Colin Marshall

2 min read 2022-06-17 19:54:44

New Yorker: The cracked wisdom of Dril

Benjamin Franklin’s admirers have to acknowledge certain embarrassing truths about the man, not least that, were he alive in the twenty-first

2 min read 2022-05-22 21:50:01

Fifteen years ago, The New York Times Book Review put out a call for readers’ favorite literary sentences of the past quarter-century, intending

2 min read 2022-05-02 15:51:24

The American shopping mall emerged in the nineteen-fifties, during which the United States became at once more affluent and less urban. “The

2 min read 2022-04-02 12:44:30

Joan Didion is associated with no place more than southern California. Yet she also spent two major stretches of her life in New York, one from the

2 min read 2022-03-30 15:08:46

Early in his new book, Robert Whiting refers to the “Yamate Line,” and most readers who have been to Tokyo in the past half-century will

2 min read 2022-03-17 11:56:33

London is a world city. Los Angeles, where I used to live, is less a world city than, as I once saw a banner at the airport call it, a “city

2 min read 2022-02-14 13:19:47

Despite the ever-increasing might of South Korea’s automobile industry, it’s a dull place for the car connoisseur. The occasional Ferrari or

2 min read 2022-02-02 12:47:43

Donald Richie closes his most personal book on Tokyo by quoting from his own diary. The entry dates from the summer of 1978, more than twenty years

1 min read 2021-12-31 20:22:04

For nearly a decade now, I’ve written a post every weekday at Open Culture, usually to do with literature, film, music, art, architecture,

2 min read 2021-12-07 12:37:56