The End of Jazz
How America’s most vibrant music became a relic
Book Review
A Critic and a Poet
Pauline Kael showed us how to talk about popular art and fall in love with movies.
Sex Lives of Novelists
Writing about writers; an atrocity ignored; the most influential book in English
A Harsh Beauty
Revising the Escorial, plus the wonders of Wonder Bread
The Escapist
P. G. Wodehouse’s comic gift was built on his brilliant capacity for repressing unpleasantness.
The Cruel Idealist
LBJ’s better angels, plus the power of Big Oil
Style Is the Man
Dwight Macdonald shows us that only a great writer can be a great critic.
A Swing and a Miss
Why the latest hyped-up work of staggering genius fizzles
Night Owls
How nightlife changed Western culture, plus why New Zealand is better than the U.S.