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Photograph by Zbyszek Zolkiewski From The New York Review of Books: The hard-drinking crowd of painters and poets I hung out with at Cedar Bar, White Horse, and San Remo had little interest in fine cooking. With me, the more I drank, the hungrier I became. Also, I preferred...

We stand for the opposite of whatever The Economist says.

Battle of Borodino, Louis-François, Baron Lejeune, 1812 by Jenny Diski It’s beginning to feel as if the beat of our lives is marked by acts of human violence and stupidity. Our lives mostly consist in routines of work and play, and intermittent moments of spring, summer, art, literature, comedy,...

Atrium of Nazarbayev University. Photograph by Liz Jones by Jim Sleeper U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings...

Jodi Wille in 2012. Photograph by Joe Mabel From Full Stop: FullStop: Music fans also seem be people that get it the most intuitively. How did the relationship with Drag City come about, and why do think it’s been so easy to bridge the gap between the film and...

At my artist’s residency in France. Long bike ride through the birch woods today, then two swims in the Seine river. No one around. I don’t want to live in cities anymore. Not all the time. Or at least not in any American city. And not in soul-sucking New...

The MOOC era has dawned with a rush of utopian and dystopian bombast, much of which is bound to be wrong. A platform for enabling high-quality instruction over the internet will probably be a boon for higher education at large, even if it drastically changes the working conditions of...

I was 7 when I first watched The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s classic film adaptation about a family living in an empty hotel as caretakers for a cold winter. Jack, the father, quickly transcends on a journey to madness, triggered in part by the family’s alienation. As a 7-year-old, I...

Girl Reading, Winslow Homer, 1879 by Agnes Repplier In reading the recently published Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray, a very interesting and valuable piece of biography, albeit somewhat lengthy for these hurried days, we are forcibly impressed with one surprising truth which we were far from suspecting in...

Ruth First by Ben Slow in Soweto, Johannesburg. Photograph by Derek Smith From Guernica: Joe Slovo and Ruth First. We are entering their paths. Both grew up unbelievers in Jewish or any religious faith. They met when Ruth was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Joe just returned from...