July 24, 2025, 12:29pm
Another day, another great literary website bites the dust. Next summer, we’ll apparently say “auf wiedersehen” to 4Columns, a bastion of long-form arts criticism.
4Columns makes a practice of covering fringier offerings, like experimental theatre, fashion, and jazz. They publish warm elegies for dead legends and the occasional thoughtful takedown. And the masthead is never afraid to go niche. In what other publication may we find Wolfgang Tillmans’ work covered twice in a five year span?
The site is also striking for its roster. The stable features seasoned critics like the late Greg Tate and Lauren Berlant alongside newer voices like Jessi Jesewska Stevens, Blair McClendon, and Lake Micah. Or heavies like Hilton Als, Helen Shaw, Brian Dillon, and Dawn Lundy Martin.
It’s impossible to make a best-of list from so much fine writing. But here are a few pieces to linger on as we gear up for their last year in business.
Amy Taubin on Damien Chazelle’s La La Land
In 2016, the venerable Amy Taubin wrote, “Five years from now, if we get through this current disaster and if I’m still a cinephile, I might view La La Land as the emotionally poignant, impressively crafted movie that it is, and leave it at that.” But then she proceeded to…not leave it.
I’m not the biggest La La… hater you’ll find in these streets, but I sure did appreciate this deflating. In a fun and rigorous reading, Taubin zings Chazelle for omitting race in a nostalgic exercise that purports to be all about the birth of jazz.
Harmony Holiday on Pharaoh Sanders’ Promises
And speaking of! This ode to a great is emblematic of Holiday’s keen, poetic sensibility. (Which you can spend more time with via this terrific newsletter.)
Considering the latest album from a “jazz patriarch,” Holiday writes that Sanders “plays our vanishing world, asks us to hear into a frontier we cannot yet see, and lets us release the idea that jazz is idling and redundant.” Phew.
Michelle Orange on Greta Gerwig’s Little Women
I’ve adored Orange’s criticism ever since inhaling her first collection, This is Running For Your Life. Here the great essayist puts her sharp eye to engaging some of the contradictions in Gerwig’s spin on a classic. This review pokes a useful hole in the breathless reception this film received, while managing to feel fond.
While I’m in the neighborhood, Orange is great on Normal People, too. And I love her piece on revisiting Fosse’s Cabaret over the years.
Sasha Frere-Jones on Elizabeth Hardwick’s The Uncollected Essays
One of the site’s top reviews on the year of its publication (2022), this giddy fan note lauds Hardwick’s “roomy disquisitions,” and acknowledges the late essayist’s contradictions without attempting to square them.
Frere-Jones manages to make Hardwick’s sometimes impenetrable prose sound like the coolest hat trick. Here’s the first sentence, if you’re on the fence: “Elizabeth Hardwick did, in fact, fuck around.”
Hanif Abdurraqib on Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail
During peak pandemic days, 4Columns shifted its film coverage to point the homebound to home-based offerings.
Abdurraqib’s love letter to a love letter dwells on the power of email in a time of enforced isolation, and captures the unhinged vibes of late 2020 better than anything I’ve read lately.
Sukhdev Sandhu on Excavate! The Wonderful and Frightening World of the Fall, edited by Tessa Norton and Bob Stanley
This is precisely the kind of review I go to 4Columns hungry for. Super specific, super thorough, and likely to lead a reader/watcher/feeler on a lily-pad-hopping-quest to the next cool thing.
This look at a fan forward collection of essays about the Fall, the cult English post-punk outfit, scratched such an itch. Find here a “fugitive curriculum” for all the strange rock n’rollers.
Tobi Haslett on Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro
To parrot his own description, Tobi Haslett’s got a “a philosophical seriousness ventilated by wit.”
Here he applies his critical brilliance to a a widely beloved James Baldwin documentary. The critique here centers on Baldwin’s voice, and how it functions in Peck’s Oscar-winning film. A sharp, specific piece of criticism from one stylist to another.
Andrew Chan on Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective
With its most endearing opening line—”Reading Louise Glück through the years has often felt like being friends with someone incapable of small talk”—Chan’s survey of this late work from a late poet carries a devotee’s enthusiasm, but also functions as an invite for the newer reader.
An omnivorous and even-handed critic, Chan’s just as deft on the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Or the country stylings of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit.
Aruna D’Souza on “The Black Index”
This review from 4Columns regular D’Souza considered a small but mighty “anti-archival project” that sought to reclaim Black subjectivity.
This elegant description of a group show explores how photography “constructs its own falsehoods,” and nicely synthesizes a curator’s message. A great piece of art writing.
Beatrice Loayza on Joanna Arnow’s The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
One of my favorite films of 2024 gets a rigorous royal treatment here, in a characteristically precise consideration from Loayza. (I thought this kooky Millennial sex farce did something really bold and funky and was here validated.) In Loayza’s words, Arnow’s deadpan look at a submissive enthusiast is “an ode to renewal and the power of wanting more.” Amen!
Happy trails through your last year, and we’ll-miss-ya, 4Columns! Do yourself a favor and spend some time spelunking in their archive this summer.