This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. The other night I streamed Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, a documentary by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. In most of the footage, we see a reflective and doubting Leonard. As I watched his Jewish man’s face […]
One of Stephen Marche’s refrains throughout his provocative essay, On Writing and Failure; as a writer himself, Marche would never deny that writing is hard work: He well knows that writing for a living is fatiguing to the brain and tough on the ego and that the financial payoff is overwhelmingly dismal. But, by repeatedly […]
Molly Young is on leave for the next several months. In her absence, colleagues from the Book Review will pick up the recommendation torch and appear in your inbox every two Saturdays. As a child, I always liked Valentine’s Day. My mom would leave a valentine by our cereal bowls, and sometimes Andy’s little heart […]
One of the least discussed aspects of the AI language generator ChatGPT might be its ability to produce pretty awful poetry. Given how difficult it is to teach a computer how to recognize a syllable, I’m not disparaging the technical prowess of the chatbot’s creators and testers. But very few of the AI-produced poems I’ve […]
Aside from the corporate gimmicks, Valentine’s Day is about treasuring love. In the age of digital communication, a handwritten letter is the last thing on anyone’s mind. But the physicality of a page filled with prose straight from the heart makes it an appealing gift. But of course, writing vulnerable feelings elegantly is a tough […]
