In his new book, “Blank Space” — one of Book World’s 50 notable nonfiction books of 2025 — the critic and historian W. David Marx argues that the last quarter-century has been marked by the dramatic ...

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century is a book about the art of our time that mentions only one museum: the Museum of Ice Cream. W. David Marx's ambitious but flat-footed hot ...

W. David Marx’s doomscroll through 21st century pop culture, “Blank Space,” is largely a catalog of cringe. Kardashians keep barging in, joined by Paris Hilton, Milo Yiannopoulos, MAGA-hatted trolls, ...

Music is blending into an algorithm-generated playlist, cinema is dominated by blockbuster movies from decades-old franchises, and the rest of the cultural scene is as flat and bland as a pancake.

The phrase “time is a flat circle” often refers to how the manic postpandemic news cycle makes comprehension of the recent past impossible. A similarly dazed bafflement is explored in W. David Marx’s ...