Newsroom

Somehow, without quite meaning to, I’ve become a sort of de facto travel agent to the (literary) stars. It all began in 2010 with my sixth book, Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, which concerned the...

The disintegration of the Soviet empire brought about a Copernican revolution in Russian cultural historiography. Paradoxically, the post-Soviet documentary deluge and the collapse of the ideological coordinates hitherto guiding the writing of cultural history...

One of reasons that the early poetry of T. S. Eliot resonated (and continues to resonate) with so many people is that in revealing what was essentially a personal dilemma, he dramatized an issue that has haunted thinking individuals for eons. In The Philosophy...

The sociologist-senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously exclaimed that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” As the recent US presidential election has demonstrated, however, much of the voting public would seem to disagree. They...

The following is an excerpt from Richard Begam and Matthew Wilson Smith’s new edited volume, Modernism and Opera. In opera, one always dies of the thing one loves. To love less than the impossible, less than that for which one cannot live, is not to love at...

These are dark days for cosmopolitanism. On both sides of the Atlantic, in the US and Europe, xenophobia, nativism, and aggressive jingoism are in the ascendency. In the US, the President Elect built his platform on a promise to build a wall along the US...