The Nominal Joys of a Discombobulated Text
‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Riddley Walker’ stand as scurrilous hold-outs, novels that experiment with form, juggle your expectations, and even jangle your nerves.
By Ben Fulton
How Roy Ayers Put Soul on “Nice”
Roy Ayers coasted on his unique sentiment and vibe. It was sublime, positive, and unfailingly warm and luminescent. What else would you expect a writer, any writer, to say about the musical talent who gave us the song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”?
How Zelensky Might Channel Thucydides
It is anyone’s guess as to whether Ukrainian President Volodoymyr Zelensky has read ‘The History of the the Peloponnesian War,’ even if his words spill into realms that Thucydides, with his imperatives for the preservation of law and solidarity against violence and calamity, would recognize at once.
The Universal, Demarcating Power of The Scream
By drawing a line between its disturbed central figure and the serenity of the two bystanders at the vanishing point of the painting’s perspective, The Scream asks us to question the “sanity” we pretend to hold on to.
Our Current Saga of Eggs
For the resourceful and the resilient, there will always be something else to eat for breakfast. Still, how interesting would it be if we let the high price of eggs direct our thoughts and actions beyond the simple matter of cost?
From the War of 1812 to Booing the U.S. Anthem, a Line of Little-Known History
With the current spate of Canadian-led booing of the U.S. national anthem at professional hockey games, answered by American-led booing of the Canadian national anthem, these strains converge into parallel lines of history. One has already been written in the War of 1812, while the future of Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods and threats of annexation as “our 51st state” is anyone’s guess.
Never Mind Kendrick vs. Drake, Get Yourself Some Young vs. Skynyrd
What we need desperately from pop music and rap artists, and what is in short supply now, is not rivalry for its own sake and spectacle, but a sense that our favorite songs of the future might have something immediate to say beyond the context of two individual artists.
Why To Be or Not to Be Is the Film for Our Time
I have no hesitation declaring “To Be or Not to Be” perhaps the greatest film of all time, nor should anyone else. That is not written for effect. I mean it, both in emphasis and a level of insistent aggression that, if you have not seen it, stop what you are doing and watch it forthwith.
The Solace of a Half-Empty Photo Album
Somewhere between pages 25 and 30, showcasing my daughter’s fourth-grade photo and Christmas of 2015, the images cease, as if my photo album took a different route from my own at some mysterious fork in time. Somehwere between the physical world and the ether of the digital, years slipped away, as if they never took form.
Who Is Afraid of the Bible?
Through centuries of existence, in a multitude of translations, and in myriad versions and bindings, the Bible has never mustered victory in any battle besides sheer force of influence. Even then, and up against all the glories and benefits its believers promise, it still finds plenty of ways to fall short. Put both of those qualities together, and you get a book everyone should read, even in taxpayer-funded public schools.
Turner’s Fire For Our Time
What Turner’s remarkable painting of that long-ago night in London reminds us, though, is that if fire’s wrath is not ours to contain, it will always remain dormant and waiting for our homage, whether framed or not.
How Pop Culture Made Revolution Safe, or at Least Safer
Rather than skulk in the corners of history some of the most turbulent figures in radical left terrorism found fertile afterlives in popular culture, both film and music, that treat them alternately as doomed romantics or curious, bizarre artifacts.