The funniest man in Paris — why were his novels so serious?

“It is not at all with ideas that one makes poetry. It is with words.”

He tried to explain both new modes of being and new social structures.

Each “mistake” or transposition of logic and syntax carried a shift in meaning.

“Media always offers gains, though offset by losses.”

He tapped into the era’s anxieties — crime, mechani­zation, new media.

Every cinephile is obsessed with a single Wenders film.

He blends virtuoso musicianship with generational esoterica.

Completing the circuit from art to commerce and back.

A rhetoric of laughs, a critical pastiche.

The scholar must study the consequences of politics and other inconvenient facts.

Audio recordings of LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-67) are disarmingly contemporary. On those recordings,…

He defamiliarized science rather than taming it.