Art, film, music, literature, and cultural commentary.
Showing 101–120 of 168 articles
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 · 2024-09-25
Ahmad Jamal's influence on modern jazz piano is so pervasive that it has become invisible.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-09-25
Neuroscience research from the University of California, San Francisco has demonstrated that activities involving hand-eye coordination — woodworking, drawing, pottery, model building — activate the brain's sensorimotor cortex in patterns that digital work does not replicate.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-24
Cormac McCarthy's male characters communicate through action, landscape, and violence rather than articulation.
Marcus Wei · 2024-09-24
Opera's intimidation factor is inversely proportional to actual experience.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-09-23
Art Spiegelman's Maus, which received a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, remains the graphic novel most frequently cited in arguments for the form's literary legitimacy — and for good reason.
William Ashford · 2024-09-23
Philosophy has an accessibility problem that is almost entirely self-inflicted.
Marcus Wei · 2024-09-22
Jamel Shabazz began photographing the young people of Brooklyn and Harlem in the early 1980s, capturing the emergence of hip-hop culture with a warmth and intimacy that distinguished his work from the voyeuristic poverty tourism that characterised most media coverage of Black urban life.
Daniel Hurst · 2024-09-22
Design thinking, as formalised by IDEO and Stanford's d.
Marcus Wei · 2024-09-21
When a performance of Death of a Salesman reaches the scene where Willy Loman's sons realise their father has been lying to them for decades, something happens in a theatre that cannot happen on a screen: the audience becomes complicit.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-21
Music theory is mathematics made audible.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-20
Between 1920 and 1960, the American short story occupied a cultural position comparable to prestige television today — widely consumed, fiercely debated, and financially rewarding enough to sustain careers.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-20
The streaming era has made virtually every film available and simultaneously made none of them feel essential.
Marcus Wei · 2024-09-19
Alvar Aalto designed the Paimio Sanatorium in Finland in 1933 with a single organising principle: every architectural decision should serve the patient's recovery.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-09-19
In an era of hyperpartisan media, the editorial model of public radio — listener-supported, editorially independent, allergic to sensationalism — represents something increasingly rare: journalism that respects its audience's intelligence.
Sebastian Cole · 2024-09-18
When An Inconvenient Truth premiered at Sundance in 2006, climate change was a partisan issue in American politics.
Oliver Ramsey · 2024-09-18
Alfred Hitchcock understood something about his audiences that most filmmakers avoid acknowledging: we enjoy watching people suffer, and we feel guilty about that enjoyment.
Thomas Nakamura · 2024-09-17
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James Alderton · 2024-09-17
The fear of sounding pretentious about art is itself pretentious — it assumes that your opinion requires a credential.
Catherine Avery · 2024-09-16
The average American adult now consumes over twelve hours of media daily, according to research from eMarketer, yet reports feeling less informed than a decade ago.
Marcus Wei · 2024-09-16