Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

A novelist questions the price artists pay when mining personal life for inspiration

The Material opens with a classroom of aspiring comedians workshopping their latest creations: “On Wednesdays, three of them had to perform, in turn, a four-to-six-minute routine that the whole class then proceeded to rip apart, joke by joke, beat by beat, until there wasn't anything left and the budding comedians ...
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Camille Bordas’s Latest Novel Follows Comedians on the Hunt for Material

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

What makes the arts an essential part of a society is their freestanding value—a value that cannot be described as radical, liberal, or conservative

While there have been many periods when the arts inspired some sort of controversy, different times have different troubles. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat....

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Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts