Arts & Culture: The New Criterion -November 2024
Tag Archives: Poems
The New York Review Of Books – October 17, 2024
‘The Death of Some Ideal’
The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.
The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright
The Fact Man
At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.
The Oxford Handbook of Daniel Defoe edited by Nicholas Seager and J.A. Downie
The Problems with Polls
Political polling’s greatest achievement is its complete co-opting of our understanding of public opinion, which we can no longer imagine without it.
Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliott Morris
Arts & Culture: The New Criterion -October 2024
Democracy in America: a symposium
Tocqueville’s limitations by Glenn Ellmers
Democracy in America: an introduction by Roger Kimball
Our Athenian American democracy by Victor Davis Hanson
Tocqueville versus progressive democracy by Daniel J. Mahoney
The Washington octopus by James Piereson
The New York Review Of Books – October 3, 2024
Savvy in the Grass
Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth by Zoë Schlanger
The Nation of Plants by Stefano Mancuso, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti
Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence by Paco Calvo with Natalie Lawrence
An Entry of One’s Own
A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.
Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries edited by Sarah Gristwood
The Bliss and the Risks
The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.
Paula Modersohn-Becker: Ich bin Ich/I Am Me an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, June 6–September 9, 2024, and the Art Institute of Chicago, October 12, 2024–January 12, 2025
The New York Review Of Books – September 19, 2024
The Secret Agent
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.
Venture-Backed Trumpism
Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?
Succumbing to Spectacle
During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.
Jenny Holzer: Light Line – An exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, May 17–September 29, 2024
Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle by Jonathan Crary
The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1917–1935 by Sjeng Scheijen
The Most Conservative Branch
Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism by Stephen Breyer
In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.
Arts & Culture: The New Criterion – Sept 2024
Arresting scenes
On John Constable’s The Hay Wain & the foundations of the West.
We write as The New Criterion’s annual period of aestivation enters its home stretch. The cicadas are buzzing, the days are noticeably shorter, and the leaves—some of them—are already edged with brown. Certain summers feature quiet expanses of lazy days. This one was different. In July, Donald Trump, except for the tip of his right ear, dodged a would-be assassin’s bullet; Joe Biden dropped (or, we now know, was pushed) out of the 2024 presidential race but, as of this writing, remains president; Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice president, stepped into the vacancy and magically became the new candidate for president, choosing the Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
The New York Review Of Books – July 18, 2024
Reimagining the Ordinary
The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.
Jean Hélion: La Prose du monde – an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, March 22–August 18, 2024
A Story of His Own
In James, Percival Everett’s smart, funny, brutal retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Everett takes readers deeper into the capricious yet certain violence of American slavery, giving the characters a life that seems to lift off the page.
James by Percival Everett
The Watercolorist
The short fiction of Ángel Bonomini possesses a lightness that sets him apart from contemporaries like Borges and Cortázar.
The Novices of Lerna by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman
The New York Review Of Books – June 20, 2024
Livelier Than the Living
In the Renaissance, reading became both a passion and a pose of detachment—for those who could afford it—from the pursuits of wealth and power.
A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe by Lina Bolzoni, translated from the Italian by Sylvia Greenup
Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England
Black Atlantics
The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way by Louis Chude-Sokei
The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora by Louis Chude-Sokei
The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei
The New Criterion – June 2024 Arts/Culture Preview
The New Criterion – The June 2024 issue features:
Protecting America’s promise
On combating anti-Semitism & anti-Americanism.
All the rage
On White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman.
The masterpiece of our time
On The Gulag Archipelago at fifty.
Building Palm Beach
On the town’s history & architecture.
The New Criterion – April 2024 Arts/Culture Preview
Boomers Daily 