It is an act of vandalism that Poor Things, the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray’s astonishing 1992 novel, even shares a title with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s atrocious reimagining of a book he didn’t understand. Gray decorated his works with Blakean visionary illustrations, and his 1980s masterpiece Lanark is as close to life-changing as novels get. […]
Readers of a certain age may recall when school overcrowding was a big worry. Throughout the 1990s, as the baby boomers became school parents — that is, as the millennials started flooding elementary schools across the country — students were moved into temporary classrooms erected on the playing field, and PTAs everywhere fretted about overpopulation […]
In its three previous outings, the HBO anthology series True Detective used police work to explore and defend masculine virtues. The show’s new season abandons that project, inaugurating instead a novel television genre in which radical environmentalism, racial complaint, and the occult vie for narrative supremacy. Call it woke Gothic. Or don’t call it anything […]
There’s a legend, most recently propagated in a song from the musical Hamilton, that upon surrendering at Yorktown, the British army played the tune “The World Turned Upside Down,” an English bar ballad written over 100 years prior. Though likely apocryphal, the story fits. The world had changed when Gen. Cornwallis laid down his sword to the […]
The famous Dupont slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry” was never intended to apply to drug use, but as Benjamin Breen explains in Tripping on Utopia, his charming and highly readable history of the rise and fall of psychedelic substances in the United States and abroad, it might as well have been. A historian of science […]
Among all the available definitions of cinema, few are at once truer and more politically incorrect than the one offered by Jean-Luc Godard. “The history of cinema,” the director of Breathless, Contempt, and Weekend once said, “is boys photographing girls.” In its day, Godard’s remark undoubtedly inspired a thousand dissertations on the evils of the […]
There have been great presidents who never did any soldiering, of course, but there has never been this long a run of American commanders in chief who haven’t seen war up close. Now that the only veteran to have seriously contended for the 2024 presidency, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), is gone from the race for […]
The Ukrainian ambassador to France is a courtly man who discharges his duties with all the gravitas of an envoy of a nation at war. Yet, at a ceremony on Jan. 16, he allowed his somber Slavic face to break into a smile — broad and uninhibited — as he pinned a ribbon and medal […]
Alabama on Thursday became the first state to execute a death row inmate using nitrogen gas. Kenneth Smith was put to death by nitrogen hypoxia at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., making his death the first in the U.S. to be carried out using the previously untested method. Smith was executed...
Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Dean Phillips (Minn.) said President Biden has seen a physical and communication decline, as fears of the president’s age swarm his reelection efforts. “Look, I’m an American, I want to respect my presidents. I do respect President Biden,” Phillips told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m not seeing cognitive decline. Of course,...