I wish I had a cooler story about the first time I saw George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. I’d like to say I snuck in to see it at a midnight show in Times Square back in 1978. I’d like to say I saw it in the gloriously appropriate...
I can tell you that I only trust the ugly writers. Deep down, those are the ones who have earned their wrath. All the rest of them, the pretty boy and girl authors, screw them. Or, better yet, don’t screw them. Get them all hot and bothered...
In his new book, Blind Trust, psychoanalyst Vamik Volkan offers starkly different terms for what he sees as a troubling “societal regression.” Volkan looks at bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and the Bush administration and sees id, ego, and supe...
Enraged to discover that Germany did not possess any work by Michelangelo, his favorite artist, Hitler was mildly consoled to find a painting by Caravaggio—Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio—whom Hitler thought was the same person as...
The writer was drinking himself to death. In his first flush of freedom—he had come to Iowa from a land ruled by a military dictatorship—he drowned himself in vodka, and when for the third day running he was rushed to the emergency room...
Contemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing. For all the reasons that Paul Fussell summarizes and for a great number more, much of the liveliest recent scholarship concludes that literary and cultural...
In a letter of December 1910, the young T. E. Lawrence defined civilization as “the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage than ourselves.” No Englishman had a greater understanding of the past...
Everyone around the world with access to a television set saw the cataclysmic destruction of the World Trade Center towers, saw it in constant replay, burning—and burning itself into our collective retina. I saw it that way too, but first...
One by one they came before the microphone, in bulky sweaters, down vests, business suits, blue jeans, their voices quaking with anger or fear. It was wrong, they said, and they tried to give the word powerful meaning, as if speaking it...
