A Conceptual Artist of Cinema

Now ninety-two, the Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow is receiving a retrospective of a career that brought a playful avant-garde sensibility to the moving image.

December 3, 2021

The Last Tiger

Kullu seemed haunted by the tale he told me of his grandfather’s encounter with a mighty predator. But he had another history to share, one to haunt me.

November 30, 2021

The Anti-Nazi Punjabi Princess

Catherine Duleep Singh was an Anglo-Indian aristocrat who lived much of her life quietly with another woman in Germany. Then she became a savior of Jewish refugees.

November 27, 2021

Auden’s ‘Dialectic’

“Auden was fascinated by the unsolvable problem of how much of life is governed by necessity and how much is chosen through freedom.”

December 4, 2021

Thinking in Old English

“I use my essays for the public to think through my research questions. I cannot imagine ever writing a monograph in a traditional scholarly style again.”

November 27, 2021

Declarations of Independence

“I saw how the British Empire could transform decent white people into puffed-up petty tyrants. Even if the Communist insurgents were not the ‘right side,’ I realized I was on the wrong side.”

November 20, 2021

Captive Minds

Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History.

September 30, 2010 issue

Ill Fares the Land

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

April 29, 2010 issue

The New Old Nationalism

Everywhere there has been a growing absorption in what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” None of this began recently, born again as it were in 1989. Nationalism, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, is not “resurgent”—it never died.

May 26, 1994 issue