Skip to main content

books

The Conflicted Soul of Modern Liberalism

Warren Breckman The New Republic
Tracing the history of an idea, the author charts liberalism’s two century Jekyll and Hyde existence as a credo on freedom and an ill-fitting defender of mass democracy.

books

The Soaring Writer Who Landed on His Feet

Michael Hirsch New Politics
A crime novel with a difference, this one centers on murders in a vacation town that appear to take on racial significance going back to World War Two and a segregated, elite military command.

books

Remembering Philip Roth (1933-2018)

Nathaniel Rich The New York Review of Books
An homage to the esteemed late novelist and nonfiction writer Philip Roth, who died on May 22, leaving a legacy of thick description of an American culture where, in Roth's ironic words, “everything goes and nothing matters."

tv

Anthony Bourdain Was the Best White Man

Malika Rao Vulture
Bourdain engaged without fetishizing, touristed with ease, in the way of a person who’s been toggling between identities so long, the act of meeting a stranger from a strange land is the only familiar feeling.

books

Comic Art in the Academy

Paul Buhle New Politics
Once the provenance of teens, counterculturalists or authors who were fans, comics are now entrenched in academic discourse in what the essayist calls, "the theorizing of a kind of artistic poetics." The book under review ably looks at nonfiction comics as apt reflections on modern social ills.

books

The Company She Kept

Michelle Dean The New Republic
A survey of the life, work and associations of the late New York Review of Books editor Elizabeth Hardwick, the transplanted Southerner who became a writer of note among the literary and political circles comprising the New York Intellectuals of the pre- and postwar period, she had a knack for illustrating what might have been called feminist themes by way of specific details of specific lives.

Tom Morello: Making America Rage Again

Steve Appleford Capital & Main
Tom Morello performing “We’re at a crucial historical juncture, where literally the fate of the planet hangs by a thread,” says rocker Tom Morello. “We are musicians, so our message is in the mosh pit.”

books

We Know About Bad Books, But Are There Bad Readers, Too?

Merve Emre Boston Review
The author queries the existence of bad readers, linking causes not to illiteracy or injuries of class or the diffusion of mass culture, but to a Cold War literary trend sporting "an abundance of paraliterary works," such as memoirs, diaries, biographies, diplomatic studies, and feature reports as primers for engaging with literary texts as seemingly historically accurate yet stressing outcomes and expectations consonant with systemic social ends.
Subscribe to Culture