Roger Kimball

1 week 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?

1 week 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...

1 week 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.

1 week 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.

1 week ago | newcriterion.com | Gary Saul Morson |David Gress |Fernanda Eberstadt |Roger Kimball

An anonymous Le Temps reviewer of the 1877 Impressionist exhibition showed no mercy to Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894). In his estimation, the painter was nothing but “a millionaire who paints in his spare time.” Art-historical distance has proved that reviewer wrong, but today, once again, we are being invited to experience Caillebotte’s painting through the lens of identity.