Politicians are forced to perform on a massive stage and under the fierce gaze of a thousand lenses, yet few have real skills in that arena.
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Book Review: “Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound” — Poetry of Common Cause
Carolynn Kingyens’s debut book of poems, Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound, reminds us of our everyday struggles.
Book Review: “Strange Hotel” — Battling the Inner Critic
Strange Hotel focuses on a woman’s life in middle age, suspended between the hollow satisfactions of memory and anxiety about the future.
Visual Arts Review: “Painting Edo” — Lessons About Art and the Good Society
Go feast your eyes.
Theater Review: “Manahatta” — Breaking the American Myths
The only way forward, to go beyond American myths of innocence, is to confront the enduring crimes of the past.
Film Review: “After We Leave” — No Place Like Home
I was blown away by how good After We Leave looks, its subtlety and plausibility and confident simplicity.
Author Interview: Gish Jen on “The Resisters”
Gish Jen’s new novel asks, Is ambition worthwhile in a world without justice?
Opera Album Review: The Most Neglected Master of Opera? Carl Maria von Weber, Early and Late
New recordings of Peter Schmoll and His Neighbors and of Euryanthe pose an embarrassing question: why is the opera repertory so narrow?
Concert Review: Singer/Songwriter Michael Kiwanuka — He Will Fill You With Light
Michael Kiwanuka blends singer/songwriter with funk and soul, the energy of Afro-pop with the intensity of psych and prog.
Book Review: “In the Land of Men” — A Woman in the Boy’s Club of Glossy Magazines
A victim Adrienne Miller is most certainly not: the self-portrait that emerges in her pages is of an accomplished, wise, wittily self-deprecating author of her own destiny.