Romanticism
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The Rise of the New Romanticism February 21, 2025
There is a new Marvel movie out and no one seems to care. No one, of course, is an exaggeration, a provocation, since there are obviously human beings buying tickets to Captain America: Brave New World and a good number who are discussing or even lik...
Where Did All the Good Bars Go? February 11, 2025
It’s easy to romanticize the good old days. Back when men wore suits and we didn’t know red meat was bad for us and there were trout in all the rivers. Yes, everything was better in this mythical past we never knew. But let’s acknowledge one thing th...
A. Lincoln, Political Poet June 14, 2024
It has become commonplace to say that Americans are more divided now than at any time since Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. The country is “confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War,” Ronald Brownstein argued in Ja...
'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...
On the Muppets January 03, 2024
Recently I saw The Muppet Christmas Carol for the first time. It was among the first times I’d seen The Muppets, period. I hadn’t grown up watching The Muppet Show; I’d seen virtually none of the films; I had a vague sense only that they were connect...
The Zeitgeist Is Changing December 29, 2023
Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a pe...
J. M. Coetzee’s Conflicted Romanticism December 06, 2023
HOW ROMANTIC IS J. M. COETZEE? At first the question, prompted by his eighteenth novel, The Pole, sounds like a joke. The journalist Rian Malan, who visited Coetzee’s office at the University of Cape Town in the early 1990s, reported that the novelis...
