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…
The Partly Cloudy Patriot makes an unusual addition to the bedstands of most readers of American history. In this motley collection, 34-year-old Sarah Vowell keenly applies the lessons of popular…
By December 29, 1999, Abdel Wahab al-Effendi had been convinced of Islamism’s failure. Why should you care? He is a senior writer for al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem), a major Arabic-language…
An initiation involving coffins and naked mud wrestling, thousands of dollars given to members upon graduation, and financial support of Adolf Hitler: these are some of the myths about the…
How do you write a 560-page book about the Rolling Stones without using the word “egotist”? Stephen Davis, the author of a new chronicle of the rock legends, tries to…
Sir Ernst Gombrich, the venerable humanist and scholar of art who died last year at the age of ninety-two, was not a great believer in historical epochs, but his passing…
Peter Ibbetson