The American Revolution Wasn’t the Main Event
America’s influence went beyond haberdashery. Several of the world’s leading revolutionaries had spent time in the country. The English-born Thomas Paine started his radical career writing…
Tag
a critic at large
Listening to Joe Rogan
Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention spans, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is free-form, runs…
How the Murdoch Family Built an Empire—and Remade the News
St. Bride’s, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists’ church. Having weathered not a few disasters—the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the Luftwaffe in…
When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills
Bernie Sanders was just a skinny, gap-toothed kid from Brooklyn in the autumn of 1953, when Vermont opened an information bureau at 1268 Avenue of the Americas, next door to Radio City…
The New York Shooting That Defined an Era
“Death Wish” was the dark New York story of its era—an anti-“Annie Hall” for the armed and aggrieved. An architect sees his wife killed and his daughter raped by muggers and responds by…
How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex
The latest and most vigorous addition to this genre is “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone” (Norton), by Quill Kukla, a professor of philosophy and disability studies at…
Is the Dictionary Done For?
He also introduces us to terms likely to be new to many readers: “sportocrat,” “on fleek,” “vajazzle,” and the German word Backpfeifengesicht, which is defined as “a face that deserves to…
How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as hoaxes or misidentified species. The French…
What Do We Want from Our Child Stars?
Still, Master Betty ruled the little province of Parnassus devoted to underage thespians until the advent of Shirley Temple—and it’s some measure of her talent, or maybe of her moment,…
The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story
I read George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” sometimes hailed as the greatest British novel, in a rain forest in western Indonesia. I was there as a graduate student, spending my days slogging…
Pan-African Dreams, Post-Colonial Realities
Two new books, on Kwame Nkrumah’s promise and Idi Amin’s tyranny, capture the soaring hopes and bitter aftermath of Africa’s age of independence. Source link
Where the Battle Over Free Speech Is Leading Us
When we think of the history of free-speech rights, we tend to think of the Anglo-American legal tradition. A virtue of Dabhoiwala’s book is that it is transnational, and there are…
The Autocrat of English Usage
In 1940, St. Clair McKelway typed a memo to William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor for fact. McKelway was writing a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell for the magazine, and he…
What to Make of the Mother Who Made You
It is hard to overstate the literary impact, in 1997, of Arundhati Roy’s début novel, “The God of Small Things.” A family drama set in a small town in Kerala, in southern India, it was…
How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge
When I was growing up, a critic was a jerk, a crank, a spoilsport. I figured that was the whole idea. My favorite characters on “The Muppet Show” were Statler and Waldorf, the two geezers…
Did Racial Capitalism Set the Bronx on Fire?
Sometimes people say exactly the right thing. Other times, they don’t, and we just pretend that they did. When eighteenth-century Parisians clamored for bread, did Marie Antoinette…
The Lives and Loves of James Baldwin
An interviewer once asked James Baldwin if he’d ever write something without a message. “No writer who ever lived,” Baldwin said, “could have written a line without a message.” This is…
The Iranian Revolution Almost Didn’t Happen
Strange to think, but there was a time when the United States’ most steadfast ally in the Middle East was Iran. In 1953, the C.I.A. had backed a coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadegh, the…
Was the Renaissance Real?
Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet. Colonialism and imperialism can’t explain it; they’re as old as…
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
There’s real reason for caution here, starting with the idea that interactions with A.I. can be treated as genuine relationships. Oliver Burkeman exasperatedly writes that, unless you…
The Argentinean Comic Strip That Galvanized a Generation
A uniformed police officer stands sideways, his head turned to face us. His eyes are unnaturally close together, rendered by the artist as two black dots floating in the very center of his…
Do We Need Another Green Revolution?
“Carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald concludes. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while cultivated meat hasn’t really made it to market.” He…
Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with a President from the Gilded Age
Late in his life, McKinley reconsidered protectionism. He was reëlected in 1900, and by his second Administration he felt that the United States should greet globalization by entering…
How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire
In the four and a half decades since its founding, the Library of America has issued not only the pillars of our national literature but such populist fare as the lyrics of Cole Porter and…