It is no surprise then that Rushdie’s intellectual inquiries have so often centered around the notions of borders and boundaries; transgressions and journeys; the crossing of frontiers, and the struggle…
An exhibit at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg is called Dvoe, or “Twosome.” It pairs paintings and sculptures to suggest dualities in Russian art: East vs. West, peasant vs.…
With a collection of essays, you can always tackle one piece in a hurry—say before bed or waiting for a train—without leaving a vaguely remembered thought to be picked up…
George Orwell has suffered the saddest fate for a political writer: he has been rendered uncontroversial. Animal Farm and 1984 are assigned reading for junior high school students around the…
In a lighthearted reference, Christopher Woodward begins his book with the image of Charlton Heston finding the ruins of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes—an image prefigured…
Though many jazz enthusiasts would agree that classic jazz belongs to the modern art tradition, until now no author had completed a comprehensive analysis of jazz through this lens. Alfred…
They are the kind of words that give record producers ulcers and bald heads: “Hey, I don’t have my horn.” On March 29, 1954, Miles Davis uttered that phrase to…
Albert Einstein once said that “the hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” In The Great Tax Wars, Steven Weisman attempts to prove Einstein wrong as…
What do a rose, a falcon’s spiral descent, and Salvador Dali’s “Sacrament of the Last Supper” have in common? As Mario Livio explains, they all share a connection to phi,…
Johan Huizinga, the great historian of late medieval culture, was one of those rare figures in the study of ideas whose own stature and sensibility easily matched those of his…
Peter Ibbetson