Now, neither classics nor philology is what it used to be. And the combination—classical philology—is in evident trouble. The ...

On a new production of Wagner’s Die Walküre, at the Bavarian State Opera. Kratzer studied philosophy as well as set design. He is well-versed in how to imbue opera productions with meaning even in ...

The Sun Valley Music Festival in Idaho is part of a constellation of prominent festivals that dot the Rocky Mountains’ ski towns each summer. I dropped in on the forty-second season to hear a ...

Walking to Carnegie Hall, I called a friend—a musician friend—and said, “I’m going to say something we could have said in the 1980s or ’90s: I’m going to hear Renée and Tom. How ’bout that?” I was ...

Each week the editors of The New Criterion offer recommendations on what to read, see, and hear in the world of culture in the weekly Critic’s Notebook. To get it first, subscribe to the free Critic’s ...

Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars (Basic Books). He was The New Criterion ’s Visiting Critic for the ...

I met the Brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho more than twenty years ago when he came to the United States in what seemed like his transition into intellectual and political networks north of the ...

It is remarkable that, despite its long record of failure, socialism is now more popular than ever among college students and in progressive precincts of the Democratic Party, at least judging by the ...

Anne Boleyn’s reputation was tarnished when she was beheaded and her daughter Elizabeth I was deemed “illegitimate.” Henry VIII, perhaps embarrassed by his second failed marriage (it was not to be his ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. On first looking into “The colorblind bard,” I felt like some watcher of the skies when an old planet swims into ...

Ten years ago, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary declared “surreal” its word of the year. There were many reasons for its popularity that year. In the century since the 1924 publication of André Breton’s ...