The promise of elusive answers implores you to plunge deeper, deeper, into a thriller of your own, one that you both consume and help construct. It says that the absence of answers is itself a kind of evidence. Proof is proof and so is the lack of proof. - The New York Times
As for Dostoyevsky himself, there is something dark and dangerous, perhaps even depraved, about his work which makes him more relevant to contemporary readers than even Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev. - Unherd
The showbiz-cynical attitude of “Chicago,” a tale of 1920s murderers who go into vaudeville, was inseparable from its choreographic style. “A Chorus Line” was about Broadway dancers, built from their real-life stories and framed as an audition. - The New York Times
Even when James was nominally assessing a particular work, he was in fact taking stock of its author’s more general bearing. In his determinedly novelistic hands, criticism becomes a human drama. His reviews are nothing so much as delightful character sketches. - Washington Post
Diversity matters. So does excellence. And the future of theatre criticism at the Times should reflect both. So what kind of critic do we need now? - Onstage Blog
Higher education has become regressive, widening class divisions by delivering far greater returns to wealthy students than to their low-income peers. - Washington Post
Ever since William F. Buckley Jr. turned his alma mater, Yale, into a bête noire, the American right has dreamed of shattering the left’s hegemony on campus, which it sees as the primary theater for radical experiments in social engineering. - Th Atlantic
What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. - The Atlantic
I’m currently in a WhatsApp group for ex-Unbound authors which is a bit like Alcoholics Anonymous: we introduce ourselves then tell our unique but familiar tale of missing money, obfuscating management and disgruntled readers. - The Critic
Art has become so heavily politicised, so narrowly interpreted through the lens of identity and ideology, that many people can no longer even see the art itself. They don’t encounter it openly or imaginatively. Instead, they approach it armed with a checklist. - The Critic
In this world-view academics are seen as “anemic, priggish, effeminate;” “Harvard professors” as “twisted-thinking intellectuals”; Elite universities are the breeding grounds for the “enemy from within,” and “rotten to the core.” - LitHub
Medieval Christian Europe inherited from antiquity a deep reverence for the virtue of friendship. Thinkers in the Middle Ages read Cicero and Seneca, and adapted the ancients’ ethical models to their own literature, exegesis and philosophy. But the decisive turning point occurred in 1246. - Psyche
By claiming literary fiction to be trope-free, we can pretend that literary fiction is not a genre in its own right. If we admit that literary fiction is a genre subject to common devices and plots, then we start running out of legitimate reasons to keep popular fiction separate. - Commonweal
In the 1990s, Kinkade estimated that one in twenty American homes owned a piece of his art, and reports suggest that his company boasted around 350 franchised galleries at the peak of his popularity. - Dissent
