THOR HEYERDAHL (1914–2002) lived a long life, but so much was left undone: he might have piloted an ice floe from Porvoo to Hokkaido...

1) THREE CUPS OF TEA, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. (Penguin, $15.) A former climber builds schools in villages in Pakistan and...

The myth of FLANN O’BRIEN (Brian O’Nolan, 1911-66) is that he squandered himself in the smalltime, wrote too much for the newspapers and not...

Sprezzatura. If there’s a word guaranteed henceforth to discomfit the editors of The New Republic, that’ll be it. For it was under this romantic...

At one point in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), we find washed-up silent film stars literally and figuratively playing out their last hands. A...

No anti- middlebrow in recent memory has gotten more mileage (and grief) because of Middlebrow’s coopting efforts than TALIB KWELI (born 1975). Anointed the...

Within the western current of occult mysticism, A. E. WAITE (1857–1942) stands out as a prototype of the modern scholar-practitioner — an initiate and...

Why do middlebrows love to hate performance art?