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Articles of NoteGeorgian poet Titsian Tabidze wanted to use his avant-garde art to transform the Russian Revolution. For his pains, he was murdered... more» Specialist university librarians used to choose with the help of academics the best books and journals for collections. Alas, publishers now choose for them... more» Great statesmen, Bismarck said, hear before others the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history. What, well may we ask, does Barack Obama hear?... more» Michael Savitz spends 80 hours a week trawling junk shops with a laser scanner. He’s not a booklover in search of a good read. He’s a dealer... more» In case China finds itself unable to resist temptations of foreign policy adventurism, the U.S. must be forearmed. But in the meantime... more» As agriculture spread into neolithic Europe, it gave hunter gatherers more than wheat, barley, and beer: it gave them a white revolution: milk... more» Much of what medical research treats as fact is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. Why is bad science used to justify treatments?... more» Penmanship: to draw out letters by hand and connect them in cursive style has odd, even mysterious, effects on the development of the brain... more» “I am a bit angry,” said Swedish literary critic Ulrika Milles during Swedish TV’s Nobel Prize coverage. Mario Vargas Llosa is not their sort of chap... more» In fairy tales, good triumphs over evil., but in ways we may find quite vexing. Look at the Brothers Grimm with Snow White vs. how Disney ends it... more» Joan Sutherland, who thrilled the world with her dazzling technique, vocal clarity, and finesse, is dead at age 83 ... NYT ... Australian ... SMH Ants work together, share food, and send their elders into battle to protect the young. E.O. Wilson thinks they have a lot to teach us... more» The Trolley problem. How to make an issue in moral philosophy come alive, while the thinker is still allowed to enjoy the comforts of the armchair... more» Poetry is mathematics. Hidden in that elegant structure there may be deeper truths that touch on fractal patterns, on the theory of numbers, on primes... more» Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian writer, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature... NYT... LAT... AP... Guardian... WSJ... WSJ interview... NYT Kakutani... Independent... WP... Foreign Policy... William Boyd Racism has in the past been a reason for black/white disparites in the use of the death penalty in the U.S. But, Charles Lane explains, times are changing... more» “All I need is one chance,” says Rick Rembold, long-term unemployed. “I wanna work, to make stuff with my hands”... more» The Michelson-Morley experiment opened the universe to Einstein. What’s more, Albert Michelson was a dab hand at pool. Norman MacLean recalls... more» The 10:10 climate change campaign was to be promoted with an explosive promo. Now the promo is, well... [Note: bad taste advisory]... more» ... more» “Larry Summers is unquestionably brilliant, as all who have dealt with him, including myself, quickly realize,” says Charles Ferguson. And yet... more» China is teetering on the verge of its own lost decade. A meltdown in Beijing would make Japan’s economic malaise look like child’s play... more» East Germany’s leaders thought the GDR would be defended by Soviet comrades. But Gorbachev told them he had other worries. Condi Rice explains... more» Acronyms are less innocent than they look: fluid, prone to lurches in meaning, they are weapons, in fact looser cannons than most... part 1 ... part 2 What are books good for? Every book by a single author is a particular performance, a story told as only one storyteller could recount it... more» The revolution will not be tweeted. Twitter did little for post-election events in Iran, and Facebook did not bring freedom to Moldova... more» A huge hidden tobacco industry thrives in Canada. Native entrepreneurs get rich off the back of cheap, tax-free cigarettes. A five-part series... more» Will the door be opened to Franz Kafka’s last manuscripts? Only the doorkeeper knows. Or does he know? Kafka’s afterlife is a parable, too... more» The middleclass intellectuals who were the followers of Tolstoy were poorly prepared to work as farm hands. Staying with his ideals was tough... more» The differences between humans and chimps are large compared to those between men and women. But whoa! All such differences are pretty big... more» Antoine Lavoisier and Ben Franklin were far ahead of their time in the way they dealt with Anton Mesmer’s claims about “animal magnetism”... more» Deciding on the best science fiction calls for literary judgment. Asking what is the most accurate science fiction is a different question altogether... more» Cancer isn’t a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Maybe your body is cancering all the time... more» Meredith Maran accused her father of sexual molestation, which he denied. It took years, but she finally came to see who the liar was... more» Learn that poem! Memorization, it turns out, by making levels of knowledge and practice automatic, is a wonderful asset in any education... more» For decades, while van Gogh’s star has inexorably risen, Paul Gauguin’s has declined. Yet he is the man who can be said to have invented modern art... more» In online debates, we not only fail to cultivate charity and humility, we even think of them as vices: forms of weakness that compromise our advocacy... more» In most Muslim countries, Islamic law is a tool to enslave women. Ought it therefore to be removed from the legal sphere? Consider the case of Zainab... more» “I haven’t seen Take the Money and Run since 1968. I haven’t seen Annie Hall or any film I’ve made afterward.” Woody Allen doesn’t look back... more» Plagiarism, phony research outputs, fake degrees, pseudoscience, and jail or a beating for him who dares reveal the truth. Lies, damned lies and Chinese science... more» If science is systematic skepticism writ large, doesn’t it follow that a scientific cast of mind requires us to be skeptical of science itself?... more» No species of animal outside of Homo sapiens rears the young of other species and supports them into old age. People love their pets... more» Presidential reading: Barack Obama is into Jonathan Franzen. No Sarah Palin for him. Bush tried Camus, and what Nixon got from Betty Friedan is anybody’s guess... more» George C. Williams was a very deep and careful thinker: in fact, the most important recent thinker in evolutionary biology in the United States... more» ... more» The Shotlink system has recorded 7 million golf shots since 2003. Shots that landed in trees, four-putt greens, double eagles. What does it tell us about golf?... more» I asked Fidel if he believed the Cuban model was still worth exporting. “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said. Come again?... more» Some cities are lucky enough to be able to worry about smart growth. In Detroit or Flint, the question is whether there are any strategies for smart shrinkage... more» Sean Wilentz’s move from hard-left labor historian to defender of traditional, some might say conservative, political history seems an odd turn... more» Dr. David Kelly was 59 when he was found dead in woods near his Oxfordshire home in 2003. Was it merely suicide, or a darker conspiracy?... more» The Beijing opera, with its masks and atonal, strangely modern arias, its stylized movements and fantastically intricate scenes of battle, is dying... more» The ultimate worth of cities lies in their ability to deliver a better life not only for the rich and most skilled, but for ordinary citizens... more» Never has there been so little diversity within America’s ruling class. We see the same views about good and evil, demons of the age, saints to adore... more» For Sam Harris, a science of morality is simply an account of the behaviors, rules, cultural artifacts, and emotions that constitute the moral life... more» China’s advantage as a low-wage producer will in time disappear. Will jobs then leave for Bangladesh and Vietnam?... more» The printing press was not at first used to make books. Rather, almanacs, calendars, municipal orders, indulgence certificates... more» Benjamin Lee Whorf exaggerated. But still, our mother tongue can give us habits of thought that shape our experience in surprising ways... more» Though British and American politicians, including Obama, still like to intone the words “special relationship,” the idea looks more foolish all the time... more» Emerging from deep prehistory, humans muscled their way up the food chain, with everything on the menu – including ourselves... more» Emerson knew that “under every deep, another deep opens.” He might have been talking about mowing the lawn. Jerry DeNuccio explains... more» Whatever happened to quicksand in the movies? It was once the perfect deadly pit to consume Hollywood’s expendable characters... more» Psychology varies across cultures and chemistry doesn’t. Chemistry experiments thus do not need cross-cultural verification. But psychology... more» The tug-of-war between U.S. domestic and foreign obligations, between guns and butter, is intense. Americans cannot afford everything... more» India and China, which until 1800 made up half the world economy, are not, like Japan and Germany, mere nation states. Each is a continent... more» North Korea is a real place, not some imaginary realm to be likened to Mordor. North Koreans are normal people living an abnormal life... more» Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser is in trouble. The big unanswered question is, what exactly did he do?... Chron Higher Ed ... NYT ... Science ... USAToday Why the dramatic expansion of German industry in the 19th century? It was the fact that Germany had no copyright law... more» Frank Kermode, acclaimed as Britain’s foremost literary critic, has died in Cambridge at the age of 90... NYT ... Wash Post ... Guardian ... Telegraph Today’s most centralized empire-state, China, could be undone by its cities. Controlling cities, not countryside, is the key to the Middle Kingdom... more» As Julian Hawthorne lay “dying” in a coffin as part of his Delta Kappa Epsilon initiation, his actual father, Nathaniel, died... more» Human beings are squeamish critters, repelled by unfamiliar grooming habits, physical contact with strangers, exotic meats, bodily fluids... more» The 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» |
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New BooksSam Harris is a moral realist: he holds moral questions have objectively right or wrong answers. It’s consequences that count... more» Bob Geldof and Bono used Live Aid to rescue their careers. They sincerely wished to help Ethiopians, too. But did they?... more» The Hermaphrodite was denounced by moralists as soon as it was published in 1425. Its lurid poems have delighted decadents ever since... more» Civil War what-iffers: What if Lincoln had let the South secede? Slavery had been allowed? One side had won a half-dozen battles at the outset?... more» Noël Coward danced along the divide between his life and his art, knocking off songs between tea and cocktails, writing a play in three days... more» Germanness long predates an all-German state. Protestantism, literacy, universities, and Jewish citizens devoted to high culture all played a role... more» The inferno inside a jet engine is hotter than the surface of the sun and would melt the turbine’s blades if not for clever management of airflow... more»
Ladies, find your inner geisha: that doll-like woman with her silk kimono, scarlet lips, and exotic sex techniques. Easy to ridicule. Maybe too easy... more» Stanley Cavell’s intellectual journey must ever “begin again,” must revisit and re-examine assumptions that have gone untested... more» With his prodigious talent, parents who loved him to bits, and a piano teacher named Marietta Clinkscales, Duke Ellington could only succeed... more» At its height, the British Empire had more Muslim subjects than any other empire ever. It counted as subjects over one in three of the world’s Muslims... more» The torture of walking into a bookshop today: yes, the fiction will very likely be competent, but without being genuinely beautiful. Who to blame?... more» The Preppy Handbook’s target was clear. Today, preppies, with their iPods, their Verdura jewelry and vintage Gucci loafers, are a fuzzier beast... more» Evelyn Waugh saw in Africa that “cruelty and injustice” were everywhere. Fifty years later, and V. S. Naipaul is a traveler equally without hope... more» The origins of Modernism lie in a sense of disillusion or, more precisely, in what Schiller called “the disenchantment of the world“... more» For fans, Gustav Mahler was more than a composer. He was a seer who foretold Auschwitz, McCarthyism, killing JFK, Vietnam. Yeah, whatever... more» George Washington: a general who was almost bereft of tactical ability who yet was a politician full of strategic insight... more» Sofia Tolstoy found life tolerable when she kept to her chores. “But the moment I am alone and allow myself to think, everything seems insufferable”... more» Mao Tse-Tung imprisoned, tortured, and murdered thousands of intellectuals. His helpers in the West included any number of admiring intellectuals... more» Fairy tales literalize metaphor, lowering their glittering buckets deep into the psyche’s well. Consider the worlds of the Brothers Grimm... more» When biologists talk of animal altruism, self-sacrifice, kindness, murder, slavery, or warfare, they are actually using their own technical vocabulary... more» Intellectuals tend to see what they want in the world, which is that their biases are confirmed. How does that make them so different from other mortals?... more» Sarah Bernhardt’s deceitfulness was a part of her very genius. Dumas said of the rail-thin actress, “She’s such a liar, she may even be fat!”... more» The Greeks loved names and loved to make them up. Hesiod’s nereids: Sandy, charming Salty, lovely Promontoria, Welcome-Wave, Current-Carried... more» If the task of art is to hold up a mirror to our lives, then Jonathan Franzen has done his work. But, really, is this all we want from art?... more» Socrates sure knew how to ask awkward questions and annoy people. The endless pursuit of Truth made him too many enemies... more» The DeMoulin Bros. 1930 catalog gave to men danger on demand: tricked by an exploding cigar or an electrified bench, beaten by a spanking machine... more» David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd showed how global capitalism was a threat to personal rootedness. A book still worth thinking about... more» Can grammar give people “different ways of seeing the world” in a sense that most of us would find earth-shaking? Seems not. Whorf is still dead... more» What drives moral progress? Anthony Appiah thinks he has an answer. Look at the decline and abandonment of dueling in 19th-century Britain... more» Jonathan Franzen’s juvenile prose, with its bursts of journalese, uses of sucked and very into, creates a world where nothing important can happen... more» When America goes to war, it is the poorer and less educated who are the most likely to be killed in combat. ’Twas not ever thus... more» Numbers don’t lie, but are the best kind of facts we have. Oh, yeah? Charles Seife shows how numbers are being twisted to erode our democracy... more» Walter Benjamin said Robert Walser had no style. W.G. Sebald described his style as “a pretense at awkwardness brought off with the utmost virtuosity”... more» It’s a familiar pattern: a fiery op-ed, full of striking anecdotes but unripe ideas and bad logic, has become a much worse book. For example, Mark C. Taylor’s... more» The New York tenement was a place to start, to circle your wagons, put some food on the campfire, and wait for opportunity. Look at 97 Orchard Street... more» “Man is hungry for beauty. There is a void.” Nine words. Say them aloud. What else is there to be said about beauty?... more» Thirty years on, and the WASP nest has broken open like a piñata. The new Preppy Handbook now includes gay preppies and black preppies... more» Adolf Hitler was armed with a new model of economic exploitation. Along with his dreams of a racial utopia, this meant in 1939 that war was inevitable... more» 1926: a poor young Russian who called herself Ayn Rand left the DeMille Studio, having been turned down for a job. Just then, the boss, DeMille himself... more» Stephen Hawking regards philosophical problems as the sort of thing you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you’ve run out of Sudoku puzzles... more» Thilo Sarrazin says that Germany is enduring a slow death by immigration. In so doing, he has ignited a debate that is unprecedented in its ferocity... more» We cannot create our own values, or pick and choose the rootstock from which our fragile moral feelings have sprung. We rely still on God... more» Graham Greene’s fearless travels in west Africa made his reputation as a literary explorer. But were his intrepid cousin, Barbara Greene, not at his side... more» As humans domesticated cattle, sheep, pigs, horses, cats and dogs, they at the same time domesticated themselves: we made ourselves human... more» Saul Bellow’s 1937 send-up of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” is about one Mendl Pumshtok, who dares not to eat not a peach, but a prune... more» Between 1959 and 1962, 43 million Chinese died of hunger or were executed. Parents sold their children, people dug up the dead and ate them... more» The one idea books written from within the financial crisis refuse to contemplate: the prospect of an unhappy ending for capitalism... more» H.L. Mencken: ready to bust up the joint with his combative, beautifully sprung, ingeniously funny style, as irresistible as a laughing baby... more» Too bad that the human race is so prone to make mistakes. But our capacity to err comes with our imagination, and with it our power to grow... more» In America, what passes for freedom, or so Jonathan Franzen implies, is a refusal to accept limits, to shoulder the burdens of an inheritance... more» Reading old science fiction offers a distinct pleasure, says Wendy Lesser: to compare playfully visionary forecasts with what actually took place... more» Martin Luther’s genius was to infuse his translation of the Bible with words heard on the streets of Saxony: “even tailors and shoemakers read it”... more» In the 17th century, handfuls of men using small boats, scaling ladders, and sheer nerve made piracy a profitable line of work. Not unlike the 21st century... more» The horrible U.S. air raids on Japan were so successful that by the end of WWII it was hard to find suitable targets for the A-bombs... more» The breathless admiration bestowed on China and India is not all justified. That breakneck pace of growth will not last... more» Drive-thru punditry, the intellectual’s fast food. Those tasty sound bites may appeal at first, but in the end they are devoid of genuine fortification... more» My Dog Tulip, perhaps the most repellent dog book ever written, has now become the weirdest dog movie ever made. Alex Beam describes the action... more» Bare-knuckle prize fighting was brought to America by the British and the Irish in the 1840s. Its first star was the convivial John L. Sullivan... more» Matt Ridley shoots down the culture of doom and fashionable pessimism that stands in stark contrast to the optimistic arc of human history... more» Chicago gangster girls: all sequins and eyeliner and booze and skin, in a world where sexiness trumps sanity any time... more» Lewis Hyde is unhappy with the idea that creative work is intellectual property and thus owned. For him it is our “cultural commons”... more» Adam Smith would have welcomed the blurring of the boundaries between economics, biology, genetics, cognitive science, and psychology... more» Darwinian evolution develops through time and gives rise to fad hypotheses that fall by the wayside. The aquatic ape, the Nemesis Star, Pleistocene overkill... more» “Celebrities tell us many different stories about ourselves,” says Fred Inglis, “some unsettling, some bracing, some beautiful, some ugly”... more» Village by village, Churchill bragged, “we destroyed houses, filled up wells, blew down towers, burned crops.” He himself shot three “savages”... more» People 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» | |
Essays and OpinionReal friendship involves risk. If a computer screen you ultimately control comes between you and your “friend,” then it was not authentic friendship in the first place... more» Reading Lolita at twelve: I saw the world through wiser eyes. What girl had that “soul-shattering, insidious charm” that made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?... more» In Easy A, adolescent boys pay the lovely heroine for the privilege of saying that they slept with her. For our age – or any age – it’s the double standard writ large... more» Many books offer more wisdom and self-criticism than Gone with the Wind, or give us less fantasy and better realism. Still, such tattered volumes remind us of the readers we once were... more» When he began Dilbert, Scott Adams mocked the very firm he worked for. “If you knew my backstory, you could sense my personal danger in every strip.” Yes, he got fired... more» Taxidermy, the chemistry of the morgue, is a cult obsession with contemporary artists, observes Simon Schama. Yet how much in this idea is really new?... more» “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendor,” No, Blaise Pascal did not say this. Werner Herzog explains... more» Real ants offer no lessons in human moral conduct, says Deborah Gordon. Brave soldiers, dutiful factory workers: this is the stuff of our fictions, not insect behavior... more» Somerset Maugham found it odd that Henry James ignored the most important fact of his day, the rise of the U.S. as world power, for the tittle-tattle of European drawing-rooms. Therein lies a lesson... more» The long history of American “declinism” is rooted more in the collective psyche of our chattering classes than in any sober political and economic analysis... more» Ought the exploits of Christopher Columbus be the occasion to take a day off work? He had a lot of bad attiudes by our standards. But history is complicated, as William Connell explains... more» Dickens in Lagos, Maugham in Rangoon, Hardy in Mombasa, Dreiser in Bombay. Great novels of the past are not past at all in cities of the Third World. George Packer explains... more» For Tolstoy, love is a great existential drama. To be mean and generous, depraved and decent, loving and murderous, not by turns but all at once – that is the true burden of our existence... more» Where, pray, is a sense of honor in the academic and collegial life of the university today? After all, if there can be honor even among thieves, you’d expect... more» For Ben Franklin, happiness meant overcoming the idea that the world, or other people, or God, or the state owes us a living. Owes us, in fact, anything at all... more» Sustainability, uniting vaunting political ambition and comic burlesque, has the logic of a stampede. We must run for fear of some rumored, invisible threat. The real threat is the stampede itself... more» Scientists offer evolutionary explanations of why we savor art and story-telling, but science will never give us the intense emotional experience we get from art. Brian Boyd explains... more» The Keynesian worldview regards capitalism as in need of being saved from itself by big government. But the debt crisis in Europe and the U.S. demonstrates that big government is the problem... more» The American appetite for all things Indian has grown over the years. There is no parallel interest in the culture of Pakistan. A new collection of writing begins to show why... more» War in the desert, like war at sea, takes place over a vast, often inhospitable landscape, where flanks can be turned indefinitely; intelligence and agility are essential. T.E. Lawrence knew this... more» Financing the welfare state depends critically on population increase. That a growing nation is a kind of Ponzi scheme was a fine idea when people still thought the Baby Boom would go on forever... more» Our bankers are pretty lousy, but our writers are hardly better. So we submerge ourselves in B-class fiction: “smart,” middle-brow, fashionable, contrived, writer workshop, English-major fiction... more» Since Stephen Hawking is the smartest man on earth and “the most revered scientist since Einstein,” when he tells us what it is to know the mind of God, he just can’t be wrong. Right?... more» The overcontrolling parent. Playmates summoned via phone or text. Drop-off and pick-up times coordinated. Moms and dads pressed into service as chaperones or chauffeurs or coaches... more» Wagner and his Ring are so easy to ridicule. So why is it that after the snickering dies away, people line up in their thousands to keep hearing this music?... more» Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Jewish Defense League made Soviet Jewry the focus of his aggressive 1960s activism. But then one day, a bomb in Sol Hurok’s New York office changed everything... more» The Locovore movement brings to mind William Morris and Arts and Crafts. His wallpaper and books didn’t stop the industrial revolution. But he left a legacy of beautiful things... more» “However unpalatable it might be to our sense of racial pride, we as black people need to read the dead white men with alacrity,” says Lindsay Johns, defending the canon... more» Progressives are not nihilists, nor are they opposed to the Constitution, nor are they socialists with a utopian faith in inevitable progress. Conor Williams to the defense of progressivism... more» Michel Houellebecq thinks Alexis de Tocqueville has real prophetic powers. In fact, he predicted Houellebecq himself, an artist who believes in love and in eternal, unlimited happiness... more» John Henry Newman’s conception of a university was a serene and beautiful vindication of an old ideal of the scholarly life. Perhaps it has no place in the world today... more» So far as the free world was concerned, said Gen. Walter Bedell Smith in 1954, French forces at Dien Bien Phu were engaged in a modern Thermopylae. Who else saw it that way?... more» David Markson’s library is dispersed, carried off by customers of The Strand bookstore. But much has been gained, and a dead man’s wishes have been honored... more» Okay to hate the Pope. Anti-Catholic prejudice is one of the main themes of today’s increasingly conformist imagination, argues Frank Furedi... more» Asked by a British historian why Lenin still lies in Red Square, an angry Vladimir Putin asked why a statue of Cromwell stands by Parliament in London. Look what Cromwell did to Ireland... more» Independence of mind – as opposed to servility of mind – requires that we think our own thoughts: poor things many of them may be, but they are our own, and we have reasons for them... more» I, Rigoberta Menchú. Was it really “a tissue of lies,” and “one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century”? Or was it a fine, perhaps even immortal, book? Greg Grandin argues his case... more» A skilled actor pretending to be a medical expert can, alas, fool even real medical experts. The implications of this depressing fact are good news for Big Pharma... more» Attenborough meets Dawkins. It’s almost too good to be true: on earth, life has come about in an intelligible process. And we’re the only earthly species that can understand it... more» Political correctness is silencing a debate that Germans need to be having. Thilo Sarrazin has now been forced from his position at the Bundesbank, punished for having the wrong opinions... more» For Peter Singer, the defining idea of the coming decade will be the Internet, which will democratize education, economics, and the media... more» But wait a minute, says Trevor Butterworth Stars, planets, airplane lights? How dull. Much more arresting is the notion that we are so fascinating that aliens would travel zillions of miles through space just to visit us... more» Greece’s debt is about a quarter of a million dollars for each working adult. But it gets even worse. Michael Lewis advises: Beware of Greeks bearing bonds... more» Women – beheaded, burned to death, stoned, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive – for the honor of their families. It’s barbaric and shameful, says Robert Fisk... part 1 ... part 2 “Thoughts are magnetic,” says Rhonda Byrne, “and they magnetically attract all like things that are on the same frequency.” Money must be on the same frequency... more» Lady Chatterley produced a literary show trial, with scholars forced to overpraise a rather bad novel. They can be thankful there hasn’t been another such spectacle since... more» While the intelligence needed to make a universe is superior to ours, it is recognizably similar to our own, argues John Gribbin. It need not mark an infinite and mysterious God... more» As it moved from desktop to pocket, the idea of the Web as a medium driven by expression, attention, and reputation has fallen into doubt... more» “It has become my passion to expand evolutionary theory beyond the biological sciences to include all things human.” says David Sloan Wilson... more» “People who loved Sarah Palin are disappointed,” said one woman in Wasilla. “They found out that Sarah Palin loves Sarah Palin most of all”... more» The death of the book as object of study. Will the faculty hold the line, or will no one be assigning whole books to students by 2020? Carlin Romano on Extreme Academe... more» In the wake of Wagner’s achievement in Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, the musical language that had been common property of Western composers fell into crisis... more» The humanities have been gutted by decades of pretentious postmodernist theory and identity politics, says Camille Paglia. Consider, in contrast, the happy plight of the trades... more» Philosopher Joel Marks, erstwhile Kantian, has become an amoralist. That’s right, he has thrown out morality altogether. What difference has it made?... more» America’s need for cheap oil, credit, and consumer goods means Iraq and Afghanistan get fixed before Cleveland and Detroit. It’s not just about freedom, says Andrew Bacevich... more» As regards pace of change, leftists are already more conservative than they like to admit, says Jonny Thakkar. Conservatives, however, should brush up on their Marx... more» Susan Jacoby finds herself in a lonely place among liberals. She will not accept multiculturalism as an excuse to violate universal human rights... more» ... Nomad excerpts So you think our daughter is a spoiled brat? Your problem is your whimpering son has not read Atlas Shrugged. He’s set to become a social parasite... more» Kabul: you’ve never been there, you can’t speak the language or grasp the social complexities. No fear, says P.J. O’Rourke. After 72 hours, you’re an expert. You’re a reporter!... more» The local food movement now threatens to devolve into another self-indulgent – and self-defeating – do-gooder dogma. Stephen Budiansky explains why... more» William McGonagall’s invincible delusion – that he was a theatrical and poetic genius without equal since the time of Shakespeare – merits not disdain, but sympathy and respect... more» The Soviet Union didn’t collapse because of Reagan or Thatcher or Star Wars. It collapsed, says P.J. O’Rourke, because of Bulgarian blue jeans... more» What do the Chinese really think about global warming and the West’s efforts to stop it? An answer to this crucial question is becoming visible... more» ... The Low Carbon Plot In Turkey, it is normal to say that you will do something, have done it, or agree with something when, in fact, you won’t, haven’t, or don’t. It’s not lying, it’s just being polite... more» The problem with unsuccessful stories is usually simple, says Tim O’Brien. They are boring, because of a failure of imagination... more» Google’s book search takes a group of the world’s great research library collections and returns them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore... more» “Today’s environmentalism? Consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots, adjunct to hyper-capitalism; catalytic converter on the SUV of the global economy,” says Paul Kingsnorth... more» Is 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» |
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