Most people leave a museum tired and vaguely guilty. Here is how to leave one full instead.

The performing arts are the ones that need you in the room. Everything difficult about them, and everything worth defending, follows from that requirement.

Prose is the art form that pretends to have no form. That disguise is the trick, and learning to see through it is most of what reading well means.

Before Hollywood there was Fort Lee. The grammar of film was worked out on the New Jersey side of the Hudson by people solving practical problems, and almost everything you understand instinctively at the cinema is something you were taught.

Anyone can look at a picture. Reading one is a skill, and like most skills it is mostly a matter of knowing what to do in the first thirty seconds.