By: Matthew Battles

Stephen Burt on the making of a critic.

By: Joshua Glenn

In the rumpus room of midcentury intellectual culture, WALTER BENJAMIN (1892-1940) is everybody’s favorite overstuffed velveteen rabbit. Susan Sontag, for example, rationalized Benjamin’s many self-defeating habits: the glacial pace at which he worked, she wrote, […]

By: Joshua Glenn

An intellectual historian and historian of intellectuals, CHRISTOPHER LASCH (1932-94) picked up the torch offered by negative-dialectical curmudgeons (T.W. Adorno, Dwight Macdonald) who’d rejected the shibboleths of liberals and conservatives alike. Pinpointing the social, political, […]

By: Matthew Battles

Atlantic correspondent James Parker is the hilobrow critic par excellence. Whether reviewing a biography of G. K. Chesterton or musing on the meaning of slasher films (as he does in the forthcoming issue of the […]