If you want to understand Mel Brooks, and I mean really understand him, a good place to start is with Nikolai Gogol’s unfinished masterpiece Dead Souls. This is the 1842 novel that Brooks, at his most ...

Editor's Note: This essay appeared in Cognoscenti's newsletter of ideas and opinions, delivered weekly on Sundays. To become a subscriber, sign up here. I went to the Old North Church last week, where ...

Even as lightning flashes across the sky, thunder rumbles and rain blows horizontally through the open sides of Tanglewood’s Koussevitsky Music Shed, my eyes and ears are glued to the musicians on ...