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I tried being some kind of smart guy on Twitter. I’d seen somebody’s tweet about Ted Cruz differing with an anti-gay bigot and found the replies plentiful but not at all varied. The theme was that for once Cruz the jerk had managed to be right. A couple of replies posted a famous old standby from The Onion, the one with a photo of a grumpy man underneath this headline:

In the last two weeks, my attention has been focused on three cultural events. The first is an upcoming concert at the Strathmore Center by Cecile McLorin Salvant. The second is Angel Down, the novel, se...

The Four Seasons is theoretically the type of adaptation Hollywood should make more of because the original isn’t a classic. There’s untapped potential for a remake of a show or film that had a good idea, but didn’t work; rebooting a masterpiece is only going to result in unsparing comparisons. Alan Alda’s 1981 film is a routine ensemble dramedy that didn’t provide the...

Lately there's been a bunch of YouTube videos of celebrities talking about what they want their final meal to be. One meal is too limited. If I'm going to die before breakfast the next morning, then I need to binge—food and drink—all day long.  It's going to be a Rabelaisian affair.

The day will begin with a Bloody Mary (heavy on the hot sauce and horseradish), c...

Rodrigo Toscano is an environmental and labor activist, and his poetry reflects his politics. His mode, though, isn’t directly didactic. Instead he spews dadaist satire; his 2012 volume Deck of Deeds takes Ashbery’s off-kilter garbled collages and files them down to a serrated edge in order to create limping one-to-three-page prose-poems that sound like earnest corpora...