Category: Biography
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The Human Condition According to Chekhov
By Bergotte After Homer’s wars, Ovid’s metamorphoses, Dante’s cosmology, Shakespeare’s kingdoms, and Dostoevsky’s metaphysical detonations, Anton Chekhov arrives with a doctor’s bag and a short story about a man who cannot sleep. The reduction in scale is not a diminishment. It is an argument. What Chekhov understood — and what makes him the most quietly…
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Joan Rivers
Essay · Comedy & Lives Can We Talk? Joan Rivers was the funniest woman in the history of American comedy, and the qualifications embedded in that sentence — the word woman, the word history — are themselves part of the argument she spent sixty years making: that the comedy establishment’s willingness to tolerate her existed…
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Leonard Cohen & David Bowie
Essay · Music & Ideas Two Ways of Dying in Public Leonard Cohen and David Bowie both knew they were dying when they made their final albums. Both kept the knowledge largely to themselves. Both produced, from that knowledge, work of extraordinary quality that addressed mortality directly and without evasion. And there the similarity ends…
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Ovartaci
Essay · Art & Lives The Chief Loon and the World Inside the World Ovartaci lived for fifty-six years inside a psychiatric hospital in Risskov, near Aarhus, and made, in those fifty-six years, approximately a thousand works of extraordinary formal intelligence and phantasmagoric density — paintings, drawings, sculptures, mixed media pieces built from whatever materials…
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Eddie Murphy
Essay · Comedy & Culture The Force That Arrived at Nineteen Eddie Murphy is the most naturally gifted comedian America has produced in the second half of the twentieth century, and the case for this claim is not primarily about the films, though the films at their best are extraordinary, and not primarily about the…
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Riding in Cars with Boys
We drove back to Los Angeles the next day. It was one of those sunny days suspended in time. We both knew something in our story had ended, and neither of us understood that something else had already begun. When I said goodbye to him at his hotel, I pretended it was nothing. We didn’t…
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The Human Condition According to Dostoevsky
By Bergotte The series has been moving, in its way, toward this. Homer gave us mortality without consolation. Ovid gave us transformation without stability. Dante gave us love as the architecture of the universe. Shakespeare gave us the self as performance, unmoored from any fixed ground. What Dostoevsky gives us is the consequence of all…
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Natalie Wood
Essay · Film & Lives The Girl Who Never Quite Belonged to Herself Natalie Wood was one of the most naturally gifted actresses of the Hollywood studio era, a woman who made the transition from child star to adult performer with a completeness that almost no one manages, who received three Academy Award nominations before…
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Ian Fleming’s Bond
Essay · Literature & Culture The Man Who Cannot Be Killed James Bond was created in 1952 by a bored, unhappy, recently married former intelligence officer writing his first novel in a Jamaican house he had built to escape from England, and he has refused to die for seventy years. The refusal is the most…
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Georges-Eugène Haussmann
Essay · Architecture & History The Man Who Demolished Paris to Save It Georges-Eugène Haussmann did not build Paris. He destroyed it, systematically and at enormous speed and with the full authority of an emperor behind him, and what he built in its place was something that had not previously existed: the modern city, with…
