First Things RSS Feed - Peter Wood

Conjuring Pushkin

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 06:00:00 -0400

Alexander Pushkin’s poetry notoriously defies translation. Even Vladimir Nabokov made a mighty attempt at bringing Eugene Onegin , Pushkin’s masterpiece, into English, with results that pleased almost no one. Edmund Wilson judged Nabokov’s four-volume rendering “uneven and sometimes banal.” The review famously ended the friendship between the two men. They did not, however, fight a duel. Unlike Pushkin, both went on to natural deaths.

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Covering Antietam

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 06:00:00 -0400

On October 2, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln met with General George B. McClellan near the site of the battle of Antietam. Sixteen days earlier, McClellan had turned back General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland, in what remains the bloodiest single day in American history. A photograph by Alexander Gardner shows the president and his general facing each other across a table in McClellan’s tent.

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Shadow Show

Fri, 25 May 2018 06:00:00 -0400

In the last fifty years, Artemisia Gentileschi has risen to new eminence. She originally gained fame among her seventeenth-century contemporaries as a talented Baroque painter in the manner of Caravaggio. Her remarkable works failed to garner much attention in the three centuries that followed. Since the 1960s, however, Artemisia has been unmissable. Exhibitions, catalogs, and scholarly studies of her several dozen surviving paintings have poured forth, along with biographies, letters, novels, a TV mini-series, and plays. Artemisia even has a place setting at Judy Chicago’s vagina-themed installation Dinner Party (1974–79)—suggesting that some of the hurrahs for Artemisia arise more from her perceived usefulness to feminism than from an interest in her beautiful and often disturbing art.

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Cult of the Cutting-Edge

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 12:00:00 -0500

Should art aspire to be “absolutely cutting-edge”? What exactly does that phrase mean?

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Steinem vs. Friedan

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 06:00:00 -0500

The Fight is over, for now. I hope it will continue, however, in a bigger stadium.

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Abraham Lincoln, Matchmaker

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 06:00:00 -0400

What if Abraham Lincoln had sent a young socialite to meet an injured soldier, without telling her that the soldier was black? What if an unspoken romance blossomed across the color line?

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Encompassing Bowdoin

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

What Does Bowdoin Teach? That’s the title of the 360-page report that my colleague Michael Toscano and I published on April 3. Coincidence gave us a nice round number of pages, but it was indeed our plan to compass Bowdoin College. We set out to create something new: a full 360-degree picture of a liberal arts education at one of America’s most highly regarded colleges.

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