Ars Est Mendacium

Atlantic City is a place that doesn’t just live with its ghosts; it hires them as performers. Walk along the Boardwalk and you can feel it: the laughter that once poured out of dance halls, the hum of casinos long gone dim, and stranger still, the echo of a horse leaping into water to applause. That image, absurd, cruel, unforgettable, has always stood as shorthand for the city itself. A place willing to gamble with spectacle, for better or worse. So when you step into the Warner Theatre at Caesars and find yourself in the world of  The Hook , the déjà vu is intentional. The theatre itself, born in 1929 and freshly restored, carries the weight of history. The show that now fills it carries the spirit of carnival. From the first moments, it’s clear: this isn’t meant to be tidy or reverent. It’s meant to move fast, to disarm, to excite. For seventy-five minutes, there is no pause, no intermission. Just a rush of bodies twisting in midair, jokes that hit low and hard, and music that r...

In the cold gray hush that sometimes greets a person in middle age, when the world’s edges seem less defined and the wars more internal, there are albums that don’t ask for your attention; they seize it.  Run the Jewels 3  doesn’t arrive politely. It knocks the door off the hinges and walks through with bloodied boots. And still, in its most furious moments, it sounds like a prayer. Not the kind whispered in pews. A street prayer, born of grief and survival, shouted into the wind and punctuated with laughter. You don’t listen to RTJ3 for escape. You listen to it to confront the moment when escapism no longer works. When the truth presses in through every screen, the only real option left is defiance. This album was released on Christmas Eve, 2016. That’s no accident. By the time Killer Mike and El-P handed us this record, the world had already shifted. Trump wasn’t yet inaugurated, but the storm was clearly visible, and in 2025 the albums seem even more essential. RTJ3 is less...

Some stories come to us like whispers. They don’t announce themselves with fireworks or marketing blitzes. They arrive quietly, sometimes from unexpected hands, and they linger. In 1987, Scott Turow, an assistant U.S. attorney who wrote in the hours between cases, published  Presumed Innocent . On paper, it was just a debut thriller. In practice, it changed how we imagine the law in fiction, and how we imagine ourselves within it. The premise is straightforward enough. A prosecutor named Rusty Sabich is assigned to investigate the murder of a colleague who also happens to be his former lover. As the case develops, suspicion pivots toward him. Because the novel is told in Rusty’s own voice, the story becomes claustrophobic. You don’t just watch a man being investigated. You inhabit him. His words feel both like an explanation and a plea, sometimes a confession, sometimes a dodge. He speaks, and you are never entirely sure whether to trust him. That uncertainty is what makes the book...

I first saw the painting at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. You go into these galleries the way you walk into a quiet church, out of respect, maybe routine. Some paintings catch your eye, and we've discussed some of those finds here. Others just blur into one another. But this one didn’t catch. It stopped me. It was the tree. Not the figures, not the sheep, not even the sunlit hillside unfurling like a memory. The tree, dead, jagged, enormous, stood in the foreground like a thing that refused to fall, and dared you to ask why. It didn’t lean or flourish. It loomed. Its bark had split down the middle, its arms twisted in mid-collapse. It was ugly, almost violent. An arresting and beautiful violence. The painting is called  Shepherds and Their Flock Resting Under a Tree , by Charles Hoguet, a 19th-century German painter trained in the French tradition. Most of his landscapes are soft, meditative, full of light and coastl...

  “How can I change the world, If I can’t even change myself? How can I change the way I am? I don’t know. I don’t know.” —Faithless,  Salva Mea I heard that lyric again the other night, quietly, as the day was winding down and I wasn’t trying to think too hard. But it found me anyway. There’s something about it that bypasses intellect and goes straight to the place where your unfinished business lives. The part of you that still flinches. You still wonder if the change you claim to want is still out of reach. A few days later, I rewatched  Changing Lanes . Not because I planned to, not for content or critique, but because I saw the title in a list and felt something stir. And what unfolded wasn’t nostalgia or even entertainment. It was recognition. A gut-level awareness of what this film actually is: not a thriller, not a legal drama, but a confession in two voices. It opens with a crash. Literally. Two men, Gavin Banek, a high-powered lawyer rushing to file a crucial do...

When I think back to Detroit in the early eighties, the nights are always longer in memory than they were in life. The city was both burning and rebuilding, still carrying the ghosts of industry and Motown but already listening for what might come next. The radio was a lifeline then, not just background noise. And if you were lucky enough to find WJLB after dark, you entered the strange, spellbound orbit of the Electrifying Mojo. He was unlike any other DJ, not a salesman, not a hype man, but a curator of the unexpected. He might put Prince next to Kraftwerk, Parliament next to Yellow Magic Orchestra, and make you believe they were all having the same conversation. One night, he dropped the needle, or rather, pressed play, on something I had never heard before, and in truth, still haven’t heard again in quite the same way. It was slow, impossibly slow. A pulse, a few suspended chords, and then space, not the silence of absence, but the space of something being built with deliberate pat...

I remember the first time I heard the words  Crescent City . Not from a bookseller or critic, but from a friend who reads the way some people breathe. She said it like a secret. “You haven’t read it? You have to.” I didn’t have to. But I did. Twice, in fact, through the first two books. And by the end, I was left with a question that still lingers: how can something so full...full of pages, of plot twists, of names and histories and warring factions and feel so empty inside? Sarah J. Maas’s series follows Bryce Quinlan, a half-human, half-Fae who begins as a party girl and becomes a reluctant heroine, and Hunt Athalar, a fallen angel with a storm for a past. Around them spins an elaborate city of angels, shifters, witches, and politicians, with murder mysteries, political conspiracies, ancient magic, and an ever-widening web of alliances and betrayals. It is, by any measure, a commercial triumph. First print runs sell out. Bestseller lists bend to make room. Cosplay, fan art, and T...

The first thing you notice is the light. It pours in through a tall Gothic window, draped with a red curtain that softens it, slows it, and then sets it down gently on three women who share a room but not a mind. One speaks, animated and sure of her own point. Another reclines, her face turned toward the speaker, but her thoughts drifting far beyond her words. The third is somewhere else entirely, not in the room so much as in her own world, her eyes on the page before her, her hand resting on a globe as if the entire earth had paused to wait for her. The painting is  The Three Sisters , made in 1824 by Jean-Antoine Laurent. At first glance, it might seem like a quiet domestic tableau. But the quiet is deceptive, the stillness loaded with tension. Laurent wasn’t merely making a pretty scene; he was working in the  Troubadour style , a French movement that pulled moments from the Middle Ages and Renaissance into intimate, anecdotal paintings. The style traded in historical nost...

I first heard the name “Spig” in a dim living room with a television humming like a refrigerator. John Wayne stood at the top of a staircase, and the next moment, he wasn’t standing at all. He fell, and a life broke in two. The movie called it The Wings of Eagles. The man it was about was Frank W. “Spig” Wead, a naval aviator turned Hollywood writer. The fall made sense of everything. It wasn’t a spectacle. It was a hinge. We like to sort John Wayne films into categories we can carry: cavalry, frontier, war. This one resists the box. It’s a biography built like a sea shanty; start loud, hit the waves, then sing the quiet verses that tell the truth. John Ford mixes bruised comedy with hospital-room silence. Maureen O’Hara plays the wife who knows how much a marriage can take before it thins to a thread. Ward Bond lumbers in as a cigar-chomping director modeled on Ford himself, a wink that keeps the film from turning into a memorial service. If you came for dogfights, you’ll get some air...

There’s a moment, maybe you’ve had it yourself, when a place stops being just a dot on a map and starts feeling like a story you’ve stumbled into mid-sentence. It doesn’t happen with the spots you visit because the brochure told you to, or the ones your neighbor insists have the “best crab cakes in the state.” It happens quietly, without warning. A bend in the road, a shift in the light, a name that doesn’t sound like it belongs in a travel ad. And suddenly you’re not just there, you’re inside something older than you, and it’s looking back. That’s how Suicide Bridge arrived for me. Not in a flash of intention, but as the destination at the end of an unassuming drive through Dorchester County, Maryland. The road curved, the trees opened, and there it was: a small bridge over Cabin Creek, carrying a name that felt like a warning whispered from the other side of the century. No gothic towers. No cinematic plunge. Just weathered rails, water slipping past, and a history that, once you’ve ...