Culture Articles
for the luxe minded
|
The New Republic
Culture The New Republic: Culture |
 |
|
|
From The New Republic
Readers may say, “Well, you don’t like many films,” and they’d be right. I thought Prometheus was a catastrophe, Argo overrated, Anna Karenina risible, The Deep Blue Sea regrettable. “You didn’t even like The Master.” No, I didn& ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy
By Thomas K. McCraw
(Harvard University Press, 485 pp., $35)
THOMAS K. MCCRAW believed that financial leadership in government really matters. Since this is an issue that is very much with us at the present, his work of history may have a special timeliness. In The Founders and Finance, McCraw (who died in November) contends that the secretaries of the Treasury during the several decades following ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
For the past twenty-plus years, The Martha Stewart Empire (not its real name, of course, but who doesn’t think of it that way?)—led by their taupe pant-suited leader—has dutifully monitored the cult of domesticity. The media has gleefully followed Martha’s ups and downs. With recent news of major financial blunders, Martha Stewart may be down, but don’t count her out. In late November, The New York Times ran a story claiming that Stewart “has emerged as ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
Nothing on television reflects the state of American economic anxiety quite like the workplace competition show. When “The Apprentice” premiered in 2004, the economy was booming and the show played as a kind of capitalist gladiatorial match, a bracing dose of Donald Trump’s transparent greed and ego. As the economy soured and the ritualistic firing of average American Joes began to feel a bit too harsh, “Celebrity Apprentice” eased the collective conscience. Then ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
Since moving into its $858 million ice palace in 2005, no space in the renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York has caused more consternation than its massive atrium on the second floor. Grossly overscaled, the atrium has dwarfed almost every work of art that has appeared there. Monet's water lilies looked like wallpaper, Barnett Newman’s three-ton Broken Obelisk like a child’s plaything. It really only works as a party space, which, given the frequency of MoMA cocktail events and ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
In January 2006, reports broke in London newspapers that Joyce Carol Vincent had been found dead in her bedsit flat in Wood Green, a northern suburb of the city. She was in her late thirties. She had been tall, vivacious and always smartly dressed—she reminded some people of Whitney Houston. She had had an Indian mother and a West Indian father; they were dead now, but Joyce had sisters. No cause of death could be ascertained because she had been dead for nearly three years. The sketch of ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
In Sarajevo, Bosnia, where I grew up playing a lot of soccer, the slang word mahalaš refers to a cocky player who much prefers feints to passes; who’d rather nutmeg someone than shoot; who deplores defending. All the lost balls and all the teammates ignored while in scoring position are relegated into oblivion by each small masterpiece: dribbling past an entire defense, scoring from an impossible angle, bamboozling a goalie.
At the root of the word mahalaš is mahala—an ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
The best thing the Onion has run lately wasn’t its selection of Kim Jong Un as 2012's "sexiest man alive," or "Everything a Goddamn Ordeal in Area Family." It was "The 9 Most SCANDALOUS Rihanna photos,” an odd little gem of criticism. The headline, of course, is one the Huffington Post or any number of outlets would have run verbatim in pursuit of pageviews, as were the captions. “He-llo Ms. Fenty! Rihanna nearly s ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
“I think it's one of the most noble risks we have ever taken.” This comes from an executive at Twentieth Century Fox, the studio that gave us Sunrise, Shirley Temple, and The Robe. When a corporation has ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, talk of nobility is often a warning sign of stupidity. So sane producers may have read Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, seen that it was selling 9 million copies across the world, and concluded that there was no need for a ... Quick Read |
|
From The New Republic
THE 2012 ELECTIONS were a little bit like Groundhog Day. After spending an estimated $5.8 billion on the House, Senate, and presidential elections, America woke up on November 7 to find that the president was still Barack Obama, the Senate was still Democratic, the House retained a slightly smaller Republican majority, and prospects for bipartisan cooperation remained as slim as ever. In a post-election statement, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called on Obama “to propose ... Quick Read |
|
 |
|
|
|
rss
