Film, Music, Visual Arts

Why To Be or Not to Be Is the Film for Our Time

      Between my late teens and early twenties, when at last the finite nature of time and the seemingly infinite number of “Best Of” lists pressed on my mind, I relied on the book John Kobal Presents the Top 100 Movies (1988) to find a way through the yet undiscovered terrain of great […]

Why Pink Is So Complicated

    Growing up, I shunned anything shaped like a heart, anything ruffled or bedazzled, anything pink. In the first two instances, my antipathy holds—unless the heart holds Godiva chocolates. But my own heart does a secret leap, like a kid embarrassed to love ballet and practicing in an empty room, whenever I find myself […]

Excellent Days

      Someone told me once that I lived a monkish life. She meant something vaguely Buddhist rather than vaguely Catholic, I think, but when pressed she said only that I was bald, lived quietly, read books and wrote a lot, and liked to walk and cook as if they were meditative activities. I […]

How Pop Culture Made Revolution Safe, or at Least Safer

      The December 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by alleged gunman Luigi Mangione on the streets of New York City had all the hallmarks of a bold revolutionary act, broadly spelled out in three words inscribed on cartridge cases found at the murder scene: “Delay,” “Deny,” “Depose.” For revolutionaries in waiting, […]

The Frangible Beauty of Ceramics

        The biannual Art & Design sale at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in St. Louis’ Metro East, was as well-attended last weekend as usual. Visitors shopped in the atrium of the Art & Design building for ceramics as well as glass, metal, photo, and print objects. Proceeds funded the Wagner Potters Association, […]

Radiant Mischief at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame

    The fabric is Scottish broadcloth, a white as warm as the sunlit cathedral stone. The colors have the pure brilliance of the stained glass. The design is clean, strong, and radiant; I cannot imagine anything more joyful. Or riskier. In a time when many Catholics are growing more conservative, the Archbishop of Paris […]

Conclave Breaks the Seal of Secrecy

    My assignment (this was years ago) was to profile Archbishop Justin Rigali. A shy, diffident man who had zero desire to talk to the press. Frantic for insight, I did the usual sharklike circling, interviewing everyone I could find who knew him well. But the most helpful interview was with John Padberg, a […]

This Sporting Life is Cinema’s Ultimate Portrait of Manhood

        Many of us are old enough to remember the 1970s and its endless debates, battles, and even “war of the sexes,” when feminism emerged from its nascent forms and became a seismic force. How many of us, by contrast, cringe at the seemingly endless debate of what it means to “be […]