Blog

Prostitutes, Poets, and Politicians: The World According to Jorge Amado
Prostitutes, Poets, and Politicians: The World According to Jorge Amado
He wrote of prostitutes with the reverence of saints, of revolutionaries with the whimsy of carnival dancers, and of Brazil’s dirt-poor nordestinos as if they were the inheritors of the... Read more...
Andy Warhol: The Pop Art Icon Who Turned Celebrity and Consumerism into High Art
Andy Warhol: The Pop Art Icon Who Turned Celebrity and Consumerism into High Art
He turned celebrity into sacrament, soup cans into icons, and said almost nothing while doing it. He cultivated detachment like a monk does silence, observing America’s consumer culture not with... Read more...
The Dreamer and the Despot: Knut Hamsun’s Warped Vision of Truth
The Dreamer and the Despot: Knut Hamsun’s Warped Vision of Truth
He celebrated the primal pulse of existence even as his sympathies lurched uncomfortably toward totalitarianism. Knut Hamsun seemed perpetually at odds with himself: a wanderer turned laureate, a pioneer of... Read more...
The Longest War: What Israel’s Siege of Gaza Is Really About
The Longest War: What Israel’s Siege of Gaza Is Really About
Have you ever wondered how Israel, a nuclear-armed military superpower, the only juggernaut of its kind in the Middle East, can carry out lightning-fast airstrikes in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and... Read more...
The Unsettler: Edward Said and the Power of Unbelonging
The Unsettler: Edward Said and the Power of Unbelonging
He infiltrated the Western canon only to detonate it from within, a Palestinian exile who became America's most dangerous professor. No thinker of the late 20th century proved more subversive,... Read more...
Liberty’s Reluctant Ally: Alexis de Tocqueville in America
Liberty’s Reluctant Ally: Alexis de Tocqueville in America
He came to America looking for prisons and found democracy instead—raw, noisy, self-righteous, and destined to shape the world. Alexis de Tocqueville did not intend to become a prophet. When... Read more...
Karl Popper: The Philosopher Who Built a Fortress for Science
Karl Popper: The Philosopher Who Built a Fortress for Science
He was a philosopher of falsification, a thinker who made doubt a virtue, error a method, and scientific progress a matter of relentless criticism. Karl Popper was a philosopher whose... Read more...
John Ashbery: The Poet Who Refused to Explain Himself
John Ashbery: The Poet Who Refused to Explain Himself
He wrote poems that sounded like nobody else's and often left readers wondering what, exactly, they had just read. John Ashbery was a poet of paradoxes. He was at once... Read more...
The Unrepentant Historian: Ilan Pappé’s Crusade for Palestine's Past
The Unrepentant Historian: Ilan Pappé’s Crusade for Palestine's Past
He wields history like a scalpel, excising myths, exposing raw truths, and leaving both admirers and enemies bleeding. Ilan Pappé carries the air of a man who has spent decades... Read more...
The Unreasonable Man: George Bernard Shaw’s Contradictions and Genius
The Unreasonable Man: George Bernard Shaw’s Contradictions and Genius
He preached socialism to crowds he despised, denounced war while flirting with tyrants, and turned playwriting into a secular priesthood, a man who built his fame on contradictions he could... Read more...
The Cinematic Architect: Stanley Kubrick’s Visionary Madness
The Cinematic Architect: Stanley Kubrick’s Visionary Madness
He was a tyrannical genius who crafted flawless cinematic labyrinths, each frame a calculated obsession, each film an enduring riddle. Few filmmakers have inspired the reverence, bewilderment, and sheer mythmaking... Read more...
Theodor Herzl
Herzl’s Hoax: How an Atheist Invented a Divine Claim to Palestine
Imagine this. A man who does not believe in God stands before the world and declares that a piece of land belongs to his people because God promised it to... Read more...