Poetry is largely a sentimental education, Joseph Brodsky says in his essay “The Keening Muse,” about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and her unique ability to imbue the monuments of Russian history...

The first third of Roma, the new Netflix film written, directed, shot and co-edited by Alfonso Cuarón, works as a lullaby; that is to say, in the age of ubiquitous detonations, the nascent stages of Cuarón’s...

Who will write the next great American novel? What does that even mean? In the shifting cultural-political landscape, the Great American Novel, as a category, seems to be increasingly open to more diverse...

It is a marvel that Joel and Ethan Coen remain able to produce such ruthlessly entertaining films, while continually imbuing them with rich ideas. But such a statement has become banal; we expect the Coens...

Desire is often seen as weakness, as a suspension of rationale for a kind of primal, emotional freefall. As our desire increases, our mental capacities dim, swerving us off course in a reckless direction....

Reading, to me, is mostly an exercise in admiration. Admiring an author’s stylistic and syntactic achievement, whether in the work as a whole, or in a single sentence, is an ineffable, invaluable gift....

To demarcate the periods of our lives is almost wholly a retrospective exercise, a way of presently manifesting, through language, a significant memory on the linear continuum. That is, time itself passes,...

If the new Suspiria tells us anything, it is that Luca Gaudagnino’s languid, slowly-unfolding aesthetic palette is among the most protean we’ve seen. Compared to the lovely, gilded rays and burbling...

For Søren Kierkegaard, there is an ever-present anguish in us, a craving for individual meaning and purpose underneath both our survivalist dogmas and our more idiosyncratic disappointments. It is a deep...

One can easily imagine how Colette, a film about a female artist whose literature and life is oppressed by her greedy, domineering husband, was green-lit by Hollywood execs trying too hard to capture the...

I realize it comes across as silly and self-involved and absurdly indulgent to write about the concerns that come with my parents flying across the world to visit me in Denmark. What concerns? There should...

I was recently trying to decide, amongst my group of male friends, if there was a definitive “it” girl, a woman in film or television or culture-at-large, who seems to collect all the attention —...