The death of Superman
How Hollywood killed the American hero
Books and Arts
Friday
The demands and joys of contemporary art
Artist Alberto Guerrero’s career has been driven by a desire to look for what is behind everything that we perceive at present
Monday
Taking a trip to Russoville
Richard Russo doesn’t do fireworks. Dazzling metaphorical flights are not his thing
Blood Meridian is Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece
It may be the Great American Novel critics have searched for
William Boyd’s latest novel is immense fun
In The Romantic , it’s as if Boyd has distilled the essence of centuries of novel-writing
Visiting a forgotten chapter in American history
We May Dominate the World is a work of prodigious scholarship, featuring an extraordinary breadth and depth of sources
Elliot Page’s memoir is a tale of tragic self-destruction
For the author, transgenderism was an escape hatch
Arnold Schwarzenegger is back
With a new Netflix documentary and series, the actor is ubiquitous once again
Jane Clark Scharl delivers artful truths in Sonnez Les Matines
The play is, alas, unlikely to attract a large following in the theater
The brilliant, underappreciated work of Germaine Richier
Despite her institutional recognition in France, Richier is not as well-known outside her native country as she deserves to be
Inside the traditional art revolution
The cultural hegemony of contemporary abstract art is slowly beginning to crack
Sunday
The great late Yeats
A century ago, W.B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize. It was the start of a remarkable late era for the Irish poet
Why is George Orwell so difficult to pin down?
The writer is an easy man to admire and sympathize with, but a hard one to like
Lady Caroline Lamb and the frantic bed-hopping between the great houses of England
Antonia Fraser paints a convincing, shocking picture of upper-class mores in the late eighteenth century
Lorrie Moore explores the thin veil between life and death
It’s hard to find writers ancient or modern who have used language with a music, wit and tenderness comparable to Moore’s
The troubled relationship between Mussolini and his son-in-law
Count Galeazzo Ciano’s career is uniquely revealing as an insight into the perils of joining the family business
Men at War examines homosexuality among World War Two soldiers
Luke Turner’s essential thesis is that the war opened up a brief time of sexual liberation for men
The history of a Britney Spears masterpiece
Blackout laid the foundation for the EDM revolution, Lady Gaga’s self-referential debut album and the rest of the past fifteen years of pop
Taking in Good Night, Oscar and New York, New York
Good Night, Oscar takes us back to a time when, for better or worse, both foibles and felonies were targets for humor
What the Old Masters can teach us about contemporary life
In many of their most enduring images, the Old Masters did not shy away from asking ‘Why?’ in the face of suffering and trauma