Weekly recommendations from the Editors on what to read, see, and hear in the world of culture.

Anatoly Grablevsky on “Monet and Venice,” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Editors’ note: To buy this and other classic New Criterion essays in stand-alone print format, see the reprint series in our bookstore. Since it is difficult, or rather impossible, to represent a ...

[T]he whig historian can draw lines through certain events, . . . and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents ...

Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion’s seventh annual Circle Lecture on September 18, 2025. On November 18, 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, the first ...

Lust strives to become intellectualized, the concrete operations of the flesh are blended with decorous abstractions, human loves tend toward the impossibilities of angelic embraces. Magic and ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Philosophers of language spend a lot of time debating the ins and outs of the semantics of names. I am a linguist ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Despite all that, Zamyatin was lucky. Other writers who (to quote from the same letter) earned a “criminal name” ...

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 ...

A few months ago I went to dinner with an old friend, a retired professor of great distinction who suffered throughout his career from the vituperation of his academic colleagues who took a view of ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Stalin interrogated Sholokhov about ideologically problematic passages but agreed to the book’s publication on ...

Classicism is a broad river that has run through Western architecture for two-and-a-half millennia. A generation ago it seemed that the stream had reduced to a trickle. Only a small phalanx of ...