Matthew Adelstein

May 17, 2024 | quillette.com | Izabella Tabarovsky |Allan Stratton |James Jackson |Matthew Adelstein

I was amazed by how similar this classic of Western literature is to modern-day action movies. Oxford’s Professor of Poetry A.E. Stallings, got it right when she called The Iliad “the bloody prequel” to The Odyssey. In the chapter I just finished, the Greek and Trojan armies engage in a tug of war for the body of Achilles’ best friend, Patroclus, which takes the better part of twenty pages.

May 17, 2024 | quillette.com | Izabella Tabarovsky |Allan Stratton |James Jackson |Matthew Adelstein

Editor’s Note: The following essay first appeared in Areo Magazine in March 2017 and is reproduced here with the author’s permission. In this piece, Izabella Tabarovsky describes the stultifying atmosphere of conformity, cancel culture, and enforced speech among progressive leftists following the Black Lives Matter marches and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. She finds the speech climate eerily reminiscent of that of the Soviet Union of her youth.

May 16, 2024 | quillette.com | Allan Stratton |James Jackson |Matthew Adelstein |Kevin Mims

The Fall Guy juggles the genres of thriller, mystery, and romantic comedy with aplomb—the thriller is exciting, the mystery is clever, and the rom-com is sexy and funny. Together, they make for an exuberant celebration of the performers who risk their lives for a “gag” (the professional’s term for a stunt).

May 15, 2024 | quillette.com | James Jackson |Matthew Adelstein |Kevin Mims |Ronald A. Lindsay

“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when evaluating a work of art. A novel may contain unpleasant characters, but it does not follow that the novelist himself is immoral for creating those characters in the first place.

May 14, 2024 | quillette.com | Matthew Adelstein |Kevin Mims |Ronald A. Lindsay |Herbert Bushman

On 1 May, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced that the sale of cultured meat grown from animal stem cells in a laboratory has now been banned in his state. “While the World Economic Forum is telling the world to forgo meat consumption,” he explained, “Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef.” John Fetterman, the junior senator for Pennsylvania and a Democrat, endorsed the move the following day.