On “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

On Mondrian, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Henry Hobson Richardson, ancient moneymaking & more from the world of culture.

New to The New Criterion? Become a subscriber to receive ten print issues and gain immediate access to our online archive spanning more than four decades of art and cultural criticism.On The Gulag Archipelago at fifty.

Democracy—the word itself means “people (demos) power (kratos)”—originated in late sixth-century Athens through the reforms of Cleisthenes. The Athenian popular leader transferred political power from the traditional tribal clans to the general Assembly of citizens. What followed, however, was a historic but insidious growth in power of …

Dec 20, 2024 · Suzanna Murawski on Rousseau, Rothko & American literature.

Siena splendor at the Met by Karen Wilkin On “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

T ho mas Sowell is one of the towering American intellectuals of our time. An economist trained at the University of Chicago and a social theorist of the first rank, he has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University since 1980. He has written an astonishing fifty books (if you count revised and expanded editions), numerous essays, and a long-running, twice-a-week ...

Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s sixth annual Circle Lecture on September 26, 2024. O ve r the last six decades, a certain phrase has metastasized and become such a cliché that it has been used to describe all the following things and more: the coronavirus pandemic, Republican moderates, neoliberalism, January 6, …

The New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, was founded in 1982 by the art critic Hilton Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. A monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, The New Criterion began as an experiment in critical audacity—a publication devoted to engaging, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, with “the …

Oct 25, 2024 · “Q uomodo dicitur Latine laptop, magister?” On the left a herd of goats, and to the right a yet-hungrier herd of wide-eyed tourists, ruminate upon the ancient terrain. I chew over this question as the group sits beneath the Temple of Concordia, which stands just as proudly as when the local Sicilians conjured it up two and a half millennia ago. Now, two and a …