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What Happened to Your Face?
One of the things Wittgenstein implies is that we don’t theorize the faces we see. I might talk of “reading” your face, but it isn’t like…
Tag
a critic at large
Culture
Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers
Since the fifteenth century, most adaptations of Homer have taken the form of translation, which has never been easy. Homer wrote a very…
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Listening to Joe Rogan
Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention…
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How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News
St. Bride’s, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists’ church. Having weathered not a few disasters—the…
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When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills
Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268…
News
The New York Shooting That Defined an Era
“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed…
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How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex
The latest and most vigorous addition to this genre is “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone” (Norton), by Quill Kukla, a…
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Is the Dictionary Done For?
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word…
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How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as…
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What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?
Still, Master Betty ruled the little province of Parnassus devoted to underage thespians until the advent of Shirley Temple—and it’s some…
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The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as…
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Pan-African Dreams, Post-Colonial Realities
Two new books, on Kwame Nkrumah’s promise and Idi Amin’s tyranny, capture the soaring hopes and bitter aftermath of Africa’s age of…
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Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book…
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The Autocrat of English Usage
In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part…
News
What to Make of the Mother Who Made You
It is hard to overstate the literary impact, in 1997, of Arundhati Roy’s début novel, “The God of Small Things.” A family drama set in a…
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How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The…
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Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?
Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century…
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The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could…
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Was the Renaissance Real?
Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet. Colonialism and…
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A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver…
News
The Argentinean Comic Strip That Galvanized a Generation
A uniformed police officer stands sideways, his head turned to face us. His eyes are unnaturally close together, rendered by the artist as…
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Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
“Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald concludes. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while…
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How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire
In the four and a half decades since its founding, the Library of America has issued not only the pillars of our national literature but…
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R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise
Even the establishment distrusted the establishment. Shortly after the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy—the Attorney General and the…