By: Greg Rowland

Miles Davis once said that the history of jazz could be summed up by two names: Charlie Parker and LOUIS ARMSTRONG (1901-71). I’d go further, and claim that the ABC of 20th century pop culture […]

By: Patrick Cates

Even when JAMES HETFIELD (born 1963) smiles — which he did copiously during this year’s induction of Metallica into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, for example — his face can’t fully escape its […]

By: Joe Alterio

By: Tom Nealon

During the Reagan Era, CHUCK D (Carlton Douglas Ridenhour, born 1960), the hard rhymer, gave us “My Uzi Weighs a Ton,” “Prophets of Rage,” and “Fight the Power,” not to mention Flavor Flav and the […]

By: Peggy Nelson

HILARY PUTNAM (born 1926) is the most important philosopher you’ve never heard of. In an era when most theorists build their careers by limning the edges of history, Putnam is one of the hands-on few […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture….” That first phrase from his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class summed up the […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The one piece of fine-art-inspired kitsch I’ve been craving ever since I first heard of it is a long-unavailable shower curtain reproducing “The Large Glass” (“The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”) by MARCEL […]

By: Lucy Sante

JOSEPH MITCHELL (1908-96) arrived in New York City from rural North Carolina the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. Following a few years as a newspaper reporter, he went to work for the […]

By: Patrick Cates

If more people realized how steeped many aspects of modern life are in the ideas of CARL JUNG (1875-1961), perhaps they would use the adjective “Jungian” as often as the adjective “Freudian” when conversationally tipping […]

By: Tor Aarestad

In 1927, ELIAS CANETTI (1905-94) threw himself into a Viennese crowd protesting an acquittal in a murder trial. The crowd went on to burn down the Palace of Justice, and Canetti’s feeling of selflessness and […]

By: Erik Davis

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th lord of the Irish barony of Dunsany, hunted big game in Africa and played champion chess. As LORD DUNSANY (1878-1957), he also wrote, without revising, a prodigious number […]

By: James Parker

John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for […]

By: Greg Rowland

JAMES WHALE (1889-1957) was born in England’s industrial Black Country. Here’s a typical gag from those parts: An old left-wing activist is on his death bed. He announces that he’s joined the Conservative Party. His […]

By: Joe Alterio

In his seminal works, The Mechanical Bride (1951) and Understanding Media (1964), the Canadian philosopher MARSHALL MCLUHAN (1911-80) offered astute, didactic examinations of how the public receives and processes media, and what advertising tells us […]