Classics
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Should We Make Classics history? July 02, 2025
It is often said that the Humanities are in crisis. If so, this new book by distinguished Roman historian Walter Scheidel should be of interest to anyone who studies or teaches the Humanities, and especially Classics and Ancient History. Scheidel’s p...
What the End of Reading Truly Means June 07, 2024
In a city center somewhere in the ancient Greek world—let’s say Epidaurus in the sixth century BC—a religious festival is in progress. The mood is festive, buoyed by the free barbecue that religious sacrifices occasioned for the entire local populace...
'Do the Right Thing' Revisited June 06, 2024
Spike Lee’s 1989 classic Do the Right Thing is known for having sparked debates over conflicting methods of addressing racial oppression, namely, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent, integrationist approach and Malcom X’s separatist and–when necessa...
Shohei Ohtani Is the GOAT June 03, 2024
Just over half a century ago, Major League Baseball introduced the designated hitter rule in the American League, consigning pitchers to the bench for half of each game. This year marks only the third since the National League adopted the still-contr...
The Sexy Mind Games of “Hit Man” June 03, 2024
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase “the banality of evil,” popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as “This Gun for Hire” (1942) and “M...
Ancient Worlds October 24, 2023
The discipline of “classical” literature has long been associated with social gatekeeping. The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek—or at least enough of an acquaintance to be able to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles ove...
Marty and Leo: An Essential Pairing October 20, 2023
In an essay in Esquire in 2010, Martin Scorsese laid his chips on the table. “Leonardo and I have made four pictures together,” he wrote. “He is absolutely essential to me, to all of us, and essential to the history of movies.”That last claim is part...
Why Do We Persist With Opera? October 20, 2023
Arts Council England’s recent funding round enticed an unprecedented 1,723 applications. If all of these had been granted, the total funding would have exceeded £2 billion. Ultimately, £445 million was assigned to 985 organisations for the 2023-26 In...
Martin Scorsese on “Killers of the Flower Moon” October 18, 2023
Martin Scorsese has the best curveball in the business. His 2013 film, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” based on the true story of a large-scale financial fraudster, is also his wildest and wackiest comedy, closer in inspiration to Jerry Lewis than to Oliv...
Sly Stone Reflects on the Past and His New Memoir October 17, 2023
It's been 55 years since Sly and the Family Stone released their first hit, the psychedelic dancefloor stomper "Dance to the Music." Since then, Sly Stone, the group's leader and frontman, has lived out a life as one of America's most exuberant and c...
"The Soul of Civility" by Alexandra Hudson October 16, 2023
Alexandra Hudson, daughter of the "Manners Lady," was raised to respect others. But as she grew up, Hudson discovered a difference between politeness—a superficial appearance of good manners—and true civility. In this timely book, Hudson sheds light ...
A Fresh and Tragic 'Iliad' October 16, 2023
The Iliad and the Odyssey have been translated into English again and again over the past several centuries, and about once every two decades a translator emerges as Homer’s standard-bearer for a generation. E. V. Rieu astonished the English-speaking...
Kill Bill Volume 1 Is the Most Tarantino Film of Them All October 11, 2023
She landed at the multiplex this summer like a pink confetti bomb, blithely crushing the patriarchy under one (permanently) arched foot. Two decades before Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, though, Quentin Tarantino lured legions of moviegoers with his own bloo...
Encountering Plato's Symposium October 10, 2023
In an article appearing in the March 1897 number of the Atlantic Monthly, Harvard professor Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) lamented the dominant influence of German-style scientific philology on classics professors in American institutions of higher lear...
Marriage Has Been Divorced From Love October 05, 2023
Because there is nothing Americans will not politicise, marriage is now at the heart of a culture war.On the traditionalist side, a loose assortment of classical conservatives, terminally online reactionary trad types, and the odd dissident feminist ...
That Fine-Sounding Language October 03, 2023
By the middle of the eighteenth century, it was possible to find introductory, digested accounts of more or less any area of intellectual life, including classical languages and literature—forms of knowledge once thought synonymous with being a forma...
Confessions of a Netflix DVD Dead-Ender September 05, 2023
The first set of DVDs that Netflix mailed to my apartment consisted of Pedro Almodóvar’s camp classic Dark Habits, the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, and the Nicolas Cage action vehicle Con Air. That was 14 years and more than 500 DVDs ago...
Our Lost Classical Learning September 05, 2023
Ancient Athens was perhaps the first state in history in which substantial numbers of citizens were literate, and ideas were able to circulate freely. Literacy eroded the gulf between rulers and ruled and made possible the creation of a radically new...
Classical Liberalism vs. "Climate Liberalism" September 05, 2023
In an EconTalk discussion, MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel, author of What We Know About Climate Change, remarked: “If I’d written a book called What We Don’t Know about Climate Science, it would have been an encyclopedia.” Emanuel added in regard to...
Ramblin’ Men September 04, 2023
For those of us who came to the Allman Brothers Band late—not contemporaneously during their brief, indisputable reign as the hottest and coolest rock ’n’ roll band in the 1970s, but rather as the children of Boomers listening to classic-rock radio i...
A Master Novelist Visits Hell September 01, 2023
The writer Mary Gaitskill’s latest book, The Devil’s Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams, was republished this month by McNally Editions, which for two years now has been reissuing modern classics. Gaitskill is an era-defining talent, one of the b...
William Boyd Appreciates Stendahl September 01, 2023
“Stendhal” is a pseudonym. The author’s real name was Marie-Henri Beyle. Stendhal is best known for the great and classic 19th century French novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. He was born in Grenoble in 1793 and died in Pari...
Prattle of the Sexes August 25, 2023
Despite being a lover of the ancient world, I tend to be suspicious when contemporary commentators make a show of bolstering their convictions with a nod to Plato or some other big name of the distant past. It is one thing to trace a careful line of ...
The Pool August 22, 2023
My story, which is by no means a fiction, nor a case of seductive exaggeration, could best be described as a Baltimore snafu (situation normal: all fucked up). It also takes place in a quintessential battle zone—that of my semiretired parents’ condo ...
Roman Polanski at Ninety August 22, 2023
How should we assess the reputation of a late-career movie director?In the case of Roman Polanski, who turns ninety on August 18, we can clearly tick the box denoting a solid body of work. He’s responsible for half a dozen enduring films, and one — 2...
