Another postscript to Matthew Battles’ meditation on doodling. I originally wrote this item for Laylah Ali: 5 Responses to 5 Paintings, an exhibition brochure...

Here’s a postscript to Matthew Battles’ terrific meditation on doodling. In this scene, Gary Cooper gives us all permission to doodle and otherwise be...

Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. And yet for all its primitivity, and despite...

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899–1986). The gaucho stood over the dead man, smeared the blade of his facón across his poncho, and slid it away...

In today’s New York Times Week in Review section, Mary Jo Murphy uses the 40th anniversary of Woodstock as a peg/excuse to air a...

The most widely known American anthropologist since Margaret Mead, CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1926-2006) was instrumental in turning anthropology into the respectable and (more importantly) theory-poachable...

Despite her reputation as the witty gal of the Algonquin Round Table, DOROTHY PARKER (1893-1967) dismissed the clique as “just a lot of people...

The thing about KIM CATTRALL (born 1956) is that when she was young she was middle-aged, and in middle age found her youth —...