Our authors are officially geniuses
It’s that time of year again: the recipients of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships have been announced. The MacArthur—often called the “genius award,” though program director Cecilia Conrad insists you don’t have to be… Read more »
Treat yourself (and the Public Theater) with a Shake-speare shake
The PR folks at Bank of America and Delta Airlines were apparently so nervous about the Trumpian depiction of Julius Caesar in last month’s Shakespeare in the Park production that… Read more »
That “Fearless Girl” sculpture should stay up — as a reminder of the Democratic Party
She stands with her hands on her hips and a ponytail flying in the wind. She squints her eyes and plants her feet in the earth with tremendous courage and… Read more »
A brief history of mall writing
Tolstoy once wrote, “Standalone retail outlets are all alike; every mall is a mall in its own way.” Countless scholars have debated the subtle shadings of this sentence, how it flashes with scenes… Read more »
About the size of that NEA budget
We wrote last week about what cuts to the NEA, NEH, and CPB would mean for arts in America, and the sheer ridiculousness of cutting programs that wring such high… Read more »
What cuts at the NEA, NEH, and CPB will mean for humanities, journalism, and arts in America
It’s virtually impossible to keep up with all of the destructive decisions coming out of the six-day-old Trump administration. It truly is a parade of horrors. But, that doesn’t mean… Read more »
“Whiteness is not inevitable”: Claudia Rankine on “the racial imaginary”
During recent visits to three different bookstores, National Book Award finalist and MacArthur “genius” Claudia Rankine was met with confusion when she sought recommendations for “books on whiteness.” “You… Read more »
Sandra Cisneros awarded National Medal of Arts
Last week, President Obama presented to author Sandra Cisneros—and eleven other artists, among them Morgan Freeman, Philip Glass, and Luis Valdez—a National Medal of Arts. The award is the highest given… Read more »
Welcome to Exmoor National Park: have a beer, take a walk, write a poem, be published in a book
Southwest England’s Exmoor National Park has long been a site of poetic speculation. The nineteenth-century poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously walked and pondered there (he has the footpath to prove… Read more »
Third time’s a charm for The Bell Jar film?
More than fifty years after its original publication, Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar is headed to the big screen (again). The first effort did not go well. The 1979… Read more »