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Articles by Brooke Allen
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Jan Steen, Peasants Merrymaking Outside an Inn, ca. 1676, Oil on canvas, Leiden Collection. On view in “Old Masters, New Amsterdam,” at the New-York Historical Society. The Critic’s Notebook Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series.
Záleskautky
Jak by vypadaly Rychlé šípy, kdyby vznikly ve 21. století? Přesně jako Záleskautky! Pět nejlepších kamarádek si chce užít léto na dívčím skautském táboře a utužit svoje přátelství, jenže jim plány neustále hatí tříoké lišky, vodní příšery nebo zdivočelí skauti z chlapeckého tábora. Naštěstí nemají problém tomu všemu nakopat zadek a klidně i vyhrát páku nad oživlou sochou. A když budou mít štěstí, ani nenakrknou potetovanou vedoucí.
Fox and Friend | The Hudson Review
If the last decade has taught us anything, it is that politics is theater. And seldom have two more histrionically gifted performers strutted the political stage than Charles James Fox (1749–1806) and Edmund Burke (1729–1797), allies on the liberal wing of the Whig party through an era of high drama; their long friendship foundered only late in their careers, with the outbreak of the French Revolution.
Brooke’s Books
Literary critic Brooke Allen drops by to talk about her new essay collection, Good Bones: Glorious Relics from the Age of Reading. She and Chris also discuss Brooke’s idiosyncratic career path (including her time writing for Divorce Court), the emergence of a post-literate culture, and the future of criticism.
“Swimming home,” by Brooke Allen
John Cheever’s house in Ossining, NY. Photo: A.N. Devers. Swimming home Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. Eighty-two years old, and Susan Cheever is still picking at that scab. The discovery that her father, John Cheever—to whom she felt a special bond as a fellow writer—had led a passionate emotional and sexual life that had nothing to do with his family and to which she was never made privy was understandably painful.
“Turn of the wheel,” by Daniel J. Mahoney
Boris Kustodiev, The Bolshevik, 1920, Oil on canvas, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. The turn of the wheel Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. With the publication of the first book of April 1917, we have arrived at the fourth and final “node” of Solzhenitsyn’s literary and historical masterwork The Red Wheel.1 The four books of March 1917 are now behind us.
No. 20 Wisconsin closes regular season with 1-1 draw at Northwestern
No. 20 Wisconsin closes regular season with 1-1 draw at Northwestern October 26, 2025 | Women's Soccer EVANSTON, Ill. – The No. 20 Wisconsin women's soccer team tied 1-1 with the Northwestern Wildcats in the last game of the regular season. How it Happened First Half The opening 45 minutes were evenly matched, but Wisconsin held possession throughout. Drew Stover made two saves to keep the score 0-0 at the break.
GOOD BONES | Kirkus Reviews
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists. The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities. Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker.
Northwestern Splits Points With No. 20 Wisconsin in Big Ten Finale
EVANSTON, Ill. — Northwestern picked up a 1-1 tie in its regular-season finale against No. 20 Wisconsin on Sunday at Northwestern Medicine Field at Martin Stadium. Sophomore forward Kennedy Roesch salvaged the draw with a 79th minute goal. "It was obviously a tough game," coach Michael Moynihan said. "Wisconsin had the upper hand right at the beginning, but we worked ourselves into it and generated some really good chances to go ahead.
“Week in review,” by Anatoly Grablevsky
Recent stories of note: “The greatest Cypriot show in Florida: Ringling Museum opens its first permanent ancient-art gallery” Allison C. Meier, The Art Newspaper The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, has just opened its first gallery dedicated to the museum’s collection of Cypriot antiquities, the third-largest in the Americas after those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Philadelphia’s Penn Museum.
Present glory, and past
Nadine Sierra as Amina in Bellini’s opera La sonnambula at the Met. Photo: Marty Sohl / Met Opera. Present glory, and past Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. “To say it immediately, Nadine Sierra proved herself a great singer at the Metropolitan Opera last night.” This is how I began a review of La sonnambula two weeks ago. And I include Sierra—singing from that opera—in my new Music for a While, here.
Present glory, and past
“To say it immediately, Nadine Sierra proved herself a great singer at the Metropolitan Opera last night.” This is how I began a review of La sonnambula two weeks ago. And I include Sierra—singing from that opera—in my new Music for a While, here. There is a lot of nostalgia in the musical realm, as there is in others. This should not blind us, or deafen us, to glory in the present. On this podcast, I say, “I missed Callas, Sutherland, and Caballé.
Learning the wrong lesson
Scott Johnston’s recently published second novel, The Sandersons Fail Manhattan, is one of the funniest and most compelling conservative fiction books to have come out in the last few years. The book is a tale of what can go wrong when an old New York WASP family comes up against the forces of cultural Marxism—specifically the woke trend for all things trans. William Sanderson is a third-generation Yale graduate, a native of the Upper East Side, and a member of all the right clubs.
Alissa Valles | The New Criterion
Show AllShow ArticlesShow DispatchShow TNC+ MultimediaAll Authors, , Abel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
Crescent nail-tail wallaby (Onychogalea lunata)
Runs, foreshortened paws clutched to its chest, “as if carrying something,” “always with urgent manner,” its silky pelage ashen with rufous patches and markings mimicking a moon’s arc; twitches a tail with a tip of horn like a vestigial claw or nail, seeks safety in she-oak, broom, hollow gumtree; runs from the red fox, from British and Nyungar who set a fire at the root to smoke the creature out, build a fence of brush to kettle the fugitives, introduce them to death at the end of a club.
“The cashier,” by Rachel Hadas
Apples go red and shadows black as summer turns its radiant back. The cashier at the market wore the sweatshirt that we’d seen before, with always cold across her chest. She said, as she’d said weeks ago, “Why I moved here I do not know.” Everything has a cost. Daylight savings lasts one month more, but earlier dusks shut each day’s door. Even the season’s getting old. Last night’s full moon: glowing gold.
An end to the rights revolution?
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in an election case (Louisiana v. Callais) that will decide how far the federal courts can go in requiring state legislatures to consider race in drawing congressional-district lines. At issue is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race or membership in a language-majority group.
“Mann versus man,” by Anna Ballan
“I can only imagine,” wrote Walter Benjamin to Gershom Scholem after reading The Magic Mountain, “what an internal change must have taken place in the author while he was writing.” That wonder drives Morten Høi Jensen’s The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain,” a lavish work of historical analysis that doubles as a kind of psychological thriller.
The Critic’s Notebook
Nonfiction: Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History, by Moudhy Al-Rashid (W. W. Norton):It may be that the “father of history,” Herodotus, was the first to conduct a sustained and critical “inquiry” (Greek historia) into the past. But man has always been interested in himself, and chronicling the past has been a feature of civilization almost from the beginning.
Muriel the Marvel
Try GOLD - Free The Wall Street Journal | September 20, 2025 'I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.' -MURIEL SPARK BEFORE SHE became a novelist, Muriel Spark—best known to American readers as the author of the 1961 novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”—took an interest in what she called “biographical-literary criticism.” This story is from the September 20, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
‘Electric Spark’ Review: The Rise of Muriel the Marvel
Before she became a novelist, Muriel Spark—best known to American readers as the author of the 1961 novel “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”—took an interest in what she called “biographical-literary criticism.” Under the influence of psychoanalysis and the theories of Marie Bonaparte, a sexologist, the Edinburgh-born Spark produced books on Mary Shelley, Wordsworth, John Masefield, and the Brontës.
Salzburg chronicle
Over the years, I have sometimes sounded more like a weatherman than a music critic. I have reported on the temperatures inside halls. Salzburg’s halls are usually hot. Twenty-some years ago, I nicknamed the Grosser Saal of the Mozarteum the “Grosser Sauna.” But in July of this year, I attended the opening night of the bbc Proms, in Royal Albert Hall (London). Talk about hot.
“A worldwide war,” by Jeremy Black
Rick Atkinson’s choice to end The Fate of the Day, the second volume of his Revolution Trilogy, with the Patriot surrender of Charleston in 1780, their largest loss of troops during the war, is both wise and arresting. This is narrative history in the grand style, with both sweep and apt pen portraits.
Compromise morals
In 1846, lured by the call of Manifest Destiny, the United States was preparing to invade Mexico. The prospect of Mexico’s vast unsettled lands rekindled the conflict over the expansion of slavery that had been smoldering just beneath the surface of American politics since the Compromise of 1820.
“Bosh, not Blake,” by Nicholas Shrimpton
Are the commentators on Hamlet really mad,” Oscar Wilde is supposed to have asked. “Or are they only pretending to be?” Though William Blake’s life was troubled by occasional episodes of mental illness (probably what we now call bipolar disorder), his work is lucidly conceived, robustly argued, and demandingly sane. The commentators on it, unfortunately, have frequently been downright crazy.
A Florentine fountainhead
A pet peeve of mine for the last few years has been when biographers of major figures neglect to inform their readers why a new biography of their subject is called for. Has new information come to light? If so, how significant is it? Are previous biographies in some way unsatisfactory, and if so, which of their failings need to be corrected?
Teaching Men Who Will Never Leave Prison
It’s 2018. I am, for the first time, in a classroom at Great Meadow Correctional Facility, in Comstock, New York, a men’s maximum-security state prison. There are sixteen students in the class. They are white, Black, Latino. A couple of them are the age of ordinary college kids; most are considerably older. The oldest of all, a man in his seventies, struggles to follow the conversation, using cheap, prison-issued hearing aids.
The New Yorker Daily Newsletter
Plus: a sad Wimbledon for the Brits; and reëxamining Paul Gauguin, “the creep of the Post-Impressionists.” View in browser | Smelling something that you haven’t encountered in a long time can be “almost psychedelically nostalgic,” Margaret Talbot writes. By experimenting with scents in their exhibits, museum curators are capitalizing on that feeling.
Household arts | The New Criterion
The historical vicissitudes of artistic reputation are so extreme that we might almost conclude that no such things as indubitable aesthetic quality or universal standards of taste exist.
“Week in review,” by Suzanna Murawski
Recent stories of note: “To know or not to know” Costica Bradatan, The Times Literary Supplement Mark Lilla’s recent book Ignorance and Bliss, a wandering exploration of the “will to ignorance” reviewed by Costica Bradatan in The Times Literary Supplement, begins with a version of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. In this version, however, the man who is compelled to leave his shadowy bondage pities the condition of those around him and brings along a young boy.
Shining in Florida
America, so the received wisdom goes, is home to five great orchestras: the New York Philharmonic, the symphony orchestras of Boston and Chicago, and the orchestras of Philadelphia and Cleveland. To this “Big Five,” one should rightly add the National Symphony Orchestra, which performs mainly at Washington’s recently newsworthy John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
The return of an Odysseus
There is considerable irony in the upcoming events centering on Paul Cézanne in his hometown of Aix-en-Provence, France. Although today there is a large statue of the artist at the city’s central plaza, Place Charles De Gaulle, and the sidewalks are studded with medallions bearing the artist’s name and a large C encircling the city crest, Cézanne was virtually a stranger to his own municipality during his lifetime.
The Critic’s Notebook
Art: “A Home for Art” and “Closer Look at Turner’s Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet-Boat: Evening,” at the Frick Collection, New York (May 2): If you’re thinking of swinging by the newly reopened Frick Collection sometime this May, try this Friday evening, when two talks will add an extra dollop of learning to your visit.
A Fischer in front of the Phil
In the last few days, the New York Philharmonic has been conducted by Iván Fischer, the Hungarian. He is one of the Fabulous Fischer Brothers, the other being Ádám, also a conductor. Iván’s program with the Philharmonic consisted of Mozart on the first half and the Fischers’ fellow Hungarian, Béla Bartók, on the second. I attended Saturday night’s concert. The program began with an overture (a good way to begin): that to The Magic Flute. The orchestra started almost together.
Against the laws
The modern state is built on the rationalist conceit that society is best organized with detailed codes, elaborate procedures, and rights for almost anything. Federal law and regulation comprises about 150 million words, telling people not only what to do, but exactly how to do it. Legal codes weren’t this dense before the 1960s. But a wave of guilt washed over society because of racism, pollution, and other harmful social practices. How could America prevent bad practices in the future?
Patchwork perfection
In 1876, in Rome, Prince Alessandro Torlonia, a member of a distinguished family of bankers known as much for their enthusiasm for art as for their other abilities, opened the Torlonia Museum to the public. Installed in a former warehouse on the Via Colonna, the new institution displayed Prince Alessandro’s family’s immense collection of antique sculptures, mostly in marble.
Humanism redivivus
What is conservatism? That is a good question, one that has been answered in many ways: a defense of the status quo, or of tradition; gradualism in politics; a preference for order over change; an embrace of religion; support for private property and the propertied classes; opposition to leftism and reformism in all guises. The list could go on. Anthony T.
Le style c’est l’homme même
Taking literary “style” in its strictest sense, as word choice and syntax, consider what C. S.
Brooke Allen | The New Criterion
Select an AuthorAbel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
"An Objective Diagnosis of Eating Disorders Stable Isotope Analysis of " by Brooke Allen and Beverly Roeder
Keywords eating disorders, stable isotope, hair, mental illness Abstract Eating disorders (EDs) are a group of mental illnesses that afflict up to two percent of the population . The group of illnesses consists of anorexia, bulimia, and EDNOS (Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified).
Biosynthetic Gene Cluster Diversity Across Native and Introduced Populations of an Ectomycorrhizal Fungus, Suillus luteus
Abstract Non-pathogenic fungi are being increasingly recognized for their involvement in biological invasions, where they have the potential to cause ecological and economical harm. One notable example is the ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungus, Suillus luteus, which is commonly found co-invading with non-native pines that have escaped from commercial pine plantations across the Southern Hemisphere.
An Experimental Test of Local Adaptation in Native and Introduced Populations of an Ectomycorrhizal Fungus, Suillus luteus
Abstract After species introductions and subsequent invasions, organisms often encounter intense selection pressures from biotic and abiotic aspects of novel environments, driving rapid evolutionary changes that potentially lead to local adaptation.
Variation in Biosynthetic Gene Clusters Among Lifestyles Across Kingdom Fungi
Abstract Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) produce secondary metabolites, many of which are involved in trophic interactions and carbon acquisition lifestyles of fungi. As such, BGCs are hypothesized to exhibit evolutionary diversification across those lifestyles. We tested this hypothesis by analyzing predicted BGCs in more than 1000 fungal genomes, and their variation among fungal lineages and across putative fungal lifestyles (trophic modes).
‘The Wildes’ Review: Oscar and Family
With “The Wildes,” the novelist Louis Bayard has posed himself a considerable challenge. First, much of the story is told from a woman’s perspective: not an easy exercise for many male authors but one that Mr. Bayard has already, with his novels “Courting Mr. Lincoln” (2019) and “Jackie & Me” (2022), performed with success. More daringly, he has set himself the task of writing dialogue for Oscar Wilde, the most quotable wit of the past couple of centuries.
Robert Louis Stevenson Loved Her. Many of His Friends Did Not. Original
She herself was tough as rawhide. Hailing from Indianapolis, the state capital but still not much more than a frontier town, she had married an unreliable charmer at 17 and accompanied him to the silver mines of Nevada, where he failed to make a fortune and they shivered in a canvas and cardboard shanty.
List of SpaceX Starlink launches for August 2024
Spaceflight Starlink Group 10-6: August 2, 2024, 12:19 a.m. EDT Falcon 9 Block 5 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | TIME AND DATE MAY CHANGE Starlink Group 11-1: August 4, 2024, 12:00 a.m. PDT Falcon 9 Block 5 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | TIME AND DATE MAY CHANGE You can watch a livestream of the Starlink launches on SpaceX’s X account.
Silversmith & tastemaker
In 1851, when the precocious silversmith Edward C. Moore began designing for Tiffany & Co., the industrial barons who patronized the fine-wares industry still preferred toothless Hellenistic imitation and the safety of Rococo nostalgia. By 1891, when Moore’s reign as chief designer ended, Tiffany & Co. had brought Islamic-style ornament to the American masses, mastered the art of Japanese patination, and designed firearms with Smith & Wesson.
Ghosts of the great
Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered by Andrew Roberts at the House of Lords on July 23, 2024. My Lords, it would be churlish not to congratulate the Labour Party on its stunning victory on the fourth of July and unpatriotic not to wish the Government luck and a fair wind.
Ronald S. Lauder receives The New Criterion’s 2024 Edmund Burke Award
Watch the 2024 Edmund Burke Award recipient, Ronald S. Lauder, give remarks on “Protecting America’s promise” at The New Criterion’s annual gala. To view this exclusive video of 2024 Edmund Burke Award recipient Ronald S. Lauder’s discussion on “Protecting America’s promise,” become a member of The New Criterion’s Supporters Circle. For login details, please email [email protected].
Kamala Harris’s Michael Dukakis moment
Americans over the age of fifty may remember the 1988 presidential election campaign, when Governor Michael Dukakis surged to a seventeen-point lead over Vice President George H. W. Bush following the Democratic National Convention in mid-July. That was a successful convention for Democrats. They were united and eager to take back the White House after suffering for eight years under the Reagan–Bush administration.
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