Arts & Culture
Saved by bad art
As AI continues to proliferate, I’ve been inviting my students to create something—anything.
Underground apocalypse
In three current series—Paradise, Silo, and Fallout—bunkers owned by billionaires dictate the options for post-apocalyptic existence.
Holy uprising
I’ve long seen the ascension story as an absurdity. John Donne helps me see it as a revolution.
Michael Jackson and the boys we don’t talk about
We reached consensus on Epstein and Cosby. Why are we buying tickets to see Michael?
A vampire and a Lutheran pastor in Blackfeet country
Stephen Graham Jones’s theologically inflected horror novel just might be his masterpiece.
Noah’s ark in Armenia’s religious imagination
In the church of my ancestors, even the architecture pays homage to the resonance of the flood story.
The monster stories we need
Two very different Frankenstein movies share a central concern: If humans unleash monstrousness on the world, who are we to judge when our monsters turn against us?
The brutal ax of capitalism
In No Other Choice, the unemployed anti-hero turns to a life of crime to solve his economic woes. He’s not the only one.
A 17th-century Dear Abby
Mary Beth Norton steers between the timeless and the time-lost in this all-too-slim book about the world’s first advice column.