Yet even the “world” itself is imagination, simply “the length of a human life,” as its etymology defines. The 150 years since Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was first published is a moment in any world so conceived, and the bridges to and from...
Whitman is a poet of all the senses, but listening, it seems, engaged him with special force: many of his work’s best-known passages set down what had come to him through the ear. No gesture of style so pronounced can be accidental, and I...
American coverage of the monstrous hostage-taking at Beslan’s School No. 1 in the Russian republic of North Ossetia and the ensuing controversy over President Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in ostensible response to the terrorist...
Assuredly our twenty-sixth American president is far from being forgotten. On the contrary, of late there has been positively a resurgence of historical interest in him. Kathleen Dalton’s new biography, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life ...
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...
What most people don’t know today is that Johnny Cash’s famous Folsom Prison concert was an event that had its beginnings many years before. Reverend Gressett ministered to prisoners in the California State Prison system. Gressett started...
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...
The four authors under review here lead us, through a variety of perspectives, from obscure confusion to plausible conclusions. Appropriately, they tell us that to understand the nature of Putin’s politics, we must understand the nature of...
In summer 2004, fifty years after its debut, Godzilla played in cinemas all across the United States for the first time. Not the heavily reedited cult classic starring Raymond Burr but the original, Japanese-language picture that first...
Imagine that you were born in an infinitely long and skinny country stretched out between a jagged mountain range and a lively sea that flogs thousands of kilometers.
