Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
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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
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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