Ben Yagoda
By Ben Yagoda
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Culture What Bob Dylan Owes to Frank Sinatra — and Vice-Versa
In the summer of 1966, Frank Sinatra passed a baton to Bob Dylan. Not literally, of course: it’s hard to imagine, at that point in their lives, the two men being in the same physical space. Sinatra had been the most important figure in American popular music for twenty-five years: from his bobbysoxer days with…
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Culture How Steven Pinker Became the Anti-Maven of Language
Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family professor of psychology at Harvard, didn’t coin “language maven” (William Safire did, back in the ’70s, to describe himself), but he did more than anyone else to popularize the term. In a 1994 article in The New Republic called “Grammar Puss,” included in his subsequent book “The Language Instinct,” Pinker…
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Music How a swaggering Jewish kid from East London became (albeit briefly) Britain’s greatest rock star and poet
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Opinion As an Israeli political scientist, I resisted thinking this war was a genocide. Here’s what changed my mind
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Culture On a tour of Hasidic Brooklyn, this rabbi doesn’t have all the answers — but he knows who does
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Opinion Which school of philosophy provides the best guide for how to think about Gaza?
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Culture Everything’s terrible — but at least there are Moomins
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Culture Roman Polanski’s take on the Dreyfus Affair is perfect for 2025. That’s the problem
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