Arts & Letters
A selection of recent articles on this topic
Visions of Hell
A first proposition: High-quality film video lowers the cost of horror to zero. The horror of the…
The Fanfiction Reckoning
First Things is proud to introduce a new podcast series. Secret Third Thing is a show about…
In the Footsteps of Aeneas
Gian Lorenzo Bernini had only just turned twenty when he finished his sculpture of Aeneas, the mythical…
Mark Twain’s Religion
In 2014, when Kevin Malone’s opera Mysterious 44 premiered in Manchester, England, the production featured narrative voiceovers…
The Strange Sadness of Blue Moon
Because we live in an age of cheap cynicism and alleged sophistication, many viewers of Richard Linklater’s…
Caravaggio the Destroyer (ft. Jaspreet Singh Boparai)
In this episode, Jaspreet Singh Boparai joins R. R. Reno on The Editor’s Desk to talk about…
Stevenson’s Treasure
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their…
Fact-Checking the New Yorker
Back in the day, when the New Yorker set the standard for literary elegance among serious American…
On the Pleasure of Admiring
The great essayist William Hazlitt observed that there is pleasure in hating. “Without something to hate,”...
The Viking History of Greenland
There was now much talk of looking for new lands.” This line from the thirteenth-century Icelandic Saga…
The Madness in Miami
The great boxing spectacles of the past—the Thrilla in Manila (1975) and the Rumble in the Jungle…
Lancelot in the Desert
The Last Westernerby chilton williamson jr.386 pages, st. augustine’s press, $19.95 In his dedication to The Last…
The Lonely Passion of Reginald Pole
A year after I became a Catholic, when my teenaged son was thinking about college, we visited…
Letters
As a forty-eight-year-old who graduated from high school in 1995, Trevin Wax’s “We Were Jesus Freaks”...
The Wallet
Oxblood, bifold, kept In a back bedroom Closet all these years, It dates to my time Of…
