Academic Writing

Helen Frankenthaler’s “Flirt”

I LIKE PINK. Helen Frankenthaler’s work has been criticized for using colors that are too sweet. For being too poetic. For being too soft. For being, in other words, too female. Yet “right out of the gate, Frankenthaler was making history,” writes Ted Loos in Sotheby’s. Frankenthaler, who refined a technique of Jackson Pollock’s, launched the...

The Hero Within: How the Events of September 11 Changed Our Ideas About Heroes and Masculinity

We all remember where we were that day. Ten years ago, I was editor of a Minneapolis magazine. At the first news bulletin, my staff gathered in my office around a television with bad reception, where we sat for hours watching grainy images and tried to comprehend how we should react as journalists, as Americans,...