Alissa Wilkinson founded The Curator in 2008 and was its editor for two years until accepting a full-time faculty position at The King's College. She is also associate editor of Comment. Her work on pop culture, philosophy, politics, and fine art has appears in a number of publications, including Paste, Christianity Today, Prism, Patrol, WORLD, and Relevant.
Alissa harbors a not-so-secret obsession with cooking, farmer’s markets, and food policy; reads a lot of books; drinks a lot of herbal tea; and watches movies with her husband, Tom, in their tiny apartment high above the Brooklyn treetops.
From the New York Times Magazine: The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas (with a really cool user interface).
From the London Review of Books: At the End of My Pencil. For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my [...]
From the Economist: Suspended Animation. The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, at Sotheby’s in London on September 15th 2008 (see picture). All but two pieces sold, fetching more than ¬£70m, a record [...]
From the New York Times: Tiger Woods and the Perils of Modern Celebrity. It is fitting that the hidden costs of fame should be exacted from Mr. Woods almost precisely 50 years after the publication of a book, “Celebrity Register,” that presented a new picture of social standing in modern America, one in which talent [...]
From the New York Times: Story? Unforgettable. The Audience? Often Not. “You hear people of all ages, not just elderly people, say, ‘Stop me if I’ve told you this before,’ ” said Nigel Gopie, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, who has a paper in the current issue of the journal [...]
From NPR: Picks for Best Foreign Fiction. It’s good for you. That’s the pale impetus so many of us use to immerse ourselves in foreign works of art. We should watch Bergman films, and look, we’ve got some in our Netflix queue! It’s just that Speed was on cable again last night and, well … [...]
From City Journal: Can the Polis Live Again? There is a close relation between the care with which a particular public space has been organized and the degree to which a feeling of community exists there. The activity of the market square is various, but its artistry makes for coherent and theatrically dramatic public space: [...]
From The Paris Review: Poetry from a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke. XVI. Fra Angelico, in his great frescoes of severe solitary figures, expressed the aspiration to heaven simply and beautifully in every one. But on the many, many God-breathing faces of the angels in the Last Judgment, heaven itself has its place with [...]
From City Journal: You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato. Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. Yet the history of humanity is a [...]
From The Independent: An interview with Maya Angelou. During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. “I had known [...]