Arts & Letters
A selection of recent articles on this topic
A Rudderless Odyssey
There is much to like about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The movie is visually stunning; the set pieces,…
The Dot, The Dash, and Everything Between
In the latest installment of the ongoing interview series with contributing editor Mark Bauerlein, Florence Hazrat joins…
All Labor Is Labor
The Elizabethan commonplace comparing creative production to pregnancy and birth is baked into the English language. We…
Asters
The asters bloom amid late-summer heat,Low-lying stars that will not linger longAnd bend their sprays beneath the…
To Live Fittingly
Why do the humanities face such a hostile climate? In part it’s because academics have excluded ordinary,…
Early Arrival
Last year we laid squares of sodDown in our bare yard. At first,Pale, slender spears grew tall…
Centaur
The Etruscan centaur holds up his right hand,not palm outward as if to stop chariot trafficor solemnly…
A Celtic Skull in the Museum at La Tène
Two-thousand years and more untouched I burnedIn soil’s slow fire. On the beachAbove, ringed by thin, withered…
The Holdfast Sanctity of Sigrid Undset
When I traveled to Norway for the first time, I was already a devoted reader of Sigrid…
Prisoners of Our Own Devices
To Arrive Where We Started:Belonging in the Modern World by ian marcus corbinyale university press, 200 pages, $32.50…
Lena Dunham Sticks the Landing
Famesick:A Memoirby lena dunhamrandom house, 416 pages, $32 If offered the choice, how many of us would…
Great Books Are Not Good for Everyone
Great Books are back on everyone’s mind. Christopher Nolan is making a film about one. Many fear…
The Priests of High Art
Novelists, playwrights, and historians, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (1822–1896 and 1830–1870) were also the supreme chroniclers…
Pärt’s Music of the Word
The music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has been described as spiritual, transcendent, Eastern, angelic, ethereal, mystical,…
Because It’s There
In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain, the Enlightenment champion Lodovico Settembrini and the Jesuit communist Leo…
