Category: Biography
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Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is no…
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The Human Condition According to Ovid
By Bergotte If Homer is the poet of what we lose, Ovid is the poet of what we become. Writing at the height of Roman civilisation and dying at its edge — exiled, cold, forgotten on the shore of the Black Sea — Publius Ovidius Naso produced a body of work that is dazzling, troubling,…
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Bret Easton Ellis
Essay · Literature & Ideas The Novelist Who Refused to Flinch Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel at twenty-one and his most notorious at twenty-six, and spent the following three decades being misread by people who wanted him to be either a moralist or a monster, when he was in fact something rarer and…
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The Culture Now: Sudan
The world’s largest displacement crisis has scattered Sudanese artists across three continents — and, from Cairo to Nairobi to Aberdeen, they have kept working Sudan rarely leads a news cycle, which is itself part of the story. Since war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces on 15 April…
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Courtney Love
Essay · Music & Culture The Mess That Was Also the Method Courtney Love arrived in the early 1990s indie scene like something the scene had not known it was missing: a woman who wanted to be enormous, who was not prepared to be grateful for whatever space was made available to her, and who…
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The Culture Now: Palestine
Across Gaza, the West Bank and a scattered diaspora, the past five years have produced an unusually intense body of work — made, in large part, out of catastrophe A note on scope before anything else: “Palestinian culture” today is made across more places than any single capital could hold — Gaza, the West Bank…
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Anna Karina
Essay · Film & Lives The Face That the New Wave Built Its Cathedral Around Anna Karina arrived in Paris from Copenhagen at seventeen with almost nothing, and became, within a decade, the most filmed face of the French New Wave — a presence so fully itself on screen that the camera, which usually mediates…
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The Ten Photographs That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country obsessed with images of itself. It is not enough for America to exist; it must be seen existing. It must be staged, framed, printed, reproduced, circulated, believed. From the battlefield photograph to the fashion spread, from the Depression migrant to the moonlit desert, from the civil-rights witness to the…
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The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America
America has often sung what it could not admit in speech. Its songs have carried grief before the law recognised suffering, desire before society permitted freedom, rage before politics found language, and longing before the country had earned the ideals it claimed for itself. If the American novel is a courtroom of conscience, and American…
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The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country unusually dependent on story. Before it became a superpower, before it became a marketplace, before it became a screen onto which the rest of the world projected desire and dread, it was already narrating itself: as wilderness, covenant, republic, frontier, refuge, opportunity, innocence, exception, destiny. No nation has been…
