Jim Carrey’s I Needed Color Offers a Hopeful Challenge to 2017’s Despair
What if we followed Carrey’s lead and aimed to celebrate certain aspects of our common human experience for the sake of love?
George A. Romero Made Horror What It Is Today
For all their lack of subtlety, zombies dramatize many of our deepest inner conflicts.
Twenty Years Later, Radiohead’s OK Computer Still Sounds Brand New
Part of OK Computer’s genius is that it captures the ways in which our technology detaches us.
It Comes at Night Reminds Us That the Political Is Always Personal
It Comes at Night implores us to have the courage to give each other the benefit of the doubt.
Chris Cornell’s Untimely Death Reminds Us That We Never Need to Be Alone
Perhaps the healthiest way to cope at this point is to remember Chris Cornell’s place in our lives.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Fans: The Ethics of Being a David Foster Wallace Fan
It is possible to be a fan of someone’s work without insisting that everyone else feel the same way.
Robert P. George, Cornel West and the Gift of Civil Disagreement
If our nation’s leading intellectuals can disagree with each other and still be civil, why can’t the rest of us do the same?
Let Me Help You Make Your Mind up about The OA
Though flawed, The OA is beautiful, heartbreaking, and deeply hopeful.
A Question I Hope Ronda Rousey Is Asking Right Now
Ronda Rousey lost again, but that doesn’t make her worthless.
Alien and Station Eleven Reveal the Limits of Survival and Human Nature
Two acclaimed works of fiction challenge the notion that mere survival ought to be humanity’s highest goal.
The High Price of Survival: Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time
Sometimes an artist has to choose between living a principled life or just living at all. The novelist Julian Barnes imagines the high cost of this choice for the composer Shostakovich under Stalin.
Leonard Cohen’s Voice Is Still Needed for These Troubled Times
Leonard Cohen devoted his career to telling us that, in the midst of human experience, pain is rarely devoid of beauty and beauty is rarely devoid of pain.
John Carpenter’s Halloween and the Problem of Horrendous Evil
Sometimes evil doesn’t have a backstory; it exists for its own sake. This is what makes John Carpenter’s Halloween so effective.
Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree Is a Modern Cry of Lament
What is that elusive quality that imbues certain pieces of music with a genuine sense of pain?
The Longest Distance Relationship: Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things
Michel Faber’s science fiction novel, The Book of Strange New Things, dramatizes profound gulf between its characters and between God and humanity.
