-billion-dollar mark in the United States for the third consecutive year.
Marcus Wei · 2024-10-03
On the Unlikely Friendship Between Picasso and Matisse
Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse first met in 1906 at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein, where both artists were regulars.
William Ashford · 2024-10-03
Why Every Man Should Read One Play a Month
Drama is the most efficient literary form.
Marcus Wei · 2024-10-02
Saul Leiter's Colour Photographs and the Art of Seeing Sideways
Saul Leiter began shooting colour on the streets of New York in the late 1940s, decades before William Eggleston's 1976 MoMA exhibition supposedly legitimised colour photography as art.
James Alderton · 2024-10-02
Borges, Labyrinths, and the Pleasure of Getting Lost in a Book
Jorge Luis Borges spent his career writing about libraries, mirrors, labyrinths, and infinite books — yet his own stories rarely exceed ten pages.
James Alderton · 2024-10-01
The Enduring Relevance of James Baldwin's Paris Years
James Baldwin arrived in Paris in November 1948 with forty dollars, no French, and the unfinished manuscript of Go Tell It on the Mountain.
James Alderton · 2024-10-01
The Architecture of Silence: Libraries Worth Travelling For
The Long Room at Trinity College Dublin, completed in 1732, houses two hundred thousand of the library's oldest volumes in a barrel-vaulted space sixty-five metres long.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-09-30
How the Essay Film Became the Most Honest Art Form
Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, released in 1983, established the essay film's defining characteristic: a first-person voice thinking aloud over images that neither illustrate nor contradict the narration but exist in productive tension with it.
James Alderton · 2024-09-30
Edward Hopper and the Loneliness Worth Sitting With
Nighthawks, painted in 1942 and hung at the Art Institute of Chicago, has been reproduced so often that encountering the original requires a deliberate act of unseeing.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-29
What Stoicism Actually Says (Not What LinkedIn Thinks)
The version of Stoicism circulating on social media — a productivity hack that equates emotional suppression with strength — bears almost no resemblance to the philosophy developed by Zeno of Citium in Athens around 300 BC.
James Alderton · 2024-09-29
Yukio Mishima's Impossible Pursuit of Perfection
Yukio Mishima's final act — the attempted coup and ritual suicide at the Ichigaya military headquarters on November 25, 1970 — has so dominated his legacy that his literary achievements are often treated as prologue to spectacle.
William Ashford · 2024-09-28
The Albums That Rewired How Men Listen to Music
Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, released in 1971, represented a categorical rupture in how Black male artists could present themselves commercially.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-28
The Bauhaus Legacy You Sit On Every Day
The chair you are probably sitting on right now owes its existence to decisions made in Dessau, Germany, between 1925 and 1932.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-27
How Street Photography Became the Conscience of Cities
Henri Cartier-Bresson established street photography's ethical foundation in the 1930s: the photographer as invisible witness, capturing what he called 'the decisive moment' — that fraction of a second when composition, gesture, and meaning align.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-27
Tarkovsky's Mirror: What Cinema Owes to Patience
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film Mirror unfolds at a pace that contemporary audiences, trained by algorithmic content, may initially find unbearable.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-09-26
On Rereading Graham Greene in Middle Age
Graham Greene's novels reveal different architecture depending on the age at which you read them.
James Alderton · 2024-09-26