ABOUT THE NEW CRITERION
On the front lines of the battle for culture.
The New Criterion, edited by Roger Kimball, was founded in 1982 by the art critic Hilton Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. A monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, The New Criterion began as an experiment in critical audacity—a publication devoted to engaging, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, with “the best that has been thought and said.”
This also meant engaging with those forces dedicated to traducing genuine cultural and intellectual achievement, whether through obfuscation, politicization, or a commitment to nihilistic absurdity. We are proud that The New Criterion has been at the forefront both of championing what is best and most humanely vital in our cultural inheritance and of exposing what is mendacious, corrosive, and spurious.
Published monthly from September through June, The New Criterion brings together a wide range of young and established critics whose common aim is to bring you the most incisive criticism being written today.
“As a critical periodical, The New Criterion is probably more consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English.”
– Julian Symons
the Times Literary Supplement
EDITORIAL STAFF
Roger Kimball
Editor & Publisher
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. He writes regular columns for American Greatness, The Epoch Times, and The Spectator, US edition. Mr. Kimball lectures widely and has appeared on national radio and television programs as well as the BBC. He is represented by Writers’ Representatives, who can provide details about booking him.
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James Panero
Executive Editor
James Panero is Executive Editor of The New Criterion. He writes on art and culture monthly for The New Criterion and serves as the magazine’s gallery critic. artinfo has called him a “preeminent voice of American cultural conservatism.”
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Benjamin Riley
Managing Editor
Benjamin Riley is Managing Editor of The New Criterion. He received his MA from Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and was the Hilton Kramer Fellow in Criticism at The New Criterion. He graduated from Dartmouth College, where he served as President and Publisher of The Dartmouth Review, for which he now serves as chairman of the board of trustees. His new book, The Bridges of Robert Adam: A Fanciful and Picturesque Tour, is available from Triglyph Books.
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Robert Erickson
Associate Editor
Robert S. Erickson is an Associate Editor at The New Criterion. After serving as the magazine’s Hilton Kramer Fellow in 2019–20, he completed a post-baccalaureate year in Classics at Columbia University. He holds a BA in Classics and the Program in Literary Studies from Middlebury College.
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Isaac Sligh
Associate Editor
Isaac Sligh is an Associate Editor at The New Criterion. After serving as the head curator of the Ralston Listening Library and Archive in Sewanee, Tennessee, one of the nation’s largest collections of recorded classical music, Isaac joined the magazine as its eighth Hilton Kramer Fellow. His work has appeared in a number of venues, including The Wall Street Journal, The Spectator (World Edition), The Critic, and Literary Review.
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Luke Lyman
Hilton Kramer Fellow
Luke Lyman is the eleventh and current Hilton Kramer Fellow at The New Criterion. He recently graduated from Brigham Young University where he studied political philosophy and art history. As an undergraduate, he earned grants and fellowships to study Leo Strauss, stained glass in Paris, and mosaics in Rome, and he founded byu’s first journal of cultural criticism. He was raised in Colorado but now calls Mexico City home.
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Adam Kirsch
Poetry Editor
Adam Kirsch, a poet, critic, and an editor of The Wall Street Journal’s weekend Review section is a regular contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker, as well as the author of ten books, including The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (W. W. Norton, 2016), Why Trilling Matters (Yale, 2011), and, most recently, Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?: Essays (Yale, 2019). He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2016 and a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University from 2004–05. In 2013 he served as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and he was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Prize for Book Reviewing. He has taught literature and writing at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. The first of his three collections of poetry, The Thousand Wells: Poems, was the 2002 winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize. He has subsequently served as a New Criterion Poetry Prize judge.
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Victor Davis Hanson
Visiting Critic
Victor Davis Hanson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Dying Citizen (Basic Books). He is The New Criterion’s Visiting Critic for the 2022–23 season and the 2018 recipient of the Edmund Burke Award.
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Wilfred M. McClay
Visiting Critic
Wilfred M. McClay is the Victor Davis Hanson Chair in Classical History and Western Civilization at Hillsdale College, where he is also Professor of History. He served for eleven years on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently a member of the U.S. Commission on the Semiquincentennial, which has been charged with planning the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. He is a graduate of St. John’s College (Annapolis) and received his Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University. His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America received the 1995 Merle Curtis Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America; Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past; and Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.
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FOUNDERS
Hilton Kramer
Founding Editor & Publisher
Hilton Kramer (1928–2012) was the founding editor of The New Criterion, which he started with the late Samuel Lipman in 1982. From 1987 until 2006, he was also the art critic for the weekly New York Observer, and for many years wrote the “Critic’s Notebook” column in Art & Antiques magazine. His “Media Watch” column was published weekly in The New York Post from 1993 to November 1997.
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Samuel Lipman
Publisher 1982-1994
Samuel Lipman (1934–1994) was the founding publisher of The New Criterion, which he started with the late Hilton Kramer in 1982. A distinguished concert pianist, Lipman wrote music criticism for Commentary and served on the National Council on the Arts.
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OFFICE STAFF
Caetlynn Booth
Office Manager
Jayne Allison
Assistant to the Editors
ENDORSEMENTS
“America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life.”
– The Daily Telegraph of London
“A review of the arts and intellectual life, the iconic monthly is as smart as it is bold. Each issue is chock-full of wise observations about culture and politics, pinpoint attacks on political correctness, and long-form examinations of things that matter.”
– Michael Goodwin, New York Post
“More consistently worth reading than any other magazine in English.”
– The Times Literary Supplement
“Indeed, nearly all the magazine’s reviewing— of books, art, and music—is first-rate. The poetry featured is comparably exceptional with a strong preference for formal verse (which is just fine by me).”
– Michael Dirda
“A refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism.”
– The Wall Street Journal
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The New Criterion is published by The Foundation for Cultural Review, 900 Broadway, New York, NY 10003, a nonprofit public foundation as described in Section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code, EIN 13-3108424, which solicits and accepts contributions from a wide range of sources, including public and private foundations, corporations, and the general public. Contributions to The New Criterion are tax-deductible according to the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. All gifts in excess of $75 will be acknowledged with a written disclosure statement describing the “quid pro quo” deductibility under section 6115 of the Internal Revenue Code.