What is vulgar? The word's many meanings and many forms are at the heart of “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined,” an expansive exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London. The show takes shape around eleven categories of vulgarity conceived by writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, like “Puritan,” “Impossible Ambition,” and “Showing Off.” Each is explored through clothing, shoes, and texts spanning the eighteenth century through the present.

In his now familiar way, Trump has come across as clueless, as though he doesn’t know who Representative John Lewis is, which district he represents, and more important, what history he represents. But his instincts are guiding him into a confrontation that is hardly new: it is a response that has occurred over and over when an autocratic leader is challenged by the voice of moral authority.

In his quiet film In the Last Days of the City, Tamer El Said brilliantly captures a struggle I've had for years: how to pin down what it is about Cairo that leaves us feeling as if we exist in a no man’s land, somewhere between past and present, constantly searching, never quite there.

Tan Hecheng: I'd kept asking one question: Had any one of the 9,000 people killed in the region been planning a counterrevolutionary event or said something unlawful? In the end the answer was: No.

What does it mean when the man chosen to run the State Department has no experience in government but ample experience doing business with dictators of every stripe? Given what we know so far, it is possible to imagine two possible directions Rex Tillerson's tenure as secretary of state could go.

Obscene language presents problems, the linguist Michael Adams writes in his new book, In Praise of Profanity, “but no one seems to spend much time thinking about the good it does.” Actually, a lot of people in the last few decades have been considering its benefits, together with its history, its neuroanatomy, and above all its fantastically large and colorful word list.

Edward Jay Epstein’s indulgence in speculation, his treatment of questionable claims as established facts, and his misunderstanding of surveillance combine to undermine the credibility of hi book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft.

What Donald Trump has done is to take the few things on which neocons, realists, and liberal internationalists agree and throw them out the window. These are fundamentals of American foreign policy, taken as givens by both parties for the seven decades since the close of World War II. They include, first, the recognition of the immense value to the security of the United States provided by its allies and worldwide military and political alliances...

What if the future is as real as the past? Physicists have been suggesting as much since Einstein. It’s all just the space-time continuum. The film Arrival, written by Eric Heisserer and directed by Denis Villeneuve, is being marketed as an alien-contact adventure: creatures arrive in giant ovoid spaceships, and drama ensues, but it is a movie of philosophy as much as adventure. It's really a movie about time. Time, fate, and free will.

John Berger didn’t want to be called a critic. Where there is formal analysis, his Marxist reasoning implied, there is patrolling and commodifying. He sometimes used formal analysis, but as an opening maneuver, as a means to an end. (The end was often a thought about desire and work and human dignity in relation to profit.) Anyway, no matter what he thought, criticism is wide enough to encompass him. To some degree he made it so: he expanded the ...

A close reading of the intelligence report on Russian interference in the US election shows that it does nothing to clarify the abnormalities of Trump’s campaign and election. Instead, it suggests that the US intelligence agencies’ Russia expertise is weak.