Like Bea Arthur, Pearl Bailey, and Redd Foxx, the televisual omnipresence of JULIUS “NIPSEY” RUSSELL (1918?-2005) belied his status as a veteran of less...

As a visiting nurse in New York’s tenements at the turn of the 20th century, MARGARET SANGER (1879-1966) once heard a woman recovering from...

Director Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has many fine qualities, but they founder and die away to nothing on the eerie smoothness...

We’re riding a swell of black-humored children’s literature, these days — the Lemony Snicket books are just a whitecap. However, as dark as these...

Were his novels written by half-crazed, single-minded machines?

R. Sikoryak is a versatile, witty, and well-read cartoonist and illustrator who’s retold Dante’s Inferno in the style of Bazooka Joe bubblegum comics, Crime...

Even though there's no shepherd issuing orders, we behave like docile sheep.

High-, low-, no-, and hilobrow members of the Partisan Generation include: Albert Camus, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Clement Greenberg (whose 1939 Partisan Review essay, “Avant-Garde and...