Tag: Criticism

Five longreads about the iconoclastic American writer, director, and activist.

In “Coventry,” Rachel Cusk draws a connection between politeness and narrative death, rudeness and tragedy, storytelling and war.

“I thought for sure, I’ll never write about Rilke again. I’m done with Rilke! I’m sick of Rilke! Rilke — no more. But then the other day … I just started researching something about Rilke.”

If there’s no earth, there’s no art. How do you engage in cultural criticism at the end of the world?

Nate Chinen may have been the last full-time jazz reviewer at any American newspaper. He says jazz hasn’t been in a better place since the ’60s — but the commercial infrastructure is broken.

It’s clear we love the Dead Girl, enough to rehash and reproduce her story, to kill her again and again. But not enough to see a pattern.

Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens, and Katie Roiphe have to try to be better, right along with the rest of us.

In his review for the New York Times, Holland Cotter writes that the museum fails in “truth-telling.”

How do you talk about a weekly TV show that defies narrative order?

On the project that almost drove Jerry Saltz into despair.

We asked a few writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here, the best in essays and criticism.

Story picks by Leslie Jamison, Jia Tolentino, Roxane Gay, Tom Scocca, Ann Friedman, Rachel Syme, Francesca Mari, Sari Botton, and Emily Perper.

“I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian.”

Rebecca Solnit, writing in The New Yorker, offers a celebration of the imagination’s best ally: the ability to say “I don’t know.” Solnit looks at subtlety and subjectivity in her own writing, and in that of a hero of the art, Virginia Woolf: During my years as an art critic I used to joke that museums love artists the way that taxidermists love deer, and something […]