Category: Explore
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The Ten Films That Capture the Soul of America
America did not merely invent Hollywood. It invented one of the most persuasive dream machines in human history. More than any other modern art form, cinema allowed America to export itself: its landscapes, faces, appetites, terrors, fantasies, violence, tenderness, vulgarity, idealism and loneliness. The American film is not simply entertainment. At its most revealing, it…
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The American Imagination: 100 Groundbreaking Moments in the Arts
American art has never been a single tradition. It is not one style, one canon, one language, one race, one city, one market, one mythology, or one moral direction. It is a field of struggle: Indigenous geometry and settler expansion, enslaved song and constitutional rhetoric, Puritan severity and surrealist nightmare, Black rhythm and white appropriation,…
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The American Conscience
America’s finest leadership has not always come from the White House. Sometimes it has. There have been moments when presidents restrained themselves, widened the law, rebuilt former enemies, defended constitutional order or placed human dignity above immediate popularity. But more often, the moral leadership of America has come from those outside formal power: abolitionists, fugitives,…
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Happy Birthday, America — The Best of You Has Always Fought the Worst of You
Happy birthday, America — though the words do not come easily this year. On 4 July 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially, it is a commemoration of the birth of the republic, the semiquincentennial of the moment when thirteen colonies declared themselves no longer subjects…
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The Culture Now: Iran
In a country reshaped by war, censorship and exile, art has become the nearest thing to a free press There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from trying to describe a culture at the exact moment it is happening. The historian has the comfort of distance; the critic reviewing a single film or…
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The Decorated Life: The Bloomsbury Group, Charleston, and the Art of Living Differently
They remade British culture, reinvented the novel, revolutionised art criticism, and painted every available surface of a Sussex farmhouse in colours that the English countryside had never previously entertained. A century later, the Bloomsbury Group remains the most argued-about, most imitated, and most misunderstood intellectual community in English literary history. By Bergotte There is a…
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Bryn Mawr College
Essay · Education & Ideas The College That Refused to Lower Its Voice Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885 on a single, radical proposition: that women deserved not a version of higher education, not an approximation of it, but the genuine and uncompromised article — the same rigour, the same standards, the same unapologetic expectation…
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Where the River Bends: Memphis and the Music That Changed the World
It is the most productive square mile in American cultural history. A city of grief and genius, of violence and transcendence, built on cotton and the blues and the unsettled accounts of race — Memphis made the modern world’s soundtrack and has never quite recovered from the effort. By Bergotte Begin with the geography, because…
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Affordable Style: Inns and Guesthouses of Sicily
Sicily is an island of layers: Greek temples, Norman cathedrals, Baroque palaces, and volcanic landscapes. While Palermo’s grandeur and Taormina’s glamour attract international crowds, the island’s real charm often lies in its agriturismi and family-run guesthouses. Rooted in food, history, and landscape, these stays prove that Sicilian hospitality doesn’t need to be expensive to feel…
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Villa San Michele
Above Florence Villa San Michele, A Belmond Hotel, has just reopened above Fiesole after eighteen months of renovation — and the view from the terrace is, as it has always been, the finest available in Tuscany There is a concept the Romans called otium — a form of leisure quite distinct from idleness, devoted to…
