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1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Isaac Sligh
America’s largest surviving archive of newsreel films has many clips online, providing a timely opportunity to revisit the past on V.E. Day. Though few remember them today, newsreels were a fixture of daily life for Americans from the early days of movies until television news rendered them obsolete in the 1960s. Many will recall “News on the March,” the parody of a newsreel that opens Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941), with its bombastic narration overlaying documentary footage.
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Jan 29, 2025 | 
newcriterion.com | Isaac Sligh |James Panero
Isaac Sligh is Associate Editor of The New Criterion. He served as the magazine’s eighth Hilton Kramer Fellow in Criticism. A graduate of the University of the South, Isaac worked as the head curator of the Ralston Listening Library and Archive in Sewanee, , one of the nation’s largest collections of recorded classical music and a charitably endowed venue for audiophile listening.
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Apr 30, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Jeffrey Hart |Isaac Sligh |James Panero |John Simon
Nonfiction:To the Linksland (30th Anniversary Edition), by Michael Bamberger (Avid Reader Press): As all who play golf know, there’s more to the game than just the game. For golfers, golf is not subculture but culture itself, and nowhere is that more true than in Scotland, home of the game’s invention. To understand that culture, nothing can beat a trip to those fabled lands, but reading Michael Bamberger’s To the Linksland might be a close second.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Isaac Sligh |Jeffrey Peter Hart |James Panero |John Simon
Recent stories of note:“‘After 1177 B.C.’ Review: How the Bronze Age Turned Iron”Dominic Green, The Wall Street JournalIn March, Dominic Green treated the Friends of The New Criterion to a brisk anatomy of the twenty-first century’s savages—those who seek to destroy the West’s cultural institutions. But he also offered a hopeful forecast for these institutions’ futures.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | On Byron |Robert Frost |Isaac Sligh |Jeffrey Peter Hart
Recent stories of note:“Why art biennales are (mostly) trash”Digby Warde-Aldam, The Spectator WorldThe last time The New Criterion covered any of the international art world’s many-hundred biennales in depth was 2017, when James Panero visited the Venice Biennale.
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Apr 29, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Isaac Sligh |Jeffrey Peter Hart |James Panero |John Simon
Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an especial pleasure.
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Apr 26, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | William Logan |James Panero |Isaac Sligh |Gary Saul Morson
Over the years, we have known big pianists who like to accompany singers. (By the way, “accompany” is not a dirty word in my book. If it is in yours—you’ll need to find another critic!) Richter accompanied Fischer-Dieskau. So did Horowitz, on one occasion. Jean-Yves Thibaudet likes to accompany singers. So does Mitsuko Uchida. In an interview, Yefim Bronfman once told me that it was accompanying singers that really taught him how to play Schubert.
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Apr 25, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Panero |William Logan |Isaac Sligh |Gary Saul Morson
Still, it is undeniable that the Al Thani space sparkles. The collection has rightfully been praised as a twenty-first-century version of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. Many of the pieces on display in “A Taste for the Renaissance” are very small—bringing a magnifying glass is a good idea. One such object is a hat badge of enameled gold, diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, thought to be from 1550s Paris, executed in a style we now call Mannerist. It depicts the akedah, the sacrifice of Isaac.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Isaac Sligh |Jeffrey Peter Hart |James Panero |John Simon
Take comfort! You would not seek me had you not found me. —Blaise PascalWhere I came from, I cannot say for sure. These pathsbear no names. The houses to which they leadover the remains of snowfields hover in the east wind like hawks. Fog born from the Bohemian basin, and aglow in the distance,the last village before the border, the rocks sinking into sleep,broad-browed, cold, having drunk from Saxony’s Lethe.
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Apr 17, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | William Logan |James Panero |Isaac Sligh |Amit Majmudar
“You don’t even exist!” Characters in Russian fiction are always insulting each other in this way. They call each other zeroes, nothings, nonentities. The hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground feels profoundly insulted when someone he hopes to annoy by standing in his way simply moves him aside like a piece of furniture. “I could even have forgiven blows,” the underground man explains, “but I absolutely could not forgive” his acting as if it was not a person in his way.
