Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 81–100 of 168 articles
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 · 2026-05-13
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 · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
Jorge Luis Borges spent his career writing about libraries, mirrors, labyrinths, and infinite books — yet his own stories rarely exceed ten pages.
James Alderton · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
Drama is the most efficient literary form.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse first met in 1906 at the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein, where both artists were regulars.
William Ashford · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
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 · 2026-05-12
Cormac McCarthy's male characters communicate through action, landscape, and violence rather than articulation.
Marcus Wei · 2026-05-11
Terrence Malick's films are not difficult because they are obscure — they are difficult because they operate on principles that mainstream cinema has trained audiences to resist.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-11
Ahmad Jamal's influence on modern jazz piano is so pervasive that it has become invisible.
Sebastian Cole · 2026-05-11
Andrei Tarkovsky's 1975 film Mirror unfolds at a pace that contemporary audiences, trained by algorithmic content, may initially find unbearable.
Daniel Hurst · 2026-05-11
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Graham Greene's novels reveal different architecture depending on the age at which you read them.
James Alderton · 2026-05-11
The chair you are probably sitting on right now owes its existence to decisions made in Dessau, Germany, between 1925 and 1932.
Catherine Avery · 2026-05-11
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 · 2026-05-11
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 · 2026-05-11
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