I saw Ford v Ferrari with two car junkies, though their jitters through the previews quickly settled into polite interest as the film proved, by most metrics, to be standard fare. There’s little antiquing...

What is there to say about my time working for the Old Gold & Black that isn’t banal? “It’s the people,” some would say, and it is, but that sentiment has become obvious and feels like scrambling...

The gap between our contemporary conception of the Holocaust and that of its historical reality is often bridged by a series of grave images or narrative confessions. Both aim to impress the tragedy on...

I wrote last week that my release from social media returned me to intellectual clarity. That I no longer have to hurdle over oncoming obstacles of images like the Google error bot has afforded me not...

Motherless Brooklyn, written for the screen and directed by Edward Norton, is a rare treat that blends canon with creativity. Based on Jonathan Lethem’s eponymous novel, the film instantiates itself...

We have all read countless laments about social media’s psychological fallout: depression, anxiety, loneliness. The platforms meant for perpetual connection isolate us in silos of comparative torture....

One wonders what’s a-swirl in director Robert Eggers’ head. Do his monstrously imaginative thoughts tear at each other until they pare down into some grisly vision? If ever the creative collateral...

What are these things I write? What are the various cultural flash-points, aesthetic philosophies and slight, introspective discoveries put down in these pages? Am I a critic, an artist, a recycler? Am...

Last week I wrote about what literature knows, about the things fine literature can teach us through form and style, aesthetic excellence and splendor. The knowledge transferred to us can seem ineffable...

I’ve boycotted television. Why? Because I don’t want my (relatively unmalleable) taste unwittingly caged by the Netflixian ethos of limitation by inundation. What does that florid nonsense mean? It...

It is often said that literature mimics real life, that it absorbs the contours of lived experience and reflects them back to us in a new way. Paul Ricouer defines literature’s mimetic act as a kind...

“The horror!” Marlon Brando exclaims near the end of Apocalypse Now, having seen the uncut evil shredding humans into hollow men. He might have shouted something similar at Heath Ledger’s Joker from...