A note about the Art Institute of Chicago’s 2011-12 exhibition “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-77.”

A brief note about 40 Watt Sun’s The Inside Room, one of my favorite metal albums of the year.

Two recent articles on politics in Arizona.

A link to my review of journalist Simon Kuper’s book Soccer Men.

Does Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United coach and Civil War buff, know he met one of the war’s foremost scholars?

American History Now is an imaginative overhauling of the invaluable sourcebook of essays on recent developments in American history, increasing the total number of texts and dividing them roughly evenly between accounts ordered chronologically and those ordered thematically.

I’d like to point you to the Los Angeles Review of Books, a new and ambitious book-review publication.

Links to articles and discussions concerning books about and from the 1970s.

Several years ago, when Robert Silvers spoke at 192 Books, the New York Review of Books editor was asked what subject he felt was the most difficult to write about. “Contemporary art” was his answer, and he said that he was hoping to cover more recent art in the pages of his journal. While I [...]

In recent weeks I’ve found myself thinking frequently about Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an experimental 2008 documentary by filmmaker John Gianvito. I saw it that summer at Anthology Film Archives, and was happy to learn that this hour-long plaintive meditation on radical American history—and how it has been encoded in the country’s landscape—is available as a free online stream at SnagFilms.

Huge fanfare surrounded the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in February 2009—and occasioned a flood of books on our sixteenth president. (Here is Sean Wilentz’s controversial take on seven of them.) The ruckus has hardly died down, yet historians of nineteenth-century America are once again being tapped by newspaper opinion pages, this time to commemorate [...]

Urban Omnibus has published an interview with Stanley Greenberg, whose “photography explores hidden systems, infrastructures and technologies, both state-of-the-art and antiquated. New York City’s unseen workings, the region’s complex water systems, architecture mid-construction, physics labs, telescopes and a decommissioned dam have all been the subject of Greenberg’s careful eye.” A slideshow of Greenberg’s photographs accompanies [...]

Why not spend this election day reading Benjamin L. Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press)?

This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my [...]

My friend Alan Gilbert recently conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) for Bomb Magazine. Clayton is behind the consistently great blog mudd up!; is the creator of stunning DJ mixes that incorporate music from around the globe; is the author of insightful articles (one, two) on changes in music culture; and lives, [...]

For several months I have read, in a fugitive manner, Michael Greenberg’s essay collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. A compilation of roughly thousand-word essays he has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the book, so far as I can tell, amounts to a haphazard index of New York, a careful and sympathetic accounting [...]

One of my summer goals is to read (or re-read) several of Christopher Lasch’s books, from The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (1965) to The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), as a prelude to reading Eric Miller’s new biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. Reviews of Miller’s study [...]

For several years I have enjoyed Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times. This morning, looking online, I discovered Gray has been writing about buildings and blocks in New York for over two decades. These pieces comprise a huge and diverting archive, from which I learned, for example, that until the early 1990s [...]

I’ve just surfaced from a particularly pleasant internet-as-black-hole experience: finding the contents of more than dozen issues of the Voice Literary Supplement.

John Gray has written the first review I’ve seen of The Shock of the Global (Harvard), an anthology of historians’ writings about the 1970s edited by a super-group of three Harvard-based historians and a colleague from Berkeley. His assessment: “While what one contributor calls ‘the declining autonomy of the United States in international affairs’ is [...]

Last December I wrote a brief review of Mitch Epstein’s remarkable new book American Power (Steidl). The photographic series it presents was also meant to be presented in public, and a few days ago Pentagram, the design company, announced the launch of the American Power website, located at WhatIsAmericanPower.com. Epstein’s images have been placed on [...]

I just enjoyed John Vachon’s charming memoir of being introduced to photography by Roy Striker, head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration and amasser of 250,000 images of America taken between 1935 and 1944. (Those who have access to the Harper’s online archive can read the September 1973 piece here.) After working [...]

Writing in the current issue of the New Left Review, Mike Davis offers a two-part meditation on the environmental crisis. The first part, “Pessimism of the Intellect,” uses the recent announcement that we have left behind the Holocene epoch and entered an Anthropocene period, made by Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, as [...]

The January 2010 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly contains reviews of recent books by two scholars based at NYU. Both books, Thomas M. Truxes‘s Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York and Bryan Waterman‘s Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature, [...]

I’ve just finished reading the new issue of The Baffler, and I can report that every article rewards an attentive read. The writing is crisp and the thinking is sharp throughout the magazine. Somewhat surprisingly, the tone of simmering resentment at the follies of our political and economic mandarins is invigorating, even at a moment [...]

“The skill at unmasking error, or simple intellectual one-upmanship, is not completely without value, but we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to ‘trouble’ ideas.” So says Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, whose reviews and essays I always make a point to read when I come across them.

Many people have commented upon Tony Judt’s eloquent and acutely observant description of the “progressive imprisonment without parole” that is life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, from which he suffers. The first of a series of short essays, on the subject of getting through the night, is in the January 14 issue of the NYRB. Judt [...]

e-flux journal has printed excerpts from October’s recent questionnaire about the “lightness of being” that seemingly characterizes contemporary art.

I’m jealous of my friend Michael Ned Holte, a talented art critic and film enthusiast, for he has seen James Benning’s Ruhr (2009), the filmmaker’s newest work and first foray into high-definition video. Thankfully, he has also written about it, for Artforum.com.

Those who remember with some fondness Today in Letters, the blog I published briefly in 2007, will appreciate Letters of Note, edited by Shaun Usher. The author describes it as a “blog-based archive of fascinating correspondence, complete with scans and transcripts of the original missives.” Since I began following the site a few weeks ago, [...]

From an interview with Wolves in the Throne Room drummer and organic farmer Aaron Weaver: “I think that black metal fundamentally is an attempt to reawaken an ancient spirit. It’s an attempt to touch some sort of transcendent primal knowledge…. I think that black metal is an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a [...]

On Design Observer, Steven Heller looks back at the late-’60s leftist muckracking magazine Ramparts, discussing both its content and its (curiously staid but influential) design. “Marking the end of post-war puritan American values, a younger generation that had been raised on the sour milk of McCarthyism reinvigorated periodical publishing. Ramparts on the West Coast was [...]

The first significant reviews of Gordon Wood’s entry in Oxford’s multi-volume History of the United States are trickling in. Jay Winik, in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calls Empire of Liberty “the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing” and “as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know,” [...]

Prompted by an article in The Guardian and an op-ed in the New York Times, Ben Davis considers why people hate “conceptual” art: “What people actually mean by ‘conceptual art’ here is art that is not valued on the basis of its real, intrinsic merits, but because of the ideas around it. ‘Conceptual’ is conflated [...]

Last night, T.J. Stiles’s new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction from an award committee chaired by Yale historian David Blight. By coincidence I just happened to read a thoughtful, generous (but by no means naive) review-essay about the book written by Steve Fraser. It’s in the [...]

The last time I wrote about Sharon Core’s photographs I reviewed an exhibition of prints from her series “Early American,” which is based on the still life compositions of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century painter Raphaelle Peale. New photographs from that series are now on view, of all places, in the Gallery at Hermès on Madison [...]