Check out Mitch Therieau‘s recent review of Greil Marcus’s What Nails It. Therieau writes: We don’t always nail it. Sometimes the writing overstretches, sometimes it manhandles its objects or produces a phantom version of them virtually unrecognizable to anyone who […]
cultural criticism
On George Scialabba’s new collection of essays
Followers of this blog know that I am a big fan of writer George Scialabba. (I have never met Scialabba, but I am guessing that he would be uncomfortable with the word “fan.”) If you are not reading Scialabba you […]
In sixty years American society has moved from “we shall overcome” to “you will not replace us”
Over at Zocalo Public Square, writer David Ulin offers some reflections on Joan Didion’s 1967 essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and how her words continue to resonate. Here is a taste: What we’re seeing is not a matter of disagreement or […]
The Christopher Hitchens revival
I didn’t know such a Hitchens revival was happening until I read philosopher Andy Lamey‘s piece at Toronto Star. Lamey asks, “Is his brand of contrarian progressivism a welcome alternative to a Twitter-fixated, deplatforming Left?” Such a revival makes perfect […]
“The danger of being a professional exposer of the bogus is that, encountering it so often, one may come in time to cease to believe in the reality it counterfeits.”
Alan Jacobs dug-up this gem from W.H. Auden’s 1941 review of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christianity and Power. It was published in The Nation on January 4, 1941: A brother once came to one of the desert fathers saying, “My mind is […]
Most Americans “do not learn piano from the age of five, do not attend private school” and “do not have SAT tutors”
According to Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, the members of the “aspirational class,” for all their tree-hugging and wokeness, have lost their way. Here is a taste of her piece at The Hedgehog Review: According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, cultural capital […]