Cultural Criticism
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How Culture Got Stupid July 15, 2024
Like a lot of ’90s kids, I had strict rules growing up about what I was allowed to watch on TV—but with a twist. Unlike my friends, whose viewing restrictions were based on things like sex or violence, my mom had a single, esoteric standard: I was no...
Analyst or Moralist? May 16, 2024
“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when ev...
What Is Culture Anyway? May 16, 2024
The UK’s cultural institutions are the boy who cried wolf. Since the early days of the 2010 coalition government’s austerity programme, museums, theatres, and art schools have prophesied the collapse of not only the country’s cultural infrastructure ...
Glenn Loury: An Intellectual Force of Nature May 14, 2024
Glenn Loury, the brilliant American economist and social commentator, now turned successful podcaster, has turned his hand to autobiography. The result, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, is a captivating memoir, so much so that if...
What Does A Healthy Culture Look Like? May 14, 2024
I’ve been reflecting this week on a couple of state-of-the-culture pieces — on Elle Griffin’s “No One Buys Books” and on Chris Jesu Lee’s The Nostalgia Plot and, like in some Sim for total dorks, I wanted to think through what the criteria of a healt...
An Interview with Emmeline Clein March 06, 2024
“Writing about my body is like breaking that mirror, cathartic and chaotic and unclean,” writes Emmeline Clein in Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. In her debut essay collection, Clein braids together scientific and academic writing, original r...
An Interview With Book Critic Becca Rothfeld March 06, 2024
I first met Becca Rothfeld when I pitched her back at the end of 2020. She had just joined The Point Magazine as a contributing editor, but I reached out because I loved her essay “Same As It Ever Was,” published in a magazine called Cabinet. The pie...
Lauren Oyler’s Book Dissects Contemporary Cultural Criticism March 06, 2024
“I think ‘why I’m right’ should be the subtext of any piece of critical writing,” states American novelist and journalist Lauren Oyler in her new book No Judgement. “Sometimes I become energised by a feeling that I need to right some discursive wrong...
