Universal City was on fire. OK, to use more literal terms, a section of the 230-acre back lot at NBC Universal Studios was on fire, but I like the first version for its metaphoric as well as prophetic import. After all, the place is actually named Universal City. And on a recent Sunday morning in…

We’re all astronauts, encapsulated voyagers peering out through windshields at the vast, perilous universe beyond. From these places inside our heads, we steer our ships, sending out probes as necessary. The command center seems far away from the engines and manifolds, a mind/body dissociation that’s long been a philosophical quandary—the proverbial “ghost in the machine.”…

Patricia Hampl notes that successful memoir evidences a “hunger for the world,” yearning which “expands beyond its subject…into the endless and tragic recollection that is history.” Not long before her recent, untimely death, the memoirist Nuala O’Faolain referred to this hunger in an interview published in Ireland’s The Independent. Devastated by a terminal cancer diagnosis…

One of the perils of editing a journal of high culture (and publicly lamenting the dumbing down of the culture generally) is that people assume I’m an art snob. Few seem willing to say this directly to my face, but a couple of the more candid folks out there have told me they imagine me…

Any project done in collaboration with twenty-one people is almost certain to be abysmal. Joint efforts are hard to manage, unless they’re in name only: a de facto leader and a troop of “partners” who can be told to shut up and get to it. Purpose, focus, execution—all rebel at too much participation, making “consensus…

Synchronicity is not a word I often associate with the random glut of prime-time television. But when a glancing look at the Tuesday night schedule last week revealed a Frontline special on immigration at the same hour as a History Channel segment on Noah’s Flood, I could sense a coincidence too good to pass up.…

I’m told music, dance and theater are performing arts, distinguished from “plastic arts” in that the medium of expression is the (frequently augmented) human body moving in time, the realization inseparable from interpretation. While such distinctions continue to die the death of a thousand qualifications, I can’t help but wonder at what point the categories…

Growing up, thriftiness was next to godliness. My sisters and I were never in want, but our eternal case of low-grade covetousness was stoked by an odd egotism: we were too good to eat out, shop anywhere but secondhand, or upgrade from a muffler-less Aerostar to something that didn’t belch smoke. We were too good…

Is everything going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Into the crapper? Or is life getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What, exactly, does your handbasket look like? The older I get the more interested I am in people’s convictions about the directionality of culture.…

Last December, I wrote a speculative piece for First Things Online, regarding the upcoming visit of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to the People’s Republic of North Korea. I was responding to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the critic Terry Teachout, who thought that such a visit would constitute a serenade for Kim Jong-Il,…