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Philip Martin

Philip Martin

Arkansas Online

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Clive Davis and the myth of art versus commerce in rock music

Clive Davis and the myth of art versus commerce in rock music

Democrat-Gazette online

latest 9

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: Miles ’56 — The year Davis found his voice

RECORDINGS | OPINION: Miles ’56 — The year Davis found his voice

May 26 marked the centennial of Miles Davis' birth, an anniversary he almost certainly would have hated.

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Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Lucinda Williams in North Little Rock — Why Arkansas’ greatest songwriter defies lists and categories

POPNOTES | OPINION: Lucinda Williams in North Little Rock — Why Arkansas’ greatest songwriter defies lists and categories

While critics and editors debate lists and categories and her proper placement in the American canon, she will spend an evening standing on a stage in...

previous day 4

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

How many of us are willing to become an absolute beginner again?

How many of us are willing to become an absolute beginner again?

I ran into a musician friend I hadn't seen in a while the other evening; we were walking out of a library event as he was walking in. He looked...

23.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: “The Dog’s Gaze” — Thomas W. Laqueur reveals the hidden role of dogs in western art

ON BOOKS | OPINION: “The Dog’s Gaze” — Thomas W. Laqueur reveals the hidden role of dogs in western art

Thomas W. Laqueur’s new book “The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History” argues that those apparently incidental animals are doing far more work than...

22.06.2026 9

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

How Memory Keeps Revising the Story of My Father and Me

How Memory Keeps Revising the Story of My Father and Me

Father's Day always falls on a Sunday, which means I could recycle an old column and take the day off. Change a date, smooth out a paragraph, fix an...

21.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: Baseball cards and the invisible fortunes we carry into adulthood

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: Baseball cards and the invisible fortunes we carry into adulthood

I knew my cards were worth something when I gave them away.

20.06.2026 6

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Zinzi Clemmons, Isaiah Berlin and the meaning of freedom

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Zinzi Clemmons, Isaiah Berlin and the meaning of freedom

Like an artist sketching what surrounds an object, Zinzi Clemmons reveals freedom by tracing its absence, while Isaiah Berlin explains why its...

20.06.2026 8

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Brendan Sorsby and the normalization of sports gambling in America

Brendan Sorsby and the normalization of sports gambling in America

Democrat-Gazette online

20.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Mark Currey and Sean Harrison — The comfort and healing power of ordinary songs

A Wednesday night at White Water Tavern, two Arkansas songwriters and an unexpected reminder that ordinary lives, ordinary disappointments and...

18.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Distrusting first impressions — Scholder’s ‘Indian Land #4’

LONG LOOK | OPINION: Distrusting first impressions — Scholder’s ‘Indian Land #4’

The longer one looks, the more this painting resembles an argument about the ways of seeing.

18.06.2026 8

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Why customers are doing more work for banks, airlines and businesses

Why customers are doing more work for banks, airlines and businesses

A lawyer friend reports from the ongoing dystopia: His 97-year-old mother-in-law's bank has merged with another bank. This would ordinarily be one of...

16.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

The civic virtue of evidence

One of the first things we learn in school is that it isn't enough to "know something."

14.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Summer reading picks — Different guests, same party

The books that have actually impressed me this season look, at first glance, like they belong at different parties. One tackles translating...

13.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: The Arkansas Ramble — Art Walk night at the Argenta library

On the third Friday evening of every month, Karen and I harness two impatient dogs and walk to the Argenta Branch of the William F. Laman Public...

13.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Little Rock’s Pike-Fletcher-Terry House and the cost of preserving civic memory

Democrat-Gazette online

13.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Why “Cape Fear” still matters

From Robert Mitchum to Robert De Niro to Javier Bardem, “Cape Fear” keeps returning because Max Cady changes less than the country he haunts.

11.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Victor Wembanyama and the NBA giants who changed basketball before him

The first basketball player who amazed me was Elgin Baylor.

09.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Maggie O’Farrell’s ‘Land’ and the history of Ireland’s Great Hunger

The traditional American version of the story treats the famine primarily as a natural disaster. The reality is considerably more complicated.

08.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Hungry hearts

People say America is trapped in nostalgia, though that diagnosis seems to be lazy cultural shorthand that sounds persuasive until you start poking...

07.06.2026 30

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

The Civil War, Arkansas and the Overlap of Generations

One of my earliest memories is an embroidered patch on the sleeve of my father's flight suit.

07.06.2026 30

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: ‘Red Sheet’ transforms LA into hallucinated landscape

There was a period, roughly from "The Black Dahlia" through "American Tabloid," when reading James Ellroy felt like discovering that somebody had...

06.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: Why Frank Lloyd Wright and Keith Haring defended accessible culture

Frank Lloyd Wright taught Americans to see buildings. Keith Haring believed art required no secret handshake. Their shared faith in ordinary curiosity...

06.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

D-Day and the beach ahead

Democrat-Gazette online

06.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

MUSIC | OPINION: When fashions fade and years accumulate

One of the occupational hazards of music criticism is the tendency to overvalue the new. Every Friday arrives carrying another stack of releases...

04.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

GREAT MOVIES | OPINION: John Wayne’s final film often remembered as a farewell

What makes “The Shootist” endure is its fascination with the distance between the stories people tell about a man and the man himself.

04.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

As nation marks 250 years, we don’t know what we don’t know

As America approaches its 250th birthday next month, the country seems gripped by a familiar form of existential anxiety.

02.06.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Best baseball books are rarely about the game

From Roger Kahn and Roger Angell to Jim Bouton, Bill James and Philip Roth, the best baseball books are rarely just about the game. They are about...

01.06.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Who owns the Strat?

Maybe you don't know anything about guitars. You might still recognize a Fender Stratocaster. It's an iconic design.

31.05.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: A tale of George Washington biographies as America approaches 250

Every generation eventually rewrites George Washington, which tells you less about Washington than about the country doing the rewriting.

30.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: Rise of ‘eat the rich’ programs reflects what happened when audiences stopped believing the fantasy

By the Reagan era, Hollywood had decided that upper-middle-class life was just what America looked like on a Tuesday. The illusion stuck around longer...

30.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

The privilege of having something meaningful still to say

Democrat-Gazette online

30.05.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

The AI arms race in cybersecurity has started. Most companies aren’t ready

Coinbase's head of security offers tips for companies to secure themselves against a new bread of AI threats.

29.05.2026 10

Fortune

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: What ‘Pardon the Interruption’ understands about sports and television

Recently David Letterman was talking with Bill Simmons about television and landed on a surprisingly emotional subject: ESPN's "Pardon the...

28.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

GREAT MOVIES | OPINION: ‘Body Heat’ still burns after all these years

Criterion’s superb new 4K release of Lawrence Kasdan’s neo-noir revives one of the last genuinely adult Hollywood thrillers — a movie about...

28.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Why modern war movies feel different from “Platoon,” “Saving Private Ryan”

War movies used to appear with such frequency and seriousness they felt woven into the American idea of itself. They arrived every year carrying not...

26.05.2026 30

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Sarah Pearsall’s “Freedom Round the Globe” reframes the American Revolution as a global crisis

What makes "Freedom Round the Globe" especially valuable right now is that it resists two temptations simultaneously: patriotic simplification and...

25.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

The Death of Institutional Memory

If you read enough history, you eventually notice civilizations don't run on laws alone. Laws matter. Armies and economies too. But memory--the...

24.05.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: Arthur’s Steakhouse, social media and the performance of ordinary Life

Americans once documented experience after it happened. Increasingly, documentation has become part of the experience.

23.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Uneasy stories America keeps trying to pave over

This week's books seem oddly preoccupied with things societies try to sink, pave over or explain away. All three circle the same uneasy idea: History...

23.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Netflix’s “Lord of the Flies” and the real-life Tongan Island survival story

Democrat-Gazette online

23.05.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

RECORDINGS | OPINION: More platter, less chatter — New releases survive the algorithm

As Drake floods the streaming zone with three simultaneous albums, Kevin Morby, Rostam, Peter Frampton, 49 Winchester and Willie Nelson make stronger...

21.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

POPNOTES | OPINION: Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ returns at Cannes — Why the controversial 1971 film still feels dangerous

As the 2026 Cannes Film Festival heads into its final weekend, one of the most talked-about resurrection stories in Cannes Classics has not involved...

21.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Advice of elders

My grand-niece recently texted me an invitation to her college graduation. My mother—who oversees all divisions of the family operation requiring...

19.05.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ON BOOKS | OPINION: Canwen Xu’s ‘Boring Asian Female’ skewers prestige culture and comparison anxiety

"Boring Asian Female"Comparison might be the thief of joy, but in Canwen Xu's debut "Boring Asian Female," it has metastasized into a way of life.

18.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

Golf, Aging and the Limits of Optimization Culture

Recently a launch monitor informed me, politely but conclusively, that I am no longer the golfer I used to be.

17.05.2026 30

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

CRITICAL MASS | OPINION: Why The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” changed popular music forever

Sixty years after Brian Wilson turned studio pop inward, outward and upside down, The Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’ remains less a nostalgic artifact...

16.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

ONBOOKS | OPINION: Andy Beta’s ‘Cosmic Music’ reconsiders the genius of Alice Coltrane

Andy Beta’s ‘Cosmic Music’ argues that the pianist, harpist and spiritual visionary was never merely adjacent to jazz greatness. The culture...

16.05.2026 30

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

‘The Promise of America’ and the crisis of shared civic language

Democrat-Gazette online

16.05.2026 20

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin

TELEVISION | OPINION: ‘Beef’ season 2 review — Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac and Korean cinema influences elevate the series

Netflix’s anthology reinvention ‘Beef’ trades the first season’s operatic chaos for something sharper and more unsettling.

14.05.2026 10

Arkansas Online

Philip Martin