Gambling, Debt, and Literary Fortune
Dostoevsky lost everything at the Wiesbaden casino, but the episode seemed to finally reveal to him the true depth of his habit, that it threatened not only his marriage but the life of his wife.
Dealing Beautifully With the Ordinary
The comedian is an anti-Romantic: Wherever he steps foot, following in the steps of romantic tourists with their love of the exotic, whether artificial and pre-modern (Europe) or wildly natural (Alaska, safaris), he dispels their illusions.
History in Light and Shadow
“Lumière Mystérieuse: Soane and the Architecture of Light,” at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, examines Soane’s innovative use of light as a design material as integral as bricks and mortar.
Not the Good Guys
Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood doesn’t present Dalton and Booth as heroes. They’re by turns endearing, ridiculous, and contemptible. But they do the only admirable things in the story.
The Cerebral and the Sensual in Equipoise
Arp, like Guggenheim, straddled multiple worlds. He was born in Strasbourg, which is one of Europe’s oddest cities.
Christian Dior and the Aesthetics of Femininity
In 1947, Christian Dior unwittingly prompted a transcontinental reappraisal of the relationships of femininity and culture: were women to be muses, icons, agents, or all three?
Archaeology’s Heroic Age
New Yorker John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood were classic nineteenth-century adventurers, immortalized for revealing the glories of ancient Maya civilization to an astonished world.
Humanity’s Most Beautiful Problem
Color makes our lives more vivid, more beautiful. But it also hides ugly truths.
A Group, a Sound and an Era
After reading Go Ahead in the Rain, I hope that Hanif Abdurraqib is not the last person to choose a deep and abiding love for the music that makes us real to one another.
The Last Call
Provocations is the last call to a society that “can barely survive the anxieties of freedom.”
The Best Books on British Romanticism
The Romantics were the first artists to truly have to grapple with the role of art in the face of the growth of systematic scientific knowledge as we know recognize it.
A Philosophical Friendship
David Hume and Adam Smith, both individually and through their joint attempt to create a new, all-inclusive “science of man,” can be seen to have lit fires that still kindle vigorously.
Womb and Doom: Frankenstein as Mother and Maker
The moral power of nature was waning in Shelley’s time. It diminished in proportion to the increase of the studies of physical power – lightning, Leyden jars, Voltaic piles, and most poignantly, electric eggs.
The Aesthetics Of The Axe
It says much about our fascination for everything prehistoric that the stone tools and shaped rocks recently exhibited in First Sculpture: From Handaxe to Figure Stone at the Nasher Sculpture Center did not seem out of place there.
Poetic Misprision in Art and Science
The relationship between art and biology is in flux, as is that of the humanities and natural sciences, and of art history and neuroscience.
The Palate of Nations
However little we control, food is an area where we can exercise our wills and our desires, and also grab a little piece of our family history, our ethnic history, our planetary history.
