The theater’s rich intellectual inheritance serves as a buffer to society’s recrudescent stupidity. Upholding this legacy seems a more vital role for a critic than operating as a tour guide of commercial entertainments. The survival of our democracy depends on the recovery of our critical thinking skills.

In the past, when I’ve made the case for cri... See more

Few questions today are more salient or more vital than the ones we’re asking about truth. Who determines the truth? How do we know when it’s true? Does it even matter? Can my truth be different from your truth? And what happens if it is? These issues have arisen alongside a parallel question about lies and falsehood. Google Trends shows that the p

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Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

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