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Articles of NoteThe world of the soap opera: made-up place of banal weirdness and rococo routines, where everyone is beautiful and therefore slightly crazy... more» Americans, plugged in and on the move, are confiding in their pets, their laptops, and their spouses. But more and more, they are loners... more» Who owns art stolen in war? To return plunder to its owners may seem easy, but in practice it’s very hard, especially for objects seized in the distant past... more» Who, if anyone, will stop Iran before it goes nuclear, and how? If things remain on the current course, an Israeli air strike looms... more» ... more» Neanderthals were kissing cousins of our more direct ancestors, it seems. In fact, there may have been more than a little kissing... more» Ugliest animals. From star-nosed moles to blobfish to warthogs, we find some animals downright repulsive. Are we being unfair, or what?... more» The late Patricia Neal and her husband, “Roald the Rotten.” were not made for each other. Or maybe they were ... Neal obit ... Dahl memoir David Mamet has turned on the liberal pieties that he sees as having governed his youth. But have his new politics improved his plays?... more» Tony Judt, historian, polemicist, man of ideas, brave chronicler of the disease that slowly killed him, is dead at the age of 62 ... Forward ... LAT ... NYT ... Telegraph ... Time ... Observer ... Chron Higher Ed (earlier) ... New Statesman ... AP ... Independent ... Guardian ... Wash Post ... LAT ... n+1 ... Dissent ... A Cambridge memoir The Himalayas, the Atlantic Ocean, planet Earth itself: they look solid enough, but they are maybe better understood not as places, but as processes... more» A bogus history of Afghanistan is not a good foundation for making policy to deal with the country’s problems, says Christian Caryl... more» Saddam Hussein drained the wetlands of southern Iraq to punish the Marsh Arabs. Now a courageous U.S. Iraqi wants to restore the marshes... more» Michael Bellesiles was drummed out of academe over his book about guns in America. Does he deserve a second chance?... more» Warner Oland’s Charlie Chan, with his fortune-cookie English, became one of the most hated characters in American popular culture... more» The gears of the mind evolved in ancient ecological and economic contexts. To grasp them, Jonathan Haidt looks both up to culture and down to neurons... more» The utter mysteriousness of existence was deeply felt by Chekhov, who also could not keep his eyes off the teeming variety of human forms... more» Rhapsodies to machines that tamed nature, say, the steam engine, have given way to impatience with machines that don’t instantly indulge our whims... more» Agnostics see atheism as “a theism” – as much a childlike, faith-based creed as the most orthodox of ordinary religions... more» China’s audacious gamble: to mount an ambitious public information campaign abroad while denying crucial information to its own people... more» Everyone agrees that food portion sizes in depictions of the Last Supper have grown over the centuries. Not everyone agrees why... more» Modern medicine is good at staving off death, but bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left... more» Libertarians need Charles Darwin because a Darwinian science of human evolution supports classical liberalism... Larry Arnhart ... P.Z. Myers ... Lionel Tiger ... Herbert Gintis ... response Communism no longer inspires China, which needs an ideology rooted in old traditions. Confucianism fills the bill... more» Q: What makes a good copy editor? A: Self-doubt. Before you change, ask yourself if the writer did it for a reason. Maintain eternal vigilance... more» Sarah Palin wanted to “refudiate” backers of a mosque near the WTC site. Not bad, come to think of it, as a portmanteau coinage... more» Materialist vs. mystic. Does the brain imagine a soul to take the sting out of mortality? Maybe the soul just allows the brain to pretend to be in control... more» The most fundamental change in Beijing’s new view of the West lies in the notion that the U.S. is no longer indispensable to China... more» Ottoman cosmopolitanism: Jews, Arabs, Copts, even Freemasons lived side by side, with tolerance and good humor. What went wrong? When?... more» An intelligent computer, aware of nothing, can say, “That makes me happy,” without feeling happy – seeming to act like an intelligent human being... more» Reconciliation is a lovely idea for the sentimentalist. How much value is it to actual victims of genocide in Rwanda?... more» It’s miracle medicine, to be sure. If homeopathy worked at all, the Germans are at last finding out, it would be a miracle... more» The art of slow reading. We need to return to a practice of stopping while we read, turning ideas over in our minds, exploring the depths of thought... more» Penn and Teller’s act has no showgirls, fireworks, or tigers. It is suffused with a kind of irony, skepticism, and beauty seldom seen in Las Vegas... more» We can praise the framers for an ability to compromise, and thus give us the Constitution. But they evaded an issue it took the Civil War to resolve... more» We might with existing DNA from caves clone a Neanderthal liver. But why not go all the way and clone a complete living, uh, person?... more» Steampunk: a bizarre subculture that romanticizes Victorian-era machines and Jules Verne is steadily entering the mainstream... more» Free trade and a never-ending exchange of ideas offers us an inexhaustible river of invention and discovery. Matt Ridley on wealth and growth... more» Sophisticated intellectuals are more open to new information than others. That’s what you’d expect, anyway. But you’d be wrong... more» “The Interview,” writes Mark Twain in a new-found essay, “was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man”... more» ... Meanwhile, a newly edited, complete version of his autobiography is about to appear... more» What is Google Maps? A place to record the disputed territory claims of nation states, or a higher court where we can appeal those claims?... more» Across the land, in colleges at every level of quality, students are spending far less time studying than they did thirty years ago... more» ... Why? A few theories They can wreck marital life, and make cooking, shopping, even housework less of a pleasure. If kids make us so miserable, why do we want them at all?... more» Connoisseurship is not the only way to determine the authenticity of a painting. Works of art are handled by owners and artists. All leave fingerprints... more» Neuroscientist Jim Fallon had for 20 years studied the brains of psychopaths. Then his mother told him he was related to Lizzie Borden. So he decided... part 1 ... part 2 ... part 3 In 1913, 54,000 old Gettysburg soldiers came together in peace on the battlefield to celebrate American unity. An event still to remember... more» ... more» The Declaration of Independence in an early draft uses subjects for the people of the colonies. Jefferson, new analysis shows, changed it to citizens... more» Modernist architecture – cold, alienating – was widely loathed. Postmodernism was but a fig leaf for it. Enter the authentic genius of Frank Gehry... more» Michael Bellesiles, who teaches military history, knows his job is easier in peace time. When the brother of one of his students was killed in Iraq... more» Supreme Court confirmation hearings were not always so contentious. In fact, till Lyndon Johnson got the idea to replace Earl Warren with Abe Fortas... more» Strict Islamist states fear pleasure, and so reject playfulness, laughter, and displays of fashion at the heart of human life... more» Adolf Hitler’s cell in Landsberg Prison looked like a well-stocked deli: fruit, wine, flowers, ham, sausage, cake, chocolates. He got quite fat ... more» Robert Schumann wrote almost all of his music in a trance, at unbelievable speed. Yet he showed always incredible self-control... more» “You’re a white guy, so you put on a suit, shake some hands, and take home $1000 a week.” Chinese firms need fake Western businessmen... more» Simone de Beauvoir’s translators and their critics have turned their disputes into a play where each acts the role assigned by theatrical cliché... more» Computer-based program trading has changed forever the nature of global investing. If only computers could grasp the meaning of terms like “panic”... more» Composer biopics, normally high on corn, can deliver their share of pleasures, says Ray Sawhill. But when will we ever see The Anton Webern Story?... more» Having kids – what’s in it for me? The economics of happiness, nature and nurture has an answer: Parents’ sacrifice is much smaller than it looks... more» Not such a catastrophe? “To be honest, a couple of years after the big 1979 Gulf spill, almost everything was close to 100% normal again”... more» Norman Macrae, who for forty years gave spirit and intellectual originality to the pages of The Economist, is dead at the age of 89... more» It’s a year since the election and riots in Iran. Under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad life is more grim than ever... more» ... analysis by Reuel Marc Gerecht ... letters to a husband in prison. The ravening US consumer appears to be finished as the world’s buyer of last resort. Time for post-bubble Americans to turn to a study of Marx... more» We may not be comfortable to admit it, says Julian Baggini, but in practice, if not theory, we think it’s possible to put too much value on a human life... more» The vampire story was born in the 19th century, wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence, refined from the raw ore of peasant superstition... more» As pieces of Henry Roth’s amorphous body of writing are sliced off and honed as “novels” and “stories,” his very sense of life may be polished out of his work... more» Recognizing that error is an inevitable part of our lives frees us from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right... more» Greedy publishers gouge libraries for digital journals. Now at last the University of California libraries are ready to fight back. Jennifer Howard reports... more» Paul Romer’s politically incorrect guide to ending poverty in the third world: time to revisit the best of colonialism... more» In the 1950s, Sammy Davis Jr. imitated whites. Later on, as he tried to go with the times, the best he could do was to imitate being black... more» When Xiaoda Xiao was a college student, he defaced a portrait of Chairman Mao and was sent to labor for seven years in a stone quarry. His story... more» Religion thrives in India, with 2.5 million places of worship, but only 1.5 million schools and 75,000 hospitals. Pilgrimages are half of all package tours... more» “When we’ve mastered the false memory recipes,” says Elizabeth Loftus, “we will need to worry about who controls them. Memory, like liberty, is a fragile thing”... more» Air travel technology moved fast into the future: even before Orville Wright’s death in 1948, Chuck Yeager had broken the speed of sound... more» Israel insists Gazans are not starving and there is no humanitarian crisis. So what is life like in the rubble left by years of low-level war?... more» The Order of the Assassins was by the 11th century one of the most lethally effective terrorist groups the world has ever known... more» Cleopatra: her world, buried in the silt and clay of the Bay of Aboukir, off the coast of Alexandria, is now brought back to life... more» The white working class has been ignored for generations by Britain’s political elites. The result is not pretty. Americans should pay attention... more» “It is strange how little has been written about the Upper Mississippi,” Mark Twain said. For him, it was the most arresting part of the river... more» Events in the imagination can compel us utterly. Just as artificial sweeteners may be sweeter than sugar, unreal events may be more intense than real ones... more» Apple, Nintendo, and Dell all make use of Foxconn to manufacture their hardware, from its factory – no, its “campus” – with those happy Foxconn workers... more» Charles Dickens was a great travel writer because he came to realize that travel in itself is not that interesting. People are... more» Despite the sea of women in Norman Mailer’s life – six wives and countless lovers – his great literary handicap was his failure to learn from them... more» Pompeii may be a Unesco World Heritage Site. Yet its excavated ruins are being ruined once again – this time for good... more» Martin Gardner, mathematical gamester and champion of science and skepticism, is dead at the age of 95... AP ... SciAm ... Discover, with tributes ... James Randi ... Roger Kimball ... SciAm profile ... Douglas Hofstadter ... Matt Parker ... Andrea Pitzer ... Stefan Kanfer ... NYT ... Wash Post ... Chris French ... Thomas Maugh ... Telegraph ... His latest Skeptical Inquirer column was on Oprah Winfrey, “gullible billionaire.” Around 45,000 years ago what seemed just another predatory ape transformed itself into an animal that dominates its planet... more» Christopher Hitchens says he has no heroes, but leaves the impression of being an archetypal hero worshipper. Mind you, men worth worshipping... more» Is the so-called Climategate scandal real, or is it meant to distract us from the threats of global warming? Der Spiegel just wants to know what’s going on... more» Gay artist, he was not. On the contrary, Thomas Hart Benton made it part of his business to “cowboy up” the image of the artist in America... more» Temperamentally, law school profs tend to be more conservative than other academics – and they have moved even farther right since Obama was a student... more» Ask any psycholinguist: using pronouns correctly is a lot of work. You need to balance clear reference with not beating other folks over the head... more» Michael J. Astrue, head of U.S. Social Security, is the kind of quiet, careful civil servant that Caesar Augustus would have known. He is also a stunning poet... more» The Oberammergau Passion Play has run for 400 years. Must Mary still be played by a virgin? What if that shepherd boy is a Muslim? Big issues for a small town... more» In 1957, Cornelius Ryan began placing ads in newspapers, searching for men and women who had been in Normandy on June 6, 1944... more» Unless we know how things are counted, says John Allen Paulos, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers... more» The EU was an elite-driven, top-down affair from the start. Europe’s voters didn’t know their own good. Their betters would lead them... more» The café of Hotel Castelar was the literary heart of Buenos Aires, visited by Lorca, Neruda, Borges. It’s coming back to life... more» ... New online: 1976 Jorge Luis Borges interview. Fiction and other art forms make up pristine funds of data to answer vital questions about human nature. Literature is our cultural DNA... more» The notion that the first three years of childhood deeply shape the remainder of life is seductive. But, Melvin Konner asks, is it true?... more» Duke Ellington’s charm, drive, and singular talent place him in the musical pantheon. A man of unshakable dignity... more» Finishing a book requires an author to make choices and foreclose possibilities. That is what Ralph Ellison was unable to do... more» Herman Simm seemed to deserve his Order of the White Star for service to Estonia. In truth, he was the most damaging spy in the history of NATO... more» You’re not likely to hear this from your doctor, but fake medical treatments can work amazingly well. Always did, always will... more» Whaling in the 19th century combined cruelty, greed, nobility, courage, and generosity – and still we say, “Thank God it’s gone”... more» Stefan Zweig, besides being one of the great authors of the 20th century, also brought together an astonishing collection of musical manuscripts... more» Years ago, Christopher Hitchens wrote in the New Statesman that he found the new Tory leader “sexy.” Some crimes can be forgiven, others not... more» Greece is only a start. Leading economies have long lived beyond their means. And now, ominously, the bill is coming due. Der Spiegel reports... more» The Underdog Effect. We think we prefer to see the weaker team win. But perhaps we are just kidding ourselves... more» When we rely on spies, Malcolm Gladwell reminds us, we rely on sources that can’t be trusted. “The next time a briefcase washes up onshore, don’t open it”... more» The idea that soap-opera viewers might be modeling themselves on characters in As the World Turns may seem appalling. Not to worry, says Drake Bennett... more» Like many people at Google, Franz Och sees himself as campaigning for freedom and equality. His aim: to open all the Web to non-English speakers... more» The Europeans can come off as smug do-gooders, and their latest problems may incite Schadenfreude. But the ideals of Europe are still there to be admired... more» Ortega y Gasset: “Culture is what remains after we’ve forgotten everything we’ve read.” And what, Sven Birkerts asks, is left after reading a novel?... more» Adam Smith’s great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is a global manifesto for the interdependent world in which we live. Amartya Sen explains why... more» The U.S. and China are locked in a kind of mutually assured economic destruction that will force cooperation even as security disputes simmer... more» |
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New BooksPeople fretted about printing, cameras, the telephone, and television when they first came on the scene. And now, the Web... more» Institutions progress but human beings don’t, says Roger Scruton, and the human capacity for cruelty and violence is, alas, infinite... more» All that prancing about by the clergy in elaborate, colorful costumes. Is there a deeply repressed homosexual streak in the modern Church? Is the Pope gay?... more» Europeans and Americans are thought to be very different. Wrong, argues Peter Baldwin, who prefers to call them identical cousins... more» American blacks are victims of a history of slavery and racism. Does it follow that their salvation must be engineered by government? Amy Wax says no... more» The Shakers were good, plain, celibate folks who made great furniture. Yes, and when it came to breaking up families, they could be master villains... more»
“Events happen in Burma, and then they are systematically unhappened.” Consider the dreadful cyclone of 2008, and how many chickens it killed... more» Ernest Gellner was instinctively opposed to all lazy thinking, clichés of the right or the left. He was, of course, attacked by academics through his life... more» White guilt. Making guilty noises signals status and sophistication, with high priests of the intelligentsia earning psychic wages, like bankers’ bonuses... more» The subatomic world is the perfect arena for imaginative theory and sheer fantasy. Jeremy Bernstein is a man who knows the difference... more» Women in the 20th century moved toward more autonomy, self-confidence, skills, and income, with many individuals caught in the confusion... more» Was it the starry firmament above, or maybe sand cascading through someone’s open fingers? What experience incited the first intuitions of infinity?... more» Having set before Americans the highest ideals of gastronomy, France has a unique power to let Americans down. And so it has, argues Michael Steinberger... more» God 2.0. The quantum flapdoodle of New Age author Deepak Chopra is a failed effort to update medieval theology... more» Anarchists were for Marx wild children who were incapable of building a new social order. Yes, but they saw the authoritarian bent in Marxism... more» The 17th century saw the creation of a feedback loop: liberty and science begat prosperity, which begat more liberty and technology, which begat... more» For Kai Bird, two tragedies – the Shoah and the Palestinian exodus of 1948, known as the Nakba – are “the bookends of my life”... more» Spies? Fools and traitors. “Pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives”... more» “I am myself the matter of my book” wrote Michel de Montaigne. He knew that by being so, he was engaged in producing something wholly original... more» Women can be as immoral, malicious, and violent as chaps. Anyone shocked by this hasn’t paid attention in history class, let alone the nightly news... more» Arundhati Roy now trades in the wildest forms of anti-Americanism and the crudest critiques of capitalism. She has become an outright reactionary... more» Emily Dickinson’s father viewed his son’s work as near to Shakespeare. He didn’t see that his tiny daughter in her velvet snood was a great poet of her age... more» Kaiser Wilhelm’s plan was to unleash the furies of Islamic power, a jihad, on the British Raj and harness the glories of the Near East to German interests... more» “The American character” as a phrase sounds rather antiquated. Yet it still has life in it, or so sociologist Claude S. Fischer sets out to demonstrate... more» Mathematician as romantic hero. The idea still has appeal, though it seems today slightly less than fully grown up. Consider Évariste Galois... more» Abhorring animal cruelty does not entail the idea that all animals, humans included, sit at the same moral level. Peter Singer has an argument to answer... more» Voting systems. Choose them we must, while realizing that there is no single system perfect for all peoples in every historical epoch... more» Charles Rosen describes the romantic sensibility as a craving for emotional experience, an aesthetic of rising sentiment... more» The sonnet is with us still: to write a sonnet is to join in a line of poets that stretches back for centuries... more» “My time will come,” Gustav Mahler used to say when he felt unappreciated. He was right, of course. But is he now overrated? Or just overhyped... more» Mark Zborowski’s Life is with People portrays a world he knew to be darker and more complex than the bright story he tells... more» Tolstoy’s death drama was Russia’s first great mass media event. The rail station where he died became the eye of a news hurricane... more» Novelist E.M. Forster knew nothing about sex until late in his life – and things only got worse once he learned... more» If income inequality makes for a less healthy society, why not exile the rich, or censor the media, so the poor can’t know how poor they are?... more» Intelligence, self-possession, and a sense of maturity. If this be wisdom, will we learn more about it from literature and history, or from neuroscience?... more» Hitler was no buffoon. It took a malign genius to rise from Vienna’s slums and carry out the conquest of western Europe. Hugh Trevor-Roper grasped this... more» Suppose Mary had given birth, among her various children, to twins. One was named Jesus, the other she called Christ. Let’s say they had different talents... more» Hitler’s war against Russia was his to lose. He was on the verge of victory, but Stalin’s willingness to sacrifice 27 million Soviet citizens did him in... more» The arrest in 1894 of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus for revealing French military secrets to the German embassy rocked a nation. Its echoes are heard still... more» Bullfighting, Ernest Hemingway held, was not a sport at all, but a tragedy – a play with only danger for the man, but certain death for the animal... more» “Cowardly, despicable, weak, and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology, and religion.” Few groups can compare with Jews as targets of hatred... more» Progressive Australians once wanted health, literacy, and a place in the modern world for Aborigines. This went dead against the romantic ideal of the primitive... more» Just as Chomsky blew B.F. Skinner out of the water with his innatism in the 1950s, so Jerry Fodor wants to do the same to Charles Darwin. The signs so far... more» The internet “scatters our attention,” says Nicholas Carr, turning us “into lab rats pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment”... more» Robert McCrum sees English as in some way uniquely “direct” and “universal” and therefore well-suited to bestride the modern world. He’s wrong... more» Historically the left supported growth and mass prosperity. Today, radicals demonize shopping and want limits to economic growth... more» Cycles of American foreign policy: first success, then hubris, leading to tragedy, then maybe, to wisdom. So back to a new adventure: success, then... more» For black students, is doing well at school equated with “acting white”? And is this problem peculiar only to blacks, a special kind of anti-intellectualism?... more» Pliny the Younger was no genius, but he keeps our attention, writing of an odd dream, a horrific murder, domestic scandals, or a frolicing dolphin... more» Why do so many predictions made by putative experts – scientists, finance gurus, health officials – turn out to be flat-out wrong?... more» Socialism was a fine aspiration in the mind of G.A. Cohen. But even he felt that F.A. Hayek had fingered a reason we may never be able to institute it... more» The Enlightenment inspired smart people in Manchester and Scotland who stole each others’ ideas and put them to use, making the Industrial Revolution... more» Between university philosophers with their high abstractions and the glib advice of self-help gurus, there lies the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius... more» Since the 15th century, the world has been taught by Europe and exploited by Europe and made by Europe. Maybe Europe has had enough... more» Évariste Galois marks a turn from viewing mathematics as a kind of natural study to mathematics as a pure, abstract realm of its own... more» From wartime Britain to the glittering balls of John Kennedy’s D.C., Bill Patten Jr. tells his family saga. He may dislike the morality of his tale, but... more» Emily Dickinson was a powerful artist who was intimidated by nothing – the very opposite of a lovelorn, fear-driven recluse and spinster... more» Charles Dickens’s characters, children of his fancy, are utterly spoiled: they shake the house and smash the story with an unbridled sense of life... more» Sylvia Beach and Margaret Anderson: often called midwives of Modernism, it may be better to think of them as its electrical infrastructure... more» Hugh Trevor-Roper viewed as threadbare the notion that the lights of truth were suddenly switched on in Europe at the start of the 18th century... more» Anthony Bourdain does food porn like no one else: the crunch of bones, scalding hot fat and guts, sublime dribbles of figs, or Armagnac... more» Information society? More accurate to call it the interruption society. It pulverizes attention, the scarcest of all resources, and stuffs the mind with trivia... more» Prejudice against unattractive people in the workplace runs deep. Obese women earn 12% less than thinner co-workers with similar qualifications... more» “Keynes is back” is now a cliché. But hang on, did John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, ever leave?... more» In his wisdom, Jean-Paul Sartre saw the problem: “In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team”... more» The psychologist’s plan was weird, but why not try it? Place three delusional patients, each believing he is Jesus, in the same hospital ward... more» Thomas Babington Macaulay viewed the poor and weak with indifference, and shrugged off the potato famine as a “remedy” for Irish barbarity... more» Children of the gulags. Their parents, enemies of the state, had “abandoned” them. Only the miracle of Stalin’s love saved them... more» Was J.D. Salinger’s long silence an act of courage to be a nobody, or a failure of courage to be famous? We may never know... more» Few developments central to the history of art have been so misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus... more» Others saw madness and aggression in Matisse’s work, but his one early defender among the critics, Apollinaire, saw a “Cartesian master”... more» Collateralized debt obligations, CDOs, were piles of triple-B mortgage bonds that were going to turn to gold. What won’t Wall Street believe?... more» “Never attempt to fake reality in any manner,” Ayn Rand insisted. Of course, as Charles Murray explains, this delusional woman faked it all her life... more» At the end, Somerset Maugham, who knew the likes of Henry James, Churchill, Dorothy Parker, and D.H. Lawrence, died raving like King Lear... more» Communism did not do away with class: it turned the signed denunciation into the main weapon of class warfare. Vassily Grossman knew this... more» Cold War heroine? Margaret Thatcher, it seems, a lady who knew when to be Circe and when to be the nanny from hell... more» Third-wave feminism combined combat boots and baby-doll dresses. Barbie was a mannequin on whom you practice giving abortions... more» Ayaan Hirsi Ali learned Dutch, became Dutch, and went to parliament, but her view of Islam was too radioactive for the timid Dutch to handle. So to the U.S... more» Charles Dickens was for Emerson “too consummate an artist to have a thread of nature left. He daunts me! I have not the key”... more» Curiosity about Jane Austen’s life, along with enthusiasm for her work, is at a frenzied level: she’s an infinitely exploited global brand... more» ... more» The Jane Jacobs ideal of a city, with deli, hardware store, candy shop, etc., had a village authenticity. Must we forever bellyache about its passing?... more» Arthur Koestler’s double suicide with his wife was hardly heroic. It was a sin against his own lifetime of literary work... more» Was the cult that changed the world but a product of Paul’s evangelism? And who was this man called Jesus?... more» What is communism? The Russian joke has it that “Communism is the longest path from capitalism and back to capitalism”... more» Nothing succeeds like a theory of success, as books on success multiply, says Ann Hulbert. Call it the Malcolm Effect... more» Louis Armstrong brought joy wherever he played: intelligent joy, accomplished joy, freewheeling joy, comic joy, sardonic joy... more» “Puritan repression ” Hugh Hefner said, “is really the key that unlocks the mystery of my life.” In his way, he unlocked much else... more» Forget biographies. The way into the life of a man as open, direct, and arrow-straight as George Orwell is his letters... more» Moscow may have burned for six days, but still, Napoleon lost – and victory belonged to Tsar Alexander I and his generals... more» Two travelers, an English woman and a French man, arrived in Egypt in 1849, within days of each other. Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert... more» ... more» Diana was married in Goebbels’s drawing room with Hitler as witness. The Mitford sisters were unable to avoid the pull of cads and creeps... more» France’s current identity crisis, in all its ferocity and venom, has deep roots in the history of Gallic society, going back long before 1789... more» For H.G. Wells, the most prolific author of his age, writing was like scratching an endless itch. And given that he was randy as a goat... more» What makes Martin Heidegger’s Nazism into a challenge, rather than merely a scandal, is that he did not drift into evil, but thought his way into it... more» The first challenge of sorrow is cognitive, says Leon Wieseltier: “Making Toast is a small glowing jewel in the literature of grief”... more» Why is it that when fascist ideas emanate from Islam, intellectuals prefer to call them “totalitarian”? Because the latter word is abstract, odorless, uh, nicer... more» John Cage’s 4'33'' was not greeted with anything like the riot provoked by The Rite of Spring. By the 1950s, audiences knew too much... more» The story of yoga in America is one of scandal, financial shenanigans, oversize egos, bizarre love triangles – and performing elephants... more» David Foster Wallace. How could a writer whose prose breathed in life so fully, who wrote in the biggest, boldest type, simply silence himself?... more» Fifty years of the pill: it has reshaped our ideas about sex, marriage, and family, turning childbearing from an obligation into an option... more» Daily global hydrocarbon use is 200 million barrels of oil equivalent, or about 23.5 times Saudi Arabia’s daily output. To replace that with wind turbines... more» Terry Eagleton regards two core values for a meaningful life: love and happiness – treated as ends in themselves... more» Knut Hamsun won the Nobel Prize, but you won’t find the medal on display in Norway. The author regifted it to Joseph Goebbels... more» Fashions in social explanation come and go, but there remains no substitute for game theory in modeling human behavior... more» Skepticism, yes, egomania and arrogance, no. As Descartes, hero of scientists and skeptics everywhere, said, skepticism, like charity, begins at home... more» Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Jerry Fodor may not be creationists, but that only makes more flagrant the stupidity of their case against Darwin... more» Struwwelpeter, with its sadism, humor, and dark justice, is a book adults love to hate and children find enthralling. No wonder it’s in over 100 languages... more» Shakespeare’s work is distinguished from every other great writer in the astounding comprehensiveness of his treatment of love and sex... more» | |
Essays and OpinionIs classical music in decline? Heather Mac Donald denied it, and incurred the ire of Greg Sandow. The heated debate goes on ... Sandow ... Mac Donald’s response Molière, the shape-shifter extraordinaire of the 17th century, became in time a playwright of huge political value – rather like Albert Camus in our own day... more» Prince Charles finds modern architecture ghastly, loves homeopathy, and thinks coffee enemas can cure cancer. Well, his family is highly inbred... more» Tenure – the ability to teach and conduct research without fear of being fired – is still the holy grail of higher education, one to which all junior professors aspire. Abolish it!... more» American literature in the 19th century speaks in the 21st in terms we have not yet abandoned – for all our technology, globalism, and panache... more» Surviving death. Perhaps your ghost will be a mute witness to goings-on down here. Or maybe it will be able to act, clanking a chain, or saying “Boo!” in the dark... more» From Arabian night to Assyrian horrors. The history of Mesopotamia is one where culture, psychology, tribalism, and religious belief have never quite allowed for civil society... more» How unlikely: a small community of intellectuals in a corner of 18th-century Europe changed world history. They not only wanted progress, they figured out how to attain it... more» Conservative? Poet Geoffrey Hill is a far edgier artist than any of the swaggering, finger-clicking non-entities who claim to be taking poetry to the people... more» Book thieves likely pride themselves that they show connoisseurship and erudition in their crimes. It takes knowledge and discrimination to be a good book thief... more» Experiments are at long last changing the way social science is conducted. Yes, one day we will be able reliably to predict human behavior... more» Only the peer reviewed need apply. Once upon a time, “peer reviewed” meant that research was validly arrived at, not fabricated. Today it often means hewing to the party line... more» At the heart of the Enlightenment lies a core principle, says Tzvetan Todorov: the freedom of the individual. Today, attempts to “improve” on this principle court disaster... more» He’d studied medieval poetry, but after 20 years in corporate life, this Rip Van Winkle decided to return to the groves of academe. It wasn’t college as he remembered it. Or maybe it was.. more» Conrad Black’s prison education. In 28 months and 18 days he learned of the fallibility of the U.S. justice system, which convicts more innocent people than we can ever know... more» Soccer punditry is no doubt the most facile and inconsequential form of writing known to man. So why shouldn’t the New York Review of Books try its hand at it?... more» Some Pakistanis blame Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan. Here is an Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile... more» Surveillance can keep us on the moral straight and narrow, cultivating good habits. But it stands in the way of more saintly ideals, says Emrys Westacott... more» “You’re not getting any part of me,” Robin said. “I’m being frozen.” “No.” Peggy said. “Your head is being frozen. I get the rest of you”... more» “In the grip of a neurological disorder,” writes Tony Judt, “I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them”... more» Every household in North Korea is provided with a white cloth, to be used exclusively for cleaning the portraits Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il... more» What we hear in poems, says Tom McCarthy, is not selves, but networks, not signal but noise. Rilke called it Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static... more» David Greybeard, Goliath, Gremlin, Fifi, Olly, and the murderous cannibals Passion and Pom: Jane Goodall remembers them all. Chimpanzees of Gombe... more» The 1950s, a.k.a. the “Age of Anxiety,” began a golden age of mental illness. Signs and symptoms – alcoholism, depression, neurosis, delinquency – were rampant. Right up to the present... more» Baseball: the perfect game, the very Platonic ideal of organized sport, the “moving image of eternity” in athleticis. America’s grand gift to posterity... more» Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Is it a gift from God? From innate human reason? Moral naturalists take a different approach, says David Brooks... more» BP’s incompetence with Deepwater Horizon has made 2010 likely the worst oil-spill year since 1979. Still, says Matt Ridley, it is not quite the disaster TV would portray... more» Barack Obama backers have swallowed painful policy compromises over the last months, says Eric Alterman. But if you can’t have the whole hog, better a ham sandwich than hunger... more» The intense life of classical music across the world today – stunning performances, countless recordings, legions of fans – testifies to its deep roots in human feeling... more» If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist – to show who’s boss – it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus, says Carlin Romano... more» If the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder is a function of how its victims subjectively feel, then not only being in battle, but hearing about battle can cause trauma... more» Amputation sans anaesthesia. North Korea’s health system, the head of WHO has said, is the envy of developing nations. Amnesty Int’l please shut up... more» ... the Amnesty report (PDF). Nicholas Carr loves the Web – don’t we all love new information? Trouble is, we don’t stop to think deeply about what all those new facts mean... more» Tibet: a land where childlike monks and nuns smile softly all day long? A place of stillness, calm, and wondrous spiritual energy? Only in the romantic imagination... more» The New World was named for Amerigo Vespucci, but the naming may be the work of an obscure Alsatian scholar and proofreader, one Mattias Ringmann... more» ... more» Mother Nature is a complex system with webs of interdependence and a robust ecology. Nassim Taleb also thinks of her as a very old, wise person with an impeccable memory... more» A perception of unfairness is a major driver of anger as a human emotion. It is not too far, David Barash suggests, to speak of our having a fairness instinct... more» Commitments to the truth, humility, patience, and charity are central to the idea of a university. Without them you may achieve a knowledge economy, but never a wisdom society... more» Can video games be works of art? BioShock has aesthetic qualities and expresses emotions: crushing peril, tenderness, surprise, awe. Why not call it art?... more»... Ebert: video games will never be art. Christopher Hitchens: the true jigsaw puzzle of this enigmatic man may never be solved, but Michael Weiss offers his own attempt to squeeze the pieces together... more» A thousand years of economic bubbles, panics, and collapses shows that investors always think “this time is different.” We’re not as naive as our parents or their parents. Oh, yeah?... more» Vegans are trapped by their hopeless longing for innocence. But there is no innocence, except for the dead, says Harold Fromm. “To be alive is to be a murderer”... more» Natural libertarians have a distinctive view of life. They’re convinced no one can know their interests better than they do. Loving their own freedom, they don’t aspire to control others... more» To Kill a Mockingbird. It endorses the obvious, and congratulates the reader for agreeing with the endorsement. It’s America’s most overrated book... more» The decline of the actual, physical book is taking longer than it was supposed to. Is it possible we have not understood what books are actually for? Nathan Schneider wonders... more» Snobbery. Theodore Dalrymple admits that deep within he is a frightful snob, a man who can feel only contempt for people who regard the World Cup as important... more» Who has first claim on breasts, lovers or babies? Women are so often told breasts are man-magnets that many find it impossible to believe anything else... more» In Vladimir Nabokov’s work, the kindliness of memory recreates Eden, just as perversity razes it to the ground. His memories of Berlin... more» In A Simple Heart, Gustave Flaubert took a good, ordinary, but not intelligent person, entered into her world, and made her genuinely interesting, even admirable. What an artistic feat... more» William James: just about the only philosopher who didn’t end up as either a pettifogging nit-picker or an overbearing egomaniac with delusions of genius... more» Over the last fifty years, one of the least important aspects of government – kvetching, the inner soap opera – has become among the most important. Enter Stanley McChrystal... more» Marie Antoinette was a spendthrift, gambler, and libertine, to be sure, but she did not deserve the avalance of defamation that finally overwhelmed her... more» “Appeasement” is a word with a very bad ring to it – Munich and all that. Paul Kennedy thinks we ought to reconsider the benefits of the idea... more» Decent scholarship is drowning in an ocean of low-quality journal articles. The current emphasis on academic career advancement via quantity of publications has to stop... more» Anonymous online comment forums, with their anything-goes ethos, are seen as bastions of free speech. And, alas, of venomous abuse. Have they outlived their utility?... more» It’s the 12th annual Junk Science Week, and the Financial Post has awarded its coveted Rubber Duckies for the latest in the abuse and misuse of science ... cellphones reduce brain tumor risk ... better boil that T-bone ... cooked-up climate science ... plastic causes cancer ... fishy fish farm science ... miracle job benefits of solar cells ... BPA panic ... bogus Afghan mineral bonanza ... global warming politics. Journalism has taken over from fiction in showing the gritty realities – the morality and futility, the mess – of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, argues Geoff Dyer... more» In praise of tough criticism. Jeffrey Di Leo wants to see academics develop thicker skins and more rugged tools in tearing apart each other’s arguments... more» What mysterious ultramagnetic force does Prince Charles possess such that he can attract every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range?... more» Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce, or string quartets. What are the ancient sources of these pleasures? Paul Bloom has some answers... part 1 ... part 2 ... part 3 ... part 4 “Charles de Gaulle was a colossus for most of my life,” writes Neal Ascherson: malign, conceited, aloof, and worth dying for. He understood the tempests of his century... more» Promoting gender equity in the sciences is, all agree, a worthy cause. But varied career choices women and men make are not easy to analyze, says John Tierney... more» ... earlier article. Dilbert creator Scott Adams’s personal road to stock market riches: put your money on companies that you hate the most. BP, for a start... more» Many colleges now use summer reading programs to inflict moral nostrums on incoming freshmen. Leon Botstein argues instead for a brush with classic, difficult, unfamiliar ideas... more» For Gramsci, the prestige of dominant elites brings lower orders to abandon traditional values. But this won’t work in every national context. Consider the Tea Party rallies... more» Google, rock videos, and the Web will no more make you stupid and shallow than propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap will make you smart and deep, argues Steven Pinker... more» Why are the British so rude, so uncouth? They seem obsessed with butts, tits, penises, toilet humor, strange sex. Their sitcoms offer howling tsunamis of verbal abuse... more» Robert Boyle, Thomas Hyde, and Shen Fuzong. From China to the England of the 1680s, theirs was a true meeting of brilliant minds. Jonathan Spence explains.... more» In some cyborg future, the enemies of mankind – disease, ageing, incapacity, death – may well be vanquished. But by that very token, it will not be our future... more» John Templeton wanted to hijack the meaning of life, to find a spirituality finally worthy of mankind’s great scientific achievements. ... more» It’s an honorable and decent thing to sympathize with people less fortunate than you. But virtues are turned into vices by excess, insincerity, and loose thinking... more» Why is so much contemporary art so awful? We’re in the death throes of modernism, says Ben Lewis. It isn’t the first time artistic greatness has collapsed into decadence... more» “It is the time for Jews to confront the eternal truth of our stupidity as a people, which I will stack, blunder for blunder, against that of any other nation,” writes Michael Chabon... more» Poetry and applied mathematics mix apples and oranges, says Joel Cohen. They aspire to combine multiple meanings and beauty using symbols... more» Two cheers for intuition. It is not always wrong, but neither is it a shortcut around the hard work of logical analysis, deliberation, and rational choice... more» “Sex and the City 2 takes all I hold dear as a woman and a human – working hard, contributing to society – and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car”... more» E.M. Forster imagined a more tolerant future for gay people. But did laws against homosexuality make him a better writer? How little we know about the nature of inspiration... more» Backlash! East Coast critics are shocked to find out that the new L.A. Philharmonic director, Gustavo Dudamel, is not Wilhelm Furtwängler... Anne Midgette ... Midgette, earlier ... James Rainey ... Tom Huizenga Readers are fleeing newspapers in droves. What can the papers offer to lure them back? P.J. O’Rourke has a bright idea: the pre-obituary... more» It could be that in few decades, Europe will be but the northern part of the Maghreb. But maybe North Africa and the Middle East will by then be far more Europeanized... more» Evolution is not an enemy of religion, but a friend, says Francisco Ayala. For it, disease, death, and the cruelties of organic life result from merely natural processes... more» The only mass use of germ weapons in modern times was by Japan’s infamous Unit 731 between 1932 and 1945. Perhaps half a million Chinese died in a series of atrocities... more» Two boys, aged 10 and 11, convicted at the Old Bailey of rape of a younger girl who’d withdrawn the charge. Exploited children, adult fantasies... more» Tariq Ramadan, called a “Muslim Martin Luther,” and “prophet of a new Euro-Islam,” is a brave man, it seems. But brave in the face of what?... more» Great museums take us deeper into works of art, and deeper into ourselves. Albert Barnes knew this. Moving his museum to Philadelphia is a crime against his art – and his museum... more» Annapolis and West Point no longer aim at academic excellence. Petty, soul-killing rules and winning football teams are enough for them... more» In telling stories to children, Germaine Greer felt she was doing something as old as the human race, a task women – mothers, nurses, slaves, peasants – had always done... more» “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.” Ayn Rand also regarded herself as simply “the most creative thinker alive”... more» Jan Morris, master impressionist, and V.S. Naipaul, always turning over the same questions. As travel writers, Pico Iyer explains, they are extremes on a continuum... more» Obsessions with victimhood and the Holocaust are dying among America’s secular Jewish youth. The old dreams of Zionism are not what they were... more» In a literary age dominated by absurdists, genre benders, and hysterical realists, Francine Prose quietly goes about her work in the great tradition of the novel... more» Ought scientists accommodate themselves to the idea of areas of knowledge that are off-limits to their inquiry? Is this what “respect for religion” means?... more» German novels are like German cars, says Hans Magnus Enzensberger. “Core competence and diligence, but they are not particularly exciting or surprising or interesting”... more» Maybe, argues Marilynne Robinson, we are more than an optimized ape: perhaps something terrible and glorious and quite mysterious befell us... more» Toynbee’s books, gassy, shapeless, unhistorical monsters, were no model for Hugh Trevor-Roper. His only competitor was Gibbon himself... more» Gorbachev laughed about the downing of Korean flight 007, and cared nothing for Tiananmen victims. Then there’s Neil Kinnock. Joe Biden, even. Random House, please explain... more» How did the study of literature as an art come to be replaced by the mix of bad philosophy and worse prose academics call Theory? Where is Jorge Luis Borges when you need him?... more» Is the “New Atheism” the cultural watershed its purveyors like to think, or a marketing vogue, bound to go the way of pet rocks, disco, and prime-time soaps?... more» Ray Bradbury’s stories still sing on the page because they aren’t about technologies of robots, automated houses, and rocket men, but about how people live... more» Strange to recall that linguists in the 1980s were predicting that fragmented English was doomed as a world tongue. Quite to the contrary... more» No self-respecting professor of philosophy wants to discuss the soul in class. It reeks of old-time theology, or worse, New Age quantum treacle... more» Rather than pointing fingers, Greeks should look in the mirror, says Theodore Dalrymple. And how about Britain, which has now become the Greece of the North Sea?... more» Medical Hypotheses, a journal created in order to air and scientifically debate controversial ideas, has had its editor fired. Seems he allowed the debate of controversial ideas... more» When The Onion reported, “New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths,” it supported a tradition going back to Freud. Are small children actually moral beings?... more» How did we get here? How did we get to the point where just about every new classical dance, with the hippest costumes on the hottest bodies, is meaningless?... more» A capacity for embarrassment is a marker of normal humanity. Or at least it should be. Why has it fallen into such decline? Christine Rosen wonders... more» Sexual reproduction in animals tends to generate an array of offspring, says David Barash, making for healthy genetic diversity. In fact, we need individuality to survive... more» Why cry over split milk? Especially when served with a nice peanut better sandwhich? Typos are a way of life, and not only here at Arts & Letters Dialy... more» 3-D movies infantilize the medium, dim the retinal image, degrade dramatic experience, nauseate viewers, and inflate ticket prices, says Roger Ebert... more» Why is it that a personal, hand-drawn map can be so very much more useful than a map pulled off the Web? Julia Turner wonders... more» Naomi Klein’s No Logo became a research bible for marketers selling to consumers who wanted meaning, integrity, and moral purpose in their shopping carts. Thank you, Naomi!... more» Attention, Whole Foods shoppers! Your worries about “sustainability,” organic onions, and saving the planet do nothing for the plight of the world’s poorest people... more» It’s a trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and you are in it up to your eyes. The U.S. government issues more and more debt to pay off previous debt. One day, we’ll wake up... more» Whether the world is ready or not, India is set to become a global power. The United States, says C. Raja Mohan, ought to be the first to welcome the fact... more» Makes no difference if a government borrows from foreigners or from its own citizens, banking crises can be mortal shocks for any economy. Big debt is a big danger... more» We Boy Scouts were black, white, thin, fat, rich and poor, and united in being geeks. We rather disliked our uniforms, says Paul Theroux... more» |
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