Philip Martin

Some people believe all things are ultimately understandable -- with enough time and study, we can unravel mysteries ranging from the "hard problem" of consciousness to why even tightly tied shoelaces eventually come undone.

We were talking about depression the other night.

Today at 3:24 a.m. Comments In November 1988, I wore good suits to work. I was in charge of three small-town newspapers in east Texas.

Elvis Costello's 1986 album "King of America," one of my favorite records ever, has been re-released in a six-CD boxed set version.

Susan Minot (Michael Lionstar/Knopf) In the old days, when newspapers had the resources to produce genuine book sections and farm

Today at 1:58 a.m. Comments A friend in the game asked me for a quote for his election day Substack.

W.H. Auden was, in the final decade of his life, an extraordinarily unattractive man, and was keenly aware of it. "My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain," he told an interviewer in 1967 while staying with his old friend and former lover Christopher Isherwood in Los Angeles. Auden's sense of humor and self-awareness shine through this analogy, a memorable image that influenced Jimmy Webb's song "MacArthur Park," with its famous line about a cake left in the rain.

W.H. Auden was, in the final decade of his life, an extraordinarily unattractive man, and was keenly aware of it.

The release of a new 4K remaster of Sam Raimi's 1998 bleakly precise "A Simple Plan" on home video next week allows a chance to reconsider a movie

The release of a new 4K remaster of Sam Raimi's 1998 bleakly precise "A Simple Plan" on home video next week allows a chance to reconsider a movie that was largely overshadowed in a year packed with memorable films, including "Saving Private Ryan," "Shakespeare in Love," "The Thin Red Line," "American History X" and "The Truman Show."