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Who needs a shrink? If he kept it on while people were talking it was just diverting enough to protect him from getting too involved, a process he described as being like magic. In fact, it was a buffer in more ways than one. Able to conjure or dismiss company at the touch of a button, he found tha…

this laconic, light-footed and remarkably funny book

[...] the desire to turn oneself into a multiple or machine is also a desire to be liberated from human feeling, human need, which is to say the need to be cherished or loved. ‘Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?’ he told Time in 1963.

Jasper Johns had produced his first encaustic, messy, painterly American flag in 1954

Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge

the Hoppers call it Nighthawks, after the beaked profile of the woman’s saturnine companion

moved into Edward’s marginally more salubrious room on Washington Square

After Fromm-Reichmann’s death, other psychologists slowly began to turn their attention to the subject. In 1975, the social scientist Robert Weiss edited a seminal study, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. He too opened by acknowledging the subject’s neglect, noting wryly…

There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green

This tension is present in even the most benign of his New York paintings, the ones that testify to a more pleasurable, more equanimous kind of solitude

What is it about Hopper? Every once in a while an artist comes along who articulates an experience, not necessarily consciously or willingly, but with such prescience and intensity that the association becomes indelible

Most days I did the same things. Go out for eggs and coffee, walk aimlessly through the exquisite cobbled streets or down to the promenade to gaze at the East River, pushing each day a little further until I reached the park at Dumbo, where on Sundays you’d see the Puerto Rican wedding couples come…

New York City that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass

it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd

This belief in the inherent moral as well as technological inferiority of “primitive” societies shaped her response to the concern of a Native American cadet at West Point in 1974. The cadet asked her how she squared her beliefs with the historical record of dispossession and extermination of Ameri…

Ayn Rand arrived on the scene in Hollywood without any clear understanding of the mode of business or the politics of representation developing there. Her initial astounding successes, dependent in part on her ability to assimilate as white, felt to her like pure individual achievement. Then she qu…

Andrei Taganov is a notable exception. Andrei is the son of a factory owner and a true-believing communist who served with Leon Trotsky in the Red Army during the civil war. He is consistently principled, unlike his comrades. He also bears the marks of the superior individual of Ayn Rand’s fictiona…

Alissa Rosenbaum had lived her short life oblivious to the existence of workers and peasants except as shadowy apparitions, specters of irrationality, or properly subordinated social inferiors. Then oh my god: there they were in the Winter Palace and at her door, behaving as equals and asserting th…

Rand’s posthumous appeal has not been limited to the fractious overlapping company of neoliberals, libertarians, conservatives, and right-wing politicians,