A Movie About Modigliani! And Johnny Depp! So What Could Go Wrong?
Johnny Depp’s new film Modi: Three Days on the Wings of Madness explores the artist’s struggle to sell his work, and the tension that existed between...
What Price Culture? Governments Reassess
From the role of large-scale cultural events like the European Capital of Culture to the so-called “Bilbao effect” (where a new cultural site is thought to spark revitalisation and economic...
Will AI Kill TV?
When AI is generating all the scripts, performances, music and visual design, and there are no more creative humans whose work the machines can...
How Popular Culture Trained Us In The Art Of The Conspiracy Theory
The promise of elusive answers implores you to plunge deeper, deeper, into a thriller of your own, one that you both consume and help...
So Many Things Are Problematic About Dostoyevsky In Today’s Culture. And Yet…
As for Dostoyevsky himself, there is something dark and dangerous, perhaps even depraved, about his work which makes him more relevant to contemporary readers...
What Made The Choreography In “A Chorus Line” And “Chicago” So Distinctive 50 Years...
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...
Henry James, Critic: The Art Of Dissection
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...
The NYT Is Replacing Its Theatre Critic. So What Is Needed?
Diversity matters. So does excellence. And the future of theatre criticism at the Times should reflect both. So what kind of critic do we...
How Higher Ed Failed Poor Students
Higher education has become regressive, widening class divisions by delivering far greater returns to wealthy students than to their low-income peers. - Washington Post
Alfred Brendel (1931-2025)
In the wake of the death of the pianist Alfred Brendel on June 16, I notice a sharp uptick in
Can Alan Garber Save Harvard?
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...
The Most Dangerous Book In America
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...
Inside The Collapse Of The Innovative Publisher Unbound
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...
Research: Links Between Learning And Innovation
Just as music relies on rhythm and harmony, effective team learning requires structured, harmonious sequencing. - Harvard Business Review
Ideology And The Censorious Tilt Against Art
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...
What A 1964 Book About Anti-Intellectualism Tells Us About Now
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...
How The Notion Of Friendship Has Changed Over The Centuries
Medieval Christian Europe inherited from antiquity a deep reverence for the virtue of friendship. Thinkers in the Middle Ages read Cicero and Seneca, and...
Is This Why English Departments Are Dying?
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...
Just What Was Behind The 1990s’ Thomas Kinkade Craze?
In the 1990s, Kinkade estimated that one in twenty American homes owned a piece of his art, and reports suggest that his company boasted...
The Studio That’s Making A Name For Itself With AI-created Projects
The studio is now among the most popular A.I.-powered artists on the internet for its roster of subversive videos released on YouTube and then...
ABT Dancer Gillian Murphy Steps Down After 29 Years
Murphy joined Ballet Theater as a teenager in 1996 with technique that was glitteringly strong from the start and a clear joy for the...
Why Did This Film Studio Buy An Off-Broadway Theatre?
The company says it plans a wide-ranging slate of programming, prioritizing theater — Cherry Lane describes itself as the birthplace of the Off Broadway...
What AI Is Doing To My Creative Writing Students
As a teacher of creative writing, I set out to understand what A.I. could do for students, but also what it might mean for...
Five Essential Roger Norrington Recordings
On one side were those who admired his indefatigable research into 18th- and 19th-century performance practice, and the ways in which he deployed the...
Conductor Roger Norrington, 91
His mission wasn’t only to make us hear the repertoire we thought it knew through the prism of the techniques and playing styles of...
