By: Mark Kingwell

American philosopher SIDNEY HOOK (1902-89) enacted the key dilemmas of twentieth-century politics. Born in Brooklyn to Austrian Jewish parents, he attended City College of New York, the same “Harvard of the Proletariat” that would educate […]

By: Greg Rowland

Led by MAURICE WHITE (born 1941), Earth, Wind & Fire were by far the most commercial cousins of the cosmic-jazz entity known as Sun Ra, lacking Funkadelic’s edge or Pharaoh Sanders’ experimentalism. Don’t be distracted […]

By: Tom Nealon

With the profusion of anti-heroes on television in recent years, from Tony Soprano’s jolly murderer to House’s belittling a-hole pose and from Jack Bauer’s strident seriousness to Dexter’s huggable serial killer, it’s easy to forget […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“My books (& stories) are intellectual (conceptual) mazes & I am in an intellectual maze in trying to figure out our situation (who we are & how we look into the world, & world as […]

By: James Parker

Strictly speaking it’s Meltzer who’s the hilo hero, who inverted the language of academe in pursuit of the rock thrill, but here’s what puts Lester in the pantheon: he redefined monotony. The vicious monotony of […]

By: Douglas Wolk

Sheila Escovedo, better known as SHEILA E. (born 1957), is a curious case: a totally solid musician and performer who’s spent the high points of her career in the shadow of a great one. The […]

By: Lynn Peril

Finnish-born MAILA NURMI (1921-2008) kicked around Hollywood as a hatcheck girl and pinup model before a turn as the Charles Addams cartoon character later named Morticia changed the course of her life, not to mention […]

By: Tom Nealon

It’s true that guitarist and drummer J MASCIS (Joseph Donald Mascis, born 1965) and Dinosaur Jr., drunk on jangly post-punk-death-metal, gave birth to an especially virulent strain of impossible-to-enjoy alt-rock. Much of their later work […]

By: Mimi Lipson

He knew his audience inside and out.

By: Joe Alterio

The only diploma that E.C. SEGAR (1884-1938) ever earned was from a correspondence cartooning class; but he was every bit as dedicated to his profession as Popeye, his most famous creation, was to roaming the […]

By: David Smay

TOM WAITS (born 1949) turns sixty today — and it’s not his fault that NPR wants to stick a bronze plaque on him and declare him a National Landmark. He’s been making little teratomas of […]

By: Patrick Cates

You suffer from severe anterograde amnesia; you are trapped, forever, at the end of 1955. Your memory of the events up to that point is coherent and complete, and yet you can’t remember anything that […]

By: Greg Rowland

LITTLE RICHARD (born 1932) arrived to pulverise our senses in the same pitiless manner that he attacked the upper register of the piano. He called himself the “Architect of Rock’n’Roll,” which is far more respectable […]

By: Sarah Weinman

If you know CORNELL WOOLRICH’s (1903-68) oeuvre at all, it’s most likely through the films of the standout directors who’ve interpreted it: Hitchcock’s Rear Window, for example, was based on Woolrich’s story “It Had to […]

By: Peggy Nelson

The director most identified with the art film, JEAN-LUC GODARD (born 1930) got his start, not in film, but in criticism. Along with other members of what was termed La Nouvelle Vague, he developed the […]