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Articles
Conjuring Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin’s poetry notoriously defies translation. Even Vladimir Nabokov made a mighty attempt at bringing Eugene Onegin, Pushkin’s masterpiece, into English, with results that pleased almost no one. Edmund...
Covering Antietam
On October 2, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln met with General George B. McClellan near the site of the battle of Antietam. Sixteen days earlier, McClellan had turned back General...
Shadow Show
In the last fifty years, Artemisia Gentileschi has risen to new eminence. She originally gained fame among her seventeenth-century contemporaries as a talented Baroque painter in the manner of...
Cult of the Cutting-Edge
Should art aspire to be “absolutely cutting-edge”? What exactly does that phrase mean? In The Square, a new movie written and directed by Ruben Östlund, the aspiration is voiced...
Steinem vs. Friedan
The Fight is over, for now. I hope it will continue, however, in a bigger stadium. Which is to say another theatre a little less way-off Broadway than The...
Abraham Lincoln, Matchmaker
What if Abraham Lincoln had sent a young socialite to meet an injured soldier, without telling her that the soldier was black? What if an unspoken romance blossomed across...
Encompassing Bowdoin
What Does Bowdoin Teach? That’s the title of the 360-page report that my colleague Michael Toscano and I published on April 3. Coincidence gave us a nice round number...
