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"Hill House": Haunted by What Might Have Been

The great nonsense of cultural relativism has been superseded by personal relativism. Values are now relative to each person. Shirley...

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From Dickens to LOST, part 2

Should Novels Be More Like TV? It has become a banality to describe a television series as “novelistic”, as has pointing out that in...

From Dickens to LOST, part 1

What Makes Serials So Great? I’d never anticipated quoting Benedict Cumberbatch, but here it goes: Discussing the differences between...

What Comes After Postmodernism?

Contemporary art theorist Thierry de Duve once wrote that art indicates “one of the thresholds where humans withdraw from their natural...

What's Significant About Crossover Characters?

Convergent, connected, crossover characters are everywhere. Almost by definition and certainly by design, they are appearing – and then...

What Good Can Come From Bad Books?

I was recently in the midst of inhaling (such was the speed and ease with which it was consumed) Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. I had begun...

Is the question "What is art?" worth asking?

Before Tony Shafrazi was seized by a guard at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he managed to spray-paint three blood-red words across...