Architecture Can Heal Us
Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Vishaan Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.”
Arts & Letters
The 2024 Election Through the Eyes of a Nineteenth-Century Historian
Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution is less known in our country than his larger book chronicling American social character. In this era of “America First!” it makes sense that we prefer to read about ourselves. Ancien Régime and the Revolution, though, contains political arguments more important to our time because ours is a time of seismic political change.
Mind the Gap: Tracking the Distance Between Forest Park Today and Filipino “Human Zoos” of the 1904 World’s Fair
Immigrants seeking refuge in the country responsible for their humanitarian crisis is not new. Particularly for America. What was new, however, was the largest human zoo in the world modeled in our own backyard, two years after the Philippine-American war ended.
The Asian Women Named Mary
Witness the “woman” of “Asian descent.” Is this the face of waiting? Of looking? Of becoming? Of otherizing? Did she shuffle to the chair before sitting? Did she walk quickly?
Pronouns Are Ruining Our Lives
We need to abolish pronouns altogether. And not for the reason you think.
Conclave Breaks the Seal of Secrecy
This extraordinary film reveals the Vatican’s secretive and shadowy aspect, easily seen as sinister but felt by insiders as plain necessity.
This Sporting Life is Cinema’s Ultimate Portrait of Manhood
Watching ‘This Sporting Life,’ the viewer marvels at how Machin keeps on “winning” at every turn yet still fails to find the elusive victory he craves.
Gossip from the Hôtel Biron, Where Paris’s Later-Famed Artists Were Housemates
Rodin, Camille Claudel, a free-spirited dancer named Isadora Duncan, nineteen-year-old Jean Cocteau, the painter Henri Matisse, and Rainer Maria Rilke--all housemates at a shabby hotel in Paris. Imagine the drama.
The Strangeness in Us
When I was little, I had a recurring nightmare. I would float to the laundry room, a small tiled room next to the kitchen, and open the door. Or try to. I would push the door handle down, throw my body against the wood but it would not budge, only wobble a bit as if something else pushed back. Then wind or an unseen hand would seize and suspend me in the air.
What if C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Had Never Met?
What a wild coincidence, that Lewis and Tolkien were buddies at Oxford. Except, an acclaimed new graphic novel suggests, it was not coincidence at all