God’s First

French novelist, poet, and critic Michel Houellebecq is a pessimist and a controversialist. He is also a realist, and in his latest novel, Annihilation, he writes, “However much one might despise, or even hate, one’s […]

There is a lot to like about Pope Francis’ recent letter “On the Role of Literature in Formation”. Originally conceived as an encouragement for seminarians to include fiction and poetry as part of their education, […]

In 2016, the legendary Japanese animator and filmmaker Hayo Miyazaki was invited to watch an AI-generated sequence, engineered by young computer animators. The images were of grotesque, writhing figures, which the creators imagined “could be […]

A few years ago, Beth Gibbons decided to learn Polish. That is, she learned enough Polish to perform Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (“Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki. As […]

On February 25, a twenty-five-year-old member of the United States Air Force named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire in a gruesome public suicide spectacle outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Proclaiming “Free Palestine” […]

Whit Stillman’s cult classic Metropolitan is an elegy for the haute bourgeoisie, the well-educated upper subdivision of the middle class that once set the cultural tone for liberal Western nations. Released in 1990, Stillman’s film […]

In March 2023, the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, a devout Catholic, set off a firestorm by stating bluntly, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” With some biological males identifying as women and now […]

Napoleon Bonaparte is one of a handful of historical figures identifiable by his Christian name alone; and in his case, it is the Frenchified version of the Corsican-Italian Napoleone, the Lion of Naples. Napoleon’s native […]

For her eighth full-length feature film, Priscilla, Sofia Coppola chose to adapt Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, a story of feminine languor in sympathy with Coppola’s valuable oeuvre thus far. Like the best […]