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5 days ago | 
wsj.com | Gary Saul Morson
The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn captured in fiction the events that led to the Bolshevik revolution. The great British historian Herbert Butterfield cautioned against the temptation to tell a neat story about historical events or discover “an unfolding logic” in them.
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3 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Douglas Murray |Heather Mac Donald |Gary Saul Morson |Thomas Philbrick
Few cities can rival Vienna’s list of cultural and artistic luminaries. The thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Carl Menger, Viktor Frankl, Friederich Hayek, and Sigmund Freud were all Viennese. So were the writers Stefan Zweig, Ignaz Castelli, and Arthur Schnitzler. And then, of course, there are Vienna’s composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, the Strausses (all three of them), Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, among others.
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3 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Heather Mac Donald |Gary Saul Morson |Douglas Murray |David Gress
Recent stories of note:“Vargas Llosa Stood for Freedom Against the Nationalist Tide”Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal“I learned to read at the age of five,” said Mario Vargas Llosa upon accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. “It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me.” The Peruvian novelist, essayist, and politician died last Sunday at the age of eighty-nine, and his learning to read doubtless stands as an important event for the rest of the world, too.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
Last night, the Philadelphia Orchestra played the Symphony No. 6 in A minor of Gustav Mahler. The venue: Carnegie Hall. The conductor: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who is the orchestra’s music director, as well as the music director of the Metropolitan Opera. What a double-job. Maestro Nézet-Séguin has far surpassed Noah (the tennis star of the ’80s) as the world’s most celebrated Yannick. The Mahler Sixth takes about an hour and twenty minutes to play. It was the sole work on last night’s program.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
To measure the reach of postcolonial theory, consider the Metropolitan Opera’s new staging of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, which debuted on December 31, 2024, and runs through May 9. As the opera’s gossamer prelude rises from the orchestra, a man in a pith helmet and safari suit descends on a cable from the house’s stratospheric proscenium, shining a spotlight through the smoky atmosphere.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
In 1876, in Rome, Prince Alessandro Torlonia, a member of a distinguished family of bankers known as much for their enthusiasm for art as for their other abilities, opened the Torlonia Museum to the public. Installed in a former warehouse on the Via Colonna, the new institution displayed Prince Alessandro’s family’s immense collection of antique sculptures, mostly in marble.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
The modern state is built on the rationalist conceit that society is best organized with detailed codes, elaborate procedures, and rights for almost anything. Federal law and regulation comprises about 150 million words, telling people not only what to do, but exactly how to do it. Legal codes weren’t this dense before the 1960s. But a wave of guilt washed over society because of racism, pollution, and other harmful social practices. How could America prevent bad practices in the future?
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
From October 13, 2024, to January 26, 2025, visitors to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art had the opportunity to view the glorious exhibition “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350.” In her review in the January 2025 edition of this journal, Karen Wilkin observed that the show sought to demonstrate “the originality of Sienese Trecento masters, with an acknowledgment of what helped to form them.” What was not explored in that exhibition was the debt those Sienese masters owed to their...
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
Taking literary “style” in its strictest sense, as word choice and syntax, consider what C. S.
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4 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball
It is inadvisable to start a book, especially a philosophy book, with a mistake, but that is precisely what Agnes Callard, an American professor of philosophy, does in Open Socrates: “There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it.”1An accusatory tone is not, perhaps, the best way to predispose a reader in an author’s favor, to win friends and influence people, especially when the reader is innocent of what he is accused of.
