Slim Shady’s Blues
Eminem’s music helped him to cope with his own suffering. It also helped his listeners cope with theirs.
Samuel Kronen
· 10 min read
Art and Culture
A collection of 709 posts
Scandalous Monogamy and Faithful Infidelity
On eros and marriage.
Marilyn Simon
· 12 min read
Peanuts in Perspective
Peanuts offered parables of existential angst and longing, described through small stories about the small affairs of small people.
George Case
· 7 min read
The Great Unfinished Generational Epic
George R.R. Martin, the Strauss-Howe theory of history, and the failure of the Baby Boomers.
Jason Garshfield
· 26 min read
Mammy Dearest
Richard Bernstein’s new book about Al Jolson and ‘The Jazz Singer’ offers a thoughtful reconsideration of an unfairly reviled cultural landmark.
Graham Daseler
· 14 min read
Architecture as Revenge
Brady Corbet’s panoramic epic, ‘The Brutalist,’ may be technically brilliant, but it is a cheat and a fraud.
Charlotte Allen
· 15 min read
The Thunder from Down Under
If Bach was the sound of God whistling while he worked, AC/DC was the sound of God ordering another round in a strip club on Saturday night.
George Case
· 9 min read
American Surrealist
A tribute to David Lynch (1946–2025).
Benjamin Kerstein
· 7 min read
Shakespeare Versus the Girlboss
Jodi Picoult’s latest novel is a ham-fisted expression of cultural rage, embodying the most anodyne values of corporate human-resources departments.
Marilyn Simon
· 14 min read
A Perfectly Charming Chinese Girl
Against long odds and in the face of exclusionary casting, Anna May Wong bequeathed us an extraordinary cinematic legacy.
Thomas Doherty
· 11 min read
Unmasked and Anonymous
A brief history of Bob Dylan on screen.
Benjamin Kerstein
· 18 min read
Ghosts of Electricity
The magisterial incomprehensibility of Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna.’
Thomas Larson
· 8 min read
Printing the Legend
The naysayers are dead wrong about James Mangold’s remarkable new film about Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s.
Ronald Radosh
· 15 min read
Moral Permission to Murder
Dostoevsky and the assassination of Brian Thompson.
Julia Friedman
· 6 min read
The Eerie Beauty of ‘Flow’
Gints Zilbalodis’s beautiful dystopian story feels like the start of a new era in cinema, or at least the invitation to one.
Roy Wayne Meredith III
· 5 min read