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 VERITAS ODIT MORAS
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Henry James shows that Wellesley grads who try to save the world by becoming self-righteous lawyers are a long American tradition... [more]
Anthropologist Colin Turnbull was smart and charismatic, but often cruel and distant — a scholar devoted to social justice yet blind to his own power... [more]
Aristophanes refers to the male member as a tip, neck, finger, flesh, skin, biggy, sinew, muscle, pole, ram, oar, beam, punt-pole, bolt, spit-roast, axe, club, soup-ladle... [more]
McSweeney's is like the old Partisan Review without the politics, says Michael Wolff. Or maybe it's Partisan Review meets Friends... [more]
George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were foul-weather friends, united only by a common distaste for the philistine Englishman... [more]
Time travel to the future? That's easy, says physicist Paul Davies. It's actually been done already. Traveling to the past is the tough part... [more]
Jacques Derrida has worked out a set of ideas about faith that Christians can ignore only at their own peril, says Bruce Ellis Benson... [more]
Why does a mirror reverse left and right, but not up and down? Why does it treat its vertical and horizontal axes differently? Jim Holt wonders... [more]
Faulkner was right: those who can, do. Those who cannot, and who suffer because they cannot, learn to write about it, says Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky... [more]
Biographers have become more acute and nuanced as critics, no longer treating the relation between life and art in a simple way, says Jay Parini... [more]
Anti-Communists on the left found a noble middle ground between the violation of civil liberties and softness towards tyranny, says Ronald Radosh... [more]
Willfully unaware of the facts of her life, music fans persist in thinking that Billie Holiday felt their pain, says Francis Davis... [more]
Is philosophy a subject that judges must learn? In some crucial sense yes, and in some practical sense no, says Ronald Dworkin... [more]
Soren Kierkegaard is the man we need to listen to today, when relations are so shaky between leaders and led, press and people, corporations and consumers... [more]
George W. Bush has a bad habit of saying things that don't mean anything. So why hasn't it cost him public support? Steven Pinker explains... [more]
"Did you actually like that?" a man asked some students after a Homi Bhabha lecture. "It was great!" they replied. "Well," he challenged, "then what did he say?"... [more]
"I never liked Richard Avedon's photos of Samuel Beckett," says John Minihan. "I think they're cold. In my photos I tried to show the man"... [more]
That either Bush or Gore holds the "high moral ground" is dubious, yet their claims to this phantom venue dominate the campaign, says Joan Didion... [more]
Philosopher Peter Singer wants to be on the side of the weak and poor against the rich and mighty. It's just one of his many, uh, novel ideas... [more]
Everyone may think that utopia is an idea whose time has gone. But history has a nasty way of overtaking you just as you bid it farewell... [more]
All good science leaves open a window of doubt, and in that crack of uncertainty we cram ESP, ghosts, UFOs, cell phones that cause cancer, God... [more]
Despite the late outpouring of love for Saul Bellow, there is a hard truth to swallow: the days of the Great Jewish Novel are over... [more]
If Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were writing The Vital Center today, he would tone down the rhetoric. There is too much hortatory lushness... [more]
Living in North Africa shaped the life and work of Paul Bowles in ways that we are just starting to grasp, says Brian Edwards... [more] ... [more]
A world with no booksellers is hideous to contemplate, writes Jason Epstein... [more]. Jonathan Yardley finds the romance of the bookstore overrated.
As philosophy becomes more scientific, there's reason to celebrate artists like Milton Babbitt and John Cage, whose work preserves a sort of visionary philosophy... [more]
In today's world, Ben Franklin would be a techno enthusiast, arguing for the Internet and biotech, says David Brooks... [more]
The animal rights movement wants to elevate the status of animals. But contrary to its best intentions, it may turn out to degrade humans... [more]
Tom Wolfe was shocked when his attack on The New Yorker was treated as a crime against humanity... [more] The real problem with Wolfe is that he recycles himself, says Judith Shulevitz.
Thomas Wolfe remains a yokel despite his learning. He can't escape the ideas he brought from home, says Elizabeth Hardwick... [more]
Beauty and Justice. We love them both, but do they actually help and support each other? Elaine Scarry believes that they do... [more]
For a young country, Canada has so many novelists oddly fascinated by history. Fred Stenson is case in point... [more]
Far from being a fascist, the young Richard Wagner was in fact a utopian socialist, argues Bryan Magee... [more]
In the past two decades, we've met Soloflex man, Calvin Klein man, and WWF wrestlers on steroids. Call it the Buff Revolution... [more]
For Serbian writer Jasmina Tesanovic, keeping a diary is a political act. But she also does it because she's helpless... [more]
James Atlas wanders into the realm of ideas, but he doesn't seem to know that he's in it, or how to find his way out... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
When John Ashbery is on, he is clever and charming. When he's off, he writes oblique poems that sound like nonsense... [more]
Nothing much of great interest in the way of urban fabric or form is being proposed these days, laments Nathan Glazer... [more]
At a time when conformity to the winds of fashion is passed off as subversion, Roger Kimball is a truly radical figure... [more]
Reading Philip Roth, you can't help think of all the nice books that merely confirm the politics of right-thinking people... [more] ... [more]
Kenan Malik argues that we are more than just evolved beings. Language and culture turned our brains into minds... [more] ... [excerpt]
Frank Kermode says that the English short story is now mostly an American form. Just look at the work of Raymond Carver... [more]
Philosopher George Santayana was also an eclectic man of letters, with a gift for vivid essays, poetry, novels, literary criticism... [more]
"Men can only be happy," said George Orwell, "when they don't assume the object of life is happiness." That's how saints talk... [more]
Reading soccer star David Beckham's memoir is a bit like munching your way dutifully through yard upon yard of muslin... [more]
If you ever hope to write like Stephen King, try to become a tall Maine resident named Stephen King. Avoid getting hit by a van... [more]
Marguerite Duras has all her life sought love and affection, using the only language she had for it: the poetry of sex... [more] ... [more]
For years, Martin Gardner has trained his vision on every kind of science: the good, the bad, and the bogus... [more]
Norman Lebrecht must confess to a dirty little habit before the tabloids get wind of it and ruin him: he collects postcards... [more]
Rather like Graham Greene, Gloria Emerson captures the feel of places relegated by other journalists to the status of lost worlds... [more]
Frances Stonor Saunders knows which cultural projects got CIA money in the Cold War. But does she know if the CIA got what it paid for?... [more]
Some anthropologists did secretive work for the CIA in the 1950s. And they may still be doing so today, reports David Price... [more]
Amnesty International has reached deep into the heart of Africa, deep beyond the cities of Africa, deep into the people of Africa, reports Jonathan Power... [more]
Was Pablo Picasso a Cold Warrior for the Evil Empire? Was he a weapon in the arsenal of Stalin's culture czar, Andrei Zhdanov?... [more]
Modern medicine has made little progress since the butchery of Victorian times. Surgery and drugs are still crude. But now that the genome is mapped... [more]
Literature has hit a dull patch, so a bunch of young writers have banded together as the New Puritans and produced a manifesto... [more]
Welcome to the Slamdome: a world of smoky bars where poets are the brawlers and the crowd lusts for word blood... [more]
"I'm happy to carry people from realism to science fiction and back," says Ursula K. Le Guin. "If I'm a stepping stone, walk on me"... [more]
Nobel scandal? It seems that a member of the Swedish Academy is both translator and advisor to this year's laureate, Gao Xingjian... [more]
Philosopher Roger Scruton has long been the target of criticism and abuse from the left. But his new book has won him some unlikely allies... [more]
For fifty years, Sai Baba has been seen as India's most famous and mighty holy man. But he may just be a sex maniac on an ego trip... [more]
Someone should have informed art critic and general smart-arse Robert Hughes that it's bad form to tell volunteer firemen where to shove a tuna... [more]
Patrick Tierney's sensational claim that U.S. scientists started a genocidal epidemic in the Amazon is false, says John Tooby... [more] The New Yorker replies.
Fingerprints: everyone knows that no two are alike, but no one has ever proved it. Just how reliable is fingerprinting? ... [more]
The Holocaust has been made to seem trivial. Its horrors are an integral part of American infotainment, says Detlef Junker... [more]
The Dead Sea Scrolls continue to bring Jews and Christians closer together. It now appears that Jesus Christ styled himself after a messiah named Menahem... [more]
We all know that English is fast becoming the global language. Or do we? The spread of English won't happen the way we expect it to... [more]
More art house films are made each year than anyone could ever want to see. So why do we bemoan the decline of small-scale cinema?... [more]
Hacktivism is a term that refers to the politics of the geek world, a covert attack on the growing political power of tech CEOs... [more]
Linda Waite believes marriage is good for you, and she's got numbers to prove it. Can a social scientist succeed where moralists have failed?... [more]
Three women have won the Nobel chemistry prize, compared to 129 men. Does this give us a true view of women's abilities in science?... [more]. Cambridge University is looking at the problem.
Updike, Bellow, Roth: the mighty phallocrats of American letters were supposed to be past it, packed off to rest homes. But look, says Charles McGrath... [more]
"Am I able to write while on a book tour? Are you kidding? I can't even eat. Do you know what an author tour is?" asks Kazuo Ishiguro... [more]
Was Beethoven's anguish the simple result of lead poisoning? Scientists have found high levels of the metal in strands of the composer's hair... [more]
Cannibalism hardly raised any eyebrows, but when Jared Diamond talked of circumcision with New Guinea friends, they were horrified... [more]
The Hispanicization of U.S. society? More and more, we're hearing a strange tongue called Spanglish, a.k.a. McLengua... [more]
"Well, what do you want? To do some nudes?" asked Marilyn Monroe. A pretty good idea, he thought... [more]
So-called shock art is in fact the safest, least daring kind of art that anyone can make in today's art world, says Lynne Munson... [more]
Gore Vidal's mother's anatomy made giving birth a difficult task. He came out fairly squashed in the process... [more]
Would you settle for a lower income if in return you could be assured that others were making even less than you? "Yes" seems a spiteful answer, but... [more]. NYT Mag special on spending.
When a Polish Jew spoke at an emotional seminar in the squalor of Gaza, a faulty translation of his speech nearly caused a riot... [more]
Few scientists believe that we have a "theory of everything." But modern physics is basically done, and none knows what the next step should be... [more]
It's a miracle, says the exiled Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature... [more] ... [more]
]
In Raymond Carver's stories nothing much ever happens at all. But somehow, something somewhere is always going on... [more]
Look Homeward, Angel was edited so as to excise 60,000 offensive words on religion, patriotism, and Southern mores. Those words are back... [more]
"Choking" sounds like a vague term, but it describes a very specific kind of failure. Panic is something else entirely, says Malcolm Gladwell... [more]
Iowa State University Press has shed its nonprofit status and merged with a commercial publishing giant, raising scholarly eyebrows... [more]
"I shouldn't lay my ethnicity on a novel when it doesn't warrant it. My sensibility as an Indian writer emerges in ways I can't see," says Vikram Seth... [more]
Anthropologists once studied people who eat each other. Now the anthropologists eat each other. They're making a meal of Napoleon Chagnon... [more, plus response]
Twenty ways the world could end: asteroid impact, giant solar flare, global war, robots run amok, you wake up and, like wow, it was all a dream... [more]
Why do the rich work so hard getting richer if it isn't making them happier and maybe even makes a few crazier? Robert Wright wonders... [more]
Thomas Bayes's work on stats has altered our notions of evidence and cause over the last ten years. Not bad for an 18th-century minister... [more]
Ethnomathematics is just math from a cultural point of view. But critics fear it means "so long to Euclid, and good-bye to Pythagoras"... [more]
Why do we grow old and die? The human life-span has shot up over the past century, despite our ignorance of the underlying biochemistry... [more]
Combine the political rage of a Seattle protester with the cultural despair of Hilton Kramer, and you have Morris Berman... [more]
Not only did George Orwell get the politics and morals of his century right, he did so unaided, says Chris Hitchens... [more] ... [still more]
Onassis and Callas: like bad opera, this story of their dark, sad fate is laborious without being exhilarating... [more]
Kazuo Ishiguro drifts between a sense that childhood is lost and a sense that childhood is something we rediscover all too often... [more]
In her latest collection of short stories, Alice Walker inserts her political views with all the subtlety of a hurled brick... [more]
Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza says that human history, traced through language, matches human history, traced through genes... [more] ... [more]
Freud's therapies often left his patients' emotional lives untouched. His saving graces were humor and intelligence... [more]
Genius with a dirty mind. How could the composer of Don Giovanni or the great G minor Symphony write letters so vulgar?... [more] ... [more]
Bob Dylan saved pop music by showing that rock is capable of chronicling more than dancing, driving, and making out... [more]
Politicians, academics, and judges hold so many bad ideas about poverty, responsibility, and race. It's bad news for all of us... [more]
A cold, nervy, brittle egoist, with opinions rather than instinct, Virginia Woolf's views on war and her feminism were at best chaotic... [more]
How pretty it would be to think bribes and corruption happen only in communist countries. Ha Jin shows us life's not so simple... [more]
Bertrand Russell was all for humility, socialism, and science. But he suffered from vanity, loneliness, and a fear of madness... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
William Lloyd Garrison comes to life in one of the most realistic, authentic bios anyone has had the pleasure to read... [more]
It was fighting to the death that appealed to Hitler, not victory. The only peace that for him was the peace of the grave... [more]
Roger Scruton's view of England is an attempt to dignify dogma and prejudice with long words and circular logic... [more]. In his own words.
Just before her scheduled lobotomy, Janet Frame won her nation's highest literary award. They decided to put off the surgery... [more] ... [more]
Queen Victoria once asked a comic actor to show how he "did" her. "Very funny," she pronounced when he'd finished. "Don't ever do it again"... [more]
How did Sydney, a city not noted even in Australia for elegance or charm, manage to snare that beautiful Opera House?... [more]
The grand, sensational, and often grandiose genre that Hector Berlioz made his signature style also propped up his self-image... [more]
Because of his views on big time athletics and Bobby Knight, Murray Sperber has been vilified. But it hasn't shut him up... [more] ... [in his own words]
For Kingsley Amis, it was hard to tell the difference between making an adult stand for freedom and mere adolescent ego-indulgence... [more]
Most of the languages of the world will vanish in the next hundred years. Do we need to cultivate more biolinguistic diversity?... [more] Hubert Burda knows the cultural and business models of Germany's postwar success are obsolete. Germans are hardware people trying to make it in a software world... [more]
For an English Ph.D. at Yale, liking literature is a stage that one grows out of. The critic is far superior to those who actually enjoy reading... [more]
There will be a market for ebooks, but they'll be for gadgeteers who wear calculator watches and ride solar-powered bikes, snorts Dave Eggers... [more] ... [review]
A new era has begun in Serbia, but can those who once backed Milosevic be trusted to help lead the way? Laura Secor wonders... [more]
Retributive justice may come to seem merely quaint someday, as modern science discovers the springs of criminality in genes and chemistry... [more]
At 98, she's a little old lady with a colossal and unforgiving past. Leni Riefenstahl is both proud and ashamed... [more] Jodie Foster's plans.
"People learn from stories in a different way than they learn from generalities. When writing, I start out with jargon and then purge it," says Mary Catherine Bateson... [more]
Hardly a small band making a brave stand against patriarchal schools, many scholars in women's studies are well-situated, influential, and very busy... [more]
Is the American Midwest a rural paradise and Eden? Or a hard place of factory towns and industry? Artists are struggling to paint its proper image... [more]
The flamboyant Oscar Wilde put genius into his life and talent into his work. The reclusive P.G. Wodehouse put it all into his work... [more]
Susan Wise Bauer teaches the work of black authors. She picks up black hitchhikers. Her adopted sister is black. And yet something is adrift in her life... [more]
The period from 1900 to 1928 was a time of storm and deep stress during which Russian literature recaptured its greatest heights, wrote Isaiah Berlin... [more]
For a lone crusader, the Web once promised a return to the days of muckraking. But today's Net types ruined all that with their business models... [more]
Martin Heidegger infuses the lexicon of rap music. Hiphop stars are "within the world," never rapping or observing from a distance... [more]
Since Alain Ducasse opened his New York restaurant in June, it's been scorned by food critics. They're guilty of truculent ignorance, says Steven Shaw... [more]
Shakespeare still unsettles the best of critics. His challenges to liberalism, democracy, and equality have remained radioactive, says Adam Kirsch... [more]
Alan Cabal didn't used to think much of Nietzsche, or Jimmy Buffett. Now it all makes sense. Women are easy. He'll pack a .45 and learn French... [offense advisory]
Cartoonist Ben Katchor is in touch with the seedy world of today's underground, as well as the Jewish streets of New York in the 1910s... [more]
Author Hubert Selby, Jr. thinks of himself as a "scream looking for a mouth." He is the literary godfather of the inner demon... [more]
The fall of communism is a story that needs to be told properly. It wasn't about the free flow of capital, but rather the free flow of information... [more]
Culture warrior Lynne Cheney is also a feminist who uses popular literary genres to wrestle with serious ethical and political issues, says Elaine Showalter... [more] ... [still more]
The rock band Radiohead is now poised to be the one brand and logo that might possibly win over the anti-brand, anti-logo generation... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
How stunning that the universe, for all its complex diversity, can be described with precision and power by a small number of equations... [more]
Democrats should let the GOP groan on about rapper Eminem. Parents may be upset, but they don't believe politicians are going to do anything about it... [more]
Want equality? Then let's use a lottery to elect leaders and manage society, says Alan Ryan. The ballot box offers only the most feeble kind of equality... [more]
Why did Friedrich Hayek, who spent his life studying politics and economics, end his career with a reflection on religion and tradition?... [more]
It's easy to poke fun at Oprah's book club, but her impact on the reading habits of the English speaking world rivals that of Samuel Johnson ... [more]
Cybernetic eschatology is the label Jaron Lanier gives to our newest totalizing ideology. As with Marxism, it could cause the suffering of millions... [more]
The deepest and perhaps sole taboo that yet remains on freedom of speech in the US is any criticism of the press, says Renata Adler... [more]
Pity the poor nation-state: too small to compete in a global economy, too big to handle its domestic problems. But it's here to stay... [more]
Provincial life is dead. As we laud the end of its repressive conformity, let's not forget the passing of security, self-reliance, and rootedness... [more]
Central Europe groans under the weight, not of its history, but of its distorting national myths. The same goes for Greece... [more]
Why do memoirs about J.D. Salinger so enrage people, while other authors are remembered with impunity? Judith Shulevitz asks... [more]
Salman Rushdie has left London? Good riddance, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown... [more] London just doesn't spur the imagination, Rushdie explains.
Trying to separate the roles played by nature and nurture is like trying to separate the roles played by length and width in shaping a rectangle... [more]
Scientists now tell us we deteriorate from birth. We fail to fulfil our embryonic potential. But some of us knew that already, from personal experience... [more]
If a novel is to have no plot, says Emily Barton, it must still carry the reader along. Mere moments of fine writing may not always cut it... [more]
David Brooks skewers the foibles of intellectual life, yet concludes that it's even better today than it was in the past... [more]
Ten books and ninety articles on Arthur Rimbaud appear yearly. A century after his death, one in five French schoolboys identifies with him... [more] ... [yet more]
Latin American sociologists write huge tomes that consist of nothing but stats showing disparities of wealth, followed by, "See?"... [more]
Leon Wieseltier is right when he says that what makes Lionel Trilling endure is his commitment to the intellect... [more] ... [yet more]
The law of Nobrow is simple: "the best that is known and thought" is long gone, and what rules is the Buzz... [more]
A spectacle of people making more than ever, at the same time being more broke than ever, is the measure of our age, says Rick Perlstein... [more]
When Kazuo Ishiguro's pitch perfect style gives way to plot, it's like the Creamsicle has fallen off and you're left holding the stick... [more] .... [still more]
Gilbert Bland is a map slasher, a man guilty of the closest thing to rape that a library can experience... [more]
When Princess Eugénie decided that mauve matched her eyes, all of Paris went mad for the new color. Then Queen Victoria wore it... [more]
As memoirist, Margaret Salinger is, quite frankly, no Salinger. Much of her hatchet job on Dad is tedious reading... [more]
New Labour, Oasis, Damien Hirst, and the Diana cult. What's common to all these irritants? Ultra-democracy, says George Walden... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
Arguing the World takes us back to a vivid time when debates were essential, passions fierce, and intellects first-rate... [more]
Was Richard Nixon far worse as both man and president than we ever imagined? John Dean is made to wonder... [more]. Did Nixon have a drug problem?
David Stove's notion of reason is austere and pessimistic: the universal madness of the human race is a fact... [more]
Errol Flynn, bad actor and worse chap, laid everything, of every sex, within sight. By page 57 of this new bio, he's got VD for the third time... [more]
Truth may be strange, but fiction can be freer and more vivid, at least in the hands of a skilled writer like Stephen Harrigan... [more]
Bosie is remembered mostly as Oscar Wilde's lover, but he had a later career as an editor, litigant, jailbird, and poet... [more]
Dave Eggers has a recipe for success: scorn of elders, smug apoliticality, dismissal of race issues, messianic leanings, stylized bitterness... [more]
Clone Jesus Christ? The DNA and the technology are there, says a California outfit. So let's get this Second Coming on the road... [more]
Raped or not, Andrea Dworkin is hurting. But sympathy for her pain cannot obscure an ugly lesson behind her story... [more]
Did Jean-Paul Sartre profit from the wartime dismissal of a Jewish instructor — none other than Alfred Dreyfus's great-nephew?... [more]
James Lovelock was the man who first saw the biosphere as an organism: Gaia. Now he's back with a shocking message for the world's Greens... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
Did scientists start a deadly epidemic among the Yanomami as an experiment, or is the charge merely a politically correct smear?... [more]. Prof. Chagnon's response.
True art is hard to grasp, and takes time to understand. Faux art is just coded, so art-world insiders can feel smug and superior... [more]
Americans are wildly out of sync with the opinions of their elected leaders on the drug war. Some deep-pocket libertarians are hoping to exploit this gap... [more]
When Hitler left the room, it was as if some essential element was suddenly missing: electricity, oxygen, an awareness of being alive... [more]
Julian Barnes's persnickety Oxbridge wit declares, "I am idle, well-read, and have esoteric but marvelous trivia at my fingertips"... [more]
Twice the work, half the pay, and no one can recall your name: who would ever want to a career as a piano accompanist? ... [more]
Has America's reduction in crime come at too great a cost in liberty? And how does race affect whose liberties are violated?... [more]
A new study suggests that Arts & Letters Daily readers live longer, are less likely to suffer senile dementia than hoi polloi... [more]
Preethi Nair owes heaps to her alter ego, Pru Menon, a fictitious PR exec whom she concocted to get her first novel published... [more]
When you write a biography of Gore Vidal, you get to know him well. You discover, for example, his talent for a nice literary spat. With you... [more] ... [more]
Judy Blume is the most banned author in the US. "It's about fear," she explains... [more]. Nonsense, says Kathryn Lopez: you want passages like this in a children's library?
Consider a black college prof, says John McWhorter, who sits in a trendy restaurant emoting, between forkfuls of gourmet pasta, about how oppressed he is... [more]
Evangelicals rank dead last among believers in terms of intellectual stature, says Alan Wolfe. But that's beginning to change... [more] ... Judith Shulevitz's view.
New York's latest crop of literary journals is hip, young, and stylishly packaged, with a mix of famous names and diamonds in the rough... [more]
He died in the electric chair with flames and smoke rising over his head, nodding back and forth as they switched the power on and off... [more]
Shall I compare thee to a sperm whale, sperm? Thou art more tiny and more resolute. And naught diverts thy uterine commute... [more]
The return of Proust? In one little corner of our cultural Balkans, the magus of the cork-lined room is making his presence felt... [more] ... [earlier story] ... [still more]
As literature slowly drifts from imaginative sympathy toward the cold consolation of fact, many novelists prefer to dabble in journalism... [more]
Once upon a time, Harvard stood for excellence. These days it stands for advancement: it's not a place for learning, but a club for rather more pragmatic and vulgar values... [more]
With his love for vodka and his courteous recall of strangers' names, Clement Greenberg might have made a better bartender, since few could stand his art criticism... [more]
Brenda Maddox has a few rules for her dinner table: don't pray, vomit, talk about cholesterol, your air miles, or discuss e-anything... [more]
The time has come to take video games seriously as a new and different art form to shape the aesthetics of the coming century... [more]
Every writer must decide whether to be an aesthete or a prophet. Martin Amis needs to realize that he is only an aesthete, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft... [more]
Being taken seriously by someone else is like rocket fuel for the spirit, but taking yourself too seriously is like a poison, says Hugh MacKay... [more]
The "Old Man" loves his sports and swills beer; he's inarticulate and unfeeling. The New Man? Oh, you know: more like Tony Blair... [more]
Sex is at once the most lying and truthful, most alienating and intimate, most fantastic and real thing we do, says Wendy Doniger... [more]
Frog-voiced Leonard Cohen has done it all: Prozac, psychedelia, grad school, Scientology, India, the Talmud, You Are My Sunshine... [more]
People have the ridiculous idea that if you don't like the "ideological implications" of a science, then you're free to reject it, says Helena Cronin... [more]
"What have you done for me lately?" That's the question that Americans ask today of religion and politics alike, writes Alan Wolfe... [more]
Music on the Internet isn't all pop tracks courtesy of Napster. There's Viktoria Mullova's sublime Bach Chaconne, or Anner Bylsma's dramatic Cello Suites... [more, with audio links]
Thomas Kuhn took a dazzling yet simple idea and tossed it into epistemic stew that was seasoned to almost everyone's taste... [more] ... [still more]
Boys need to be tamed and guided, to be sure, but it's in no one's interests that they be feminized, argues Christina Hoff Sommers... [more]
When weaker, less erudite minds than Edward Said's imitate his political approach to literary studies, the results are often shallow... [more]
The decline of higher ed owes much to the 1970s, that age of grade inflation, lax discipline, and King Kong replacing King Lear in the classroom... [more]
Ronald Dworkin's liberalism is rather too smooth, too slick, and too elusive for its own good, says Richard Epstein... [more]
Norman Finkelstein wants to let Holocaust victims "rest in peace." His own rage and dogma will hardly help that... [more] ... interview.
Hegel was a genius, and so much the worse for philosophy. For when it comes to writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius... [more]
Václav Havel drinks, smokes, is fat and conceited, and can't work a stick shift. Worst of all, he prefers whiskey to his own biographer... [more]
Joyce Johnson was 21 when she fell for Jack Kerouac. With his brilliant, erratic character, she knew loving him would be hard... [more]
The woozy subjectivity of art, the cold neutrality of science: different standards apply. Or do they? There is, we are told, a new fusion of the two... [more]
Boys are such a worry. They like action, competition, rough play. They don't talk enough about their feelings. Can't someone rescue them from masculinity?... [more]
What makes a great Warhol painting great? It's both tragic and sublime. A Jasper Johns? It changes our pictorial syntax. A Richter?... [more]
Academic historians no longer write the most widely read histories of America, nor do they produce the freshest historical theories... [more]
"What I'm doing is precisely what Shakespeare was doing in his age," explains Gore Vidal, a man never praised for his humility... [more]
Israel's future is not made safer by arm-twisting, boycotts, and unjust humiliation of European states in the pursuit of Holocaust reparations... [more]
"I am the star of French literature," slurred literary sensation Michel Houellebecq, drunk. "How would you like to be in my erotic film?"... [more]
Is the e-book a way to use the backlist to enrich publishers, or will they lose gems of content in the process? And what do authors get?... [more]
Black and white have played a big part in Derek Walcott's life, but it's the colors in between that have defined the man... [more] ... [yet more] ... John Carey's review.
The logic of capital, Karl Marx said, was to create a world market and propel science and social progress. Was he a prophet of globalization?... [more]
NewsWatch is back, and begins its new life with Trevor Butterworth's look at Renata Adler, a writer oddly immune to her own critical insights... [more]
Tunku Varadarajan recalls the vulgar, gaudy grief that swept Britain three years ago on the death of a banal and empty-headed woman... [more]. She was a tool of the elites, says George Walden.
Playful, oracular, and Gallic, French theory says language bears no fixed relation to the world. Austere, rigorous, and Teutonic, modern logic agrees... [more]
From savage distortions to the most fragile and gentle rendering of the human face, Picasso showed himself perhaps the greatest sculptor of his time... [more]
When Elizabeth Abbott researched A History of Celibacy, she was not celibate. After all, you don't need to kill to write about murder. And yet... [more]
Matthew Mirapaul's arts@large column gave the most savvy coverage of the new world of Internet art available anywhere. Why was it killed?... [more]
Armchair evil: George Bernard Shaw liked Stalin more than Hitler, or even Mussolini. Who cares if millions die, so long as the cause is worthy? ... [more]
Usually disappointed by performing arts events, Wendy Lesser was struck three times in a row by the aesthetic equivalent of lightning... [more]
Few sports have an image and a reality as far apart as fox hunting does. It's not pomp and privilege; it's an inner struggle against dashed hopes... [more]
If you look at it closely, the sequenced genome does not support the idea that there are simple recipes for people. Indeed, it erodes it... [more]
Criminologists, the New York Times, activists, and law professors all have spun a distorted history of New York's crime revolution... [more]
Whatever you made of his sex, magic, and "vile practices," Aleister Crowley had a gift for getting mentioned in other people's novels... [more]
Leo Strauss has been viewed as everything from a dogmatic theocrat to a closet Nietzschean. It's time for a correction... [more]
The profoundly human voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories is a joy and a blessing -- fragments of an American sublime... [more]
When Zadie Smith is writing well, she is capable of a great deal. But she can also descend into cartoonishness... [more]
Harold Bloom was once a good literary critic. He was never right, but at least he was original, says Terry Eagleton... [more] ... [profile]
Paris is no longer cheap enough to be a movable feast. Manhattan is for the young of wealthy parents. What would the Beats do today?... [more]
Four new books, countless new recordings: is there such a thing as too much Mahler? If so, it is upon us... [more]
Cross-dressing, scandalous novels, love affairs: George Sand wrote what she lived and lived what she wrote... [more]
The House of Gucci is a nonfiction book, so you can't blame the writer for the melodramatic plot turns... [more]
Confession is a practice encouraged by police, priests, psychoanalysts, talk show hosts, and the critics of President Clinton... [more]
The Romans thought it was good to watch people being killed. Not just good as public entertainment, but that it made morally better Romans... [more]
Biographers enjoy a giddy sense of power. They hobnob with the great, joining in dinner parties they'd never have been invited to in real life... [more]
Why does Vermont have more writers per capita than any other state? Cheap overheads and a cool climate, plus an excess dose of literary myth... [more]
What might it take at last to get Robert Hughes to become a US citizen? The answer is, seven months back in Australia... [more]
Evolutionary Psychology: for many it's the way forward in the study of the mind, while others distrust it. Now they can all get together... [more]
Friedrich Nietzsche's whole point is to make you believe that you are a superior being... [more]. N is for Nietzsche, Nazis, Neuroses, Nihilism.
A well-meaning person asked Ruth Tapia very slowly, "Do you speak-ee English?" "No," she shot back, "I speak English"... [more]
How quaint, noble, and pitiful that we so yearn for the politician who can make a grand and eloquent speech, writes Michael Wolff ... [more]
A farmer gawks at rows of corn plants: not only are kernels of corn growing in the ears, but granules of plastic are sprouting in the stalks... [more]
"It was perhaps because I knew Penelope Fitzgerald as a teacher that I took as long as I did to see how very good her novels were," says AS Byatt... [more]
In his trumpet solos, Louis Armstrong asserted an Olympian identity that thrilled and galvanized his culture, and started something unstoppable... [more]
One-Dimensional Man meets 60 Minutes: TV producer Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino in The Insider, was Herbert Marcuse's student... [more]
The year: 2000. The place: Earth, a desolate planet, its resources depleted. Remember this? It's how the Left twenty years ago imagined the world today... [more] But remember too: Stephen Moore has goofed with his own predictions.
The sad saga of the Cherokee Indians shows that judicial decisions alone are not enough to bring about the rule of law, says Justice Stephen Breyer... [more]
"There isn't too much originality there beyond the books I translated," says Gregory Rabassa about the later work of Gabriel García Márquez... [more]
Norman Mailer fails to see how stupid and wrong he was to confuse the terrifically good time he had in the sixties with universal sexual progress... [more]
American Psycho is a satirical reflection on the art of the monologue, yet few of its original critics saw it as other than a deadpan slasher novel... [more]
Jeffrey Rosen argues that privacy in America is under grave threat, but his case rests entirely on anecdotes and solemn pronouncements... [more]
"Why does she have to be so god damned snooty?" asked one of Mary McCarthy's friends. "Is she God or something?"... [more]
Steven Pinker says that his theory of language is not "a sappy attempt to get everyone to make nice and play together"... [more]
Given two things that look alike, one of them art and the other a plain object, what's the difference? This is Arthur Danto's obsession... [more]
Everything distinctive about the US made socialism a hard sell. Not to mention the pigheadedness of the American Socialists... [more]
The pressure to be a happy member of Disney's town of Celebration is enormous. Residents watch each other like hawks... [more]
The many eminent graduates of Yale's American Studies program have spent the last half-century turning Old West "traditions" inside out... [more]
Strung out on a rich stew of dope and overwork, Anthony Bourdain and his sous-chefs re-enact the opening scene of Apocalypse Now... [more]
Greenwich Village bohemians were easy to parody: tin pot revolutionaries, H.L. Mencken called them. Still, at their best... [more]
To consider black culture as an entity apart from a so-called mainstream is self-defeating and illogical, argued Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray... [more]
It was a bright new era that welcomed student thugs, academic hucksters, and sheer narcissism: Roger Kimball on the impact of the 1960s... [more]
Shopping can be a bribe, a pastime, a way to trawl for lovers, an entertainment, a form of education or even worship... [more]
The appalling Liberace, that deadly, winking, sniggering, fruit-flavored, chrome-plated, giggling, ice-covered heap of mother love... [more]
Babies are tyrants. They're designed by evolution to be irresistible, and their mothers love them: but only up to a point... [more]
Dave Eggers pastes together a family tragedy, a bachelor-pad comedy, and a magazine-office morality play, and hopes it all sticks... [more]
"Kiss the girl" is a popular game in Kyrgyzstan: a man chases a woman on horseback, trying to catch and kiss her. If he fails, she horsewhips him... [more]
For Slobodan Milosevic, it's scarier than NATO: Otpor, a student movement that favors anarchic street theater and mock soccer matches... [more]
As a boy, Darius Brubeck sat at the feet of jazz greats like Armstrong, Ellington, and Davis. As an adult, he brought American jazz to South Africa... [more]
Guru Rick Haskins offers easy self-help advice: think of yourself as a product to be branded. Some people regard him as a personal savior... [more]
The great British literary editor Diana Athill has at last recorded her lifetime of involvement with lovers, writers, and writers who were lovers... [more] Several apostate urban theorists feel that Los Angeles is less an anomaly than an archetype. In fact, they argue, it's the future of urbanism... [more]
Ventriloquism is vaudeville's last living art form, and it dearly needs to escape the image of a guy with a puppet telling woodpecker jokes... [more]
Every marginalized human group has fought for its liberation. So why not animals? Science, philosophy, and law are all asking that question... [more]
Polish literary critic Jan Kott dreamed of writing a great novel that would register the horror of the human condition in the twentieth century... [more]
Cyber-guru Jaron Lanier predicts computers will soon be asking all the questions that have vexed Western philosophy... [more]
When Mark Twain and U.S. Grant first met, they sat in silence. "Mr. President," Twain said at last, "I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?"... [more]
It's clearly unethical to probe, prod, or palpate human research subjects without proper oversight. But what if you just want to talk with them?... [more]
Literary darling Dave Eggers is launching a book publishing effort under the title McSweeney's Books. It could mean a lot to young writers... [more]
Hugh Hefner's support for liberal causes in the sixties brought him into the world of politics. So why is he now being attacked by the left?... [more]
If Al Gore wins the election, will Martin Peretz sell The New Republic? Will Peretz want to keep a magazine that will have to criticize his dear friend?... [more]
Harlequin is the McDonald's of popular publishing. Its romances are cheap, quick, fatty. Billions and billions are served... [more]
Long before Metallica vs Napster, there was Gilbert and Sullivan vs the sheet music pirates. If anything, back then it was harder for musicians... [more]
Jane Campion's film The Piano won her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. But did she swipe her ideas from an obscure New Zealand novel?... [more]
Chasing a mouse into the depths of his wife's closet, Woody Hochswender discovered her darkest secret: a collection of shoes... [more]
The world's oldest man credits tears, pasta, lamb shank, red wine, and quiet. You see, chaps, we could be happy if they'd just let us alone... [more]
Psychiatry after Freud is like Russia after Marx, writes Paul McHugh. Trying to rehabilitate Freud is as pointless as trying to revive to communism... [more] ... giving up on therapy.
There was a time when any decent magazine editor would protect his star writers from making fools of themselves. Now, to sell a few more copies, Harper's is willing... [more]
The rhetoric of cultural genocide treats the survival of small cultures as an absolute good. Is it? What about people, and their life choices?... [more]
Thomas Babington Macaulay saw liberty as built up over long agonies like a mass of scar tissue, abuse by abuse and resistance by resistance, says Walter Olson... [more]
When a nation replaces the rule of law with rule by lawyers, the only ones who really win are the lawyers. Consider Erin Brockovich... [more] ... earlier story.
The ancients thought the good life started with the material life. And right they were: Things 'R' Us is a slogan for freedom and democracy... [more]
When a poet determines to write coherently and fails, the result is an accident. When the poem is meaningless on purpose, you know you're reading a Language Poet... [more]
William T. Vollmann is cheerfully pro-death. He's for capital punishment, suicide, and voluntary euthanasia. Photos of vivisected frogs don't bother him... [more]
Condemned forever to feeling inadequate and under-read, the modern book-lover visits a large bookshop as much in despair as exhilaration... [more]
Two photographers took a decade in Africa to record a world soon to be lost. Some book reviews need words; here, pictures are enough... [more]
Nymphomania is a term in need of a euphemism — maybe "love addict." But what's addiction? And how much love is too much?... [more]
While many on the left can only whine or accuse, John B. Judis resists the bitterness to defend intellectual elites in a robust democracy... [more]
Jeffersonian, rather than Pavlovian, democracy might result if television could stir itself to give us broader, deeper political coverage... [more]
Early restaurant menus were made incomprehensible on purpose. Pigeon à la crapaudine? A delicious kind of sheep disease... [more]
Behavioral economics is making a big impact because it gives us a more vivid and complicated sense of what people want... [more]
President Vaclav Havel was a chubby and awkward child, nicknamed chrobak after a type of cumbersome beetle... [more]
Tall, dark, and beautiful, with a name that a press agent might have invented, Susan Sontag could have been famous even without her brains... [more]
William Randolph Hearst may be called an exuberant juvenile, but that would be a coherent explanation, and for him there was no such thing... [more]
The irascible David Stove was a genius of modern philosophy who combined horse sense with the most nimble reasoning this side of Hume... [more]
Raymond Carver called it "gravy" — to spend his last ten years "alive, sober, working, loving and being loved by a good woman"... [more]
Sir Alec Guinness, the best and most subtle actor the Brits ever gave to the movies, has died at the age of 86... Obits: Guardian ... Times ... NYTimes ... Telegraph memoir
Nijinsky's last dance was for rich doctors, bankers, and their ladies: "Now I will dance you the war," he said, "the war which you did not prevent"... [more]
Purdy and Eggers, Kiefer and Koons, Gore and Dubya. One of these prophets wants us to please get serious; the other says, Lighten up, dude... [more]
The visions, fainting, and frenzy of the St. Vitus dance was an early version of what seems a uniquely modern activity: the rave... [more]
When Touretter Amy Wilensky first noticed her ticcing, "It felt familiar, like my head and neck had practiced the move without telling the rest of me"... [more]
A falsified teaching dossier, death threats, and a hunger strike. Relax, it's just another university tenure review... [more]
American academics look to France for an intellectual high, the rush of radical ideas. Which means they miss today's most interesting French scholars... [more]
While the New Yorker never gave up charm and wit, its later engagement with morality and politics made it shiny, fat, serious, and complacent... [more]
With conscientious workers and a wired governor, Utah shows that Mormons and the Internet go together like vanilla ice cream and hot apple pie... [more]
Chimps regularly use leaves and stems as tools, but can't be taught to flake a flint. There's only one primate that ever achieved that feat... [more]
Seymour Martin Lipset tells us Marx may have been right: the coming of an advanced society follows a logic. But the U.S. shows the logic doesn't lead to socialism... [more]
Dress it in veneers or stuff it with microchips, the piano remains the perfect embodiment of an idea that can't be improved... [more]
Stephen King has excited reader interest in electronic books, but that's only a start... [more]. Random House dips a cautious toe in the e-book pond next year, while a another new e-book publisher is heading straight upmarket.
The world's electricity comes from big, dirty power plants. But Thomas Edison's different vision of power generation is about to change that... [more]
Who, Joseph Epstein wonders, invented the sandwich of bacon, lettuce, and tomato, slathered in mayo? "That person brought much more happiness into the world than any modern poet"... [more]
If you're an Amy, Freya, or Tiffanie, publishers snap you up. If you've the unfortunate name of Nicholas and you're on the wrong side of 70, they become rather cool... [more]
For efficient newspaper reading the first rule is: never waste time on stories headlined with may, vow, threat, urge, undertake, or bid... [more]
What's wrong with men? Never enough for the men-in-crisis industry, which wants to transform men into sniveling victims, just like women, children, and pets... [more] ... [yet more] ... [still more]
When people hear their own religion advocated by someone who crudely and literally believes it, they become uneasy, says Christopher Hitchens... [more]
The global-warming debate is by nature a question of science, and yet the combatants tend to be polarized along clear political lines... [more]
Walter Benjamin's genius lay in his ability to balance the mystical and the Marxist in an open philosophy of the future, writes Declan Kiberd... [more]
September 10, 2000 is the day Julian West awakes from his long nap in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. It's well worth revisiting the book today... [more]
News flash: A jury has ordered Hershey's to pay obese Americans $135 billion. "Verdict sends a clear message to Big Chocolate." Company knowingly added nuts... [more]
Scholarly publishing has hit a new low with a professor's naïve, confused advocacy of psychic hokum... [more]
Julian Barnes wears his brilliant, throwaway cleverness out in the open, like a vibrant rose on his lapel... [more] ... [still more]... [third view] ... [profile].
Joshua Freeman writes in the new labor history style. From the dry world of trade unions, he opens onto a richly layered urban milieu... [more]
Richard Powers has a basic mistrust of technology, but his worries never overcome his genuine curiosity about it... [more]
Do assassinations make much of a difference in history? For Gandhi, Malcolm X, Yitzhak Rabin: no. But for Caesar, Lincoln, and MLK, Jr... [more]
Logos, brands, marketing: tools of mind control? Hardly. It's the almighty consumer who turns brands into superstars or casts them into the gutter... [more]
A global free market is good for rich people everywhere, good for poor people in poor countries, but bad for poor people in rich ones... [more]
Preserving perfect English is a lost cause. So what? What truly noble quest is not a lost cause?... [more]
There's much to be said for drinking songs. Songsters who drink are quite another matter. Take Modest Mussorgsky... [more]
The history of restaurants can make delicious reading, but not if it's served up in the empty, jargonized manner of cultural studies, says John Carey... [more]
Pale imitators and feeble sequel writers won't leave Jane Austen alone. They should. She's not a mouthpiece for today's sexual politics... [more]
The Telegraph calls it the most intellectually nutritious search engine yet devised, while Brill's Best of the Web has named it the Most Highbrow Site on the Internet. Naturally, it's...
Aline Baehler's scholarship made her an unusual choice for Vanderbilt, but she was also hired without the consent of her department's leading light... [more]
At a time when most young pianists worked on bloodless technique, Van Cliburn was an instinctive, honest, ardent musician... [more]
"The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency: 1947 to 1969" was the title of Al Gore's undergrad thesis. Could be all too prophetic... [more]
Casanova's dictum may be old advice, but it seldom fails: "Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty"... [more]
The OED is looking for a few good slang words. For the first time in its austere history, it's combing through Marvel Comics, Seinfeld, and South Park... [more]
Fearsome critic, teacher, and linguist, the late poet A.D. Hope was a ringing voice in the creation of post-war Australian culture... [more]
Suspicions about hundreds of van Gogh fakes have spawned a cottage industry of van Gogh experts. Few of them agree on very much... [more]
Arthur Miller is a great writer, but as a political thinker he is confused and as an historian plainly can't get his facts right, says Ronald Radosh... [more]
Larry King leans toward his guest, Adolf Hitler, and asks, "Why did you do it?" "Whooo boy!" exclaims the media-savvy Führer. "The $64,000 question!"... [more]
George W. Bush would be the first president with an MBA. Not a bright bulb, but we like him 'cause he's the guy who brings beer to the party, says Michael Wolff... [more]
Like ripples on a deep and turbulent pool, calculation and other feats of thought are possible only when the chaos is quelled, says Hans Moravec... [more]
Will print culture values fade into the past? Hardly. The Web is a neat new delivery device, but it leaves facts and credibility as important as ever to journalism... [more]
Curse of the Chinese menu: our lives as consumers are beset with a numbing variety of choices. Except that not to choose would be far worse... [more]
Does Jhumpa Lahiri have a tunnel vision of India, as her critics charge? Maybe, she replies, but only because her life in India was tunnel-like... [more]
Are you a British subject with a theatrical background? If so, you may qualify to play Hollywood's next sneering, urbane Euro-villain... [more]
Geoff Dyer has reader's block. Call it the Mir Syndrome, after the cosmonaut who gave up reading in order to gaze out of the window... [more]
What's known to all is scarcely worth knowing: salacious gossip, like all luxuries, is valuable only if it's exclusive, says gossip lover Susannah Herbert... [more]
The Human Stain betrays the hopes of Roth's own American Pastoral more than Bellow's Ravelstein betrays Alan Bloom, says Norman Podhoretz... [more]
If Norman Rockwell falls short of the art's highest reach, his realism and wit are enough to allow comparison with Winslow Homer and Honoré Daumier... [more]
Things are getting ominous when a guy can't have a good time by simply popping a Bud and watching his neighbor mow his lawn... [more]
Kant's ethics insists that we treat every person as an end, not a means. Does this place prostitution beyond the pale for a Kantian? Maybe not... [more]
Has Dave Eggers sold out? Has he squandered his cred in his pursuit of ever newer projects and plans, no matter how corny or stupid?... [more]
Advertising is a kind of secular religion, our chief maker of meaning today. So does that mean it's destroying society, or holding it together?... [more]
Barbara Kruger's sarcasm is cheap, her slogans smug and sophomoric, her politics shallow, provincial, and suffused with know-it-all-itis, writes Judith Shulevitz... [more]
Descartes walks into a bar. "Bonjour Réné, how about a beer?" The philosopher replies, "I think not," and promptly disappears... [more]
Chanteuse and literary butterfly Marie Corelli brought out the first of her immensely popular romances when she was 31 — or 17, if you believe her account... [more]
Hegel's Phenomenology is a work whose energy and originality compare with the summits of 19th century literature and music... [more]
The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel is the kind of rich and multilayered book that opens doors on the world... [more]
Is Das Kapital merely a vast Gothic shaggy-dog story, a utopian satire? Is Marx nothing but a Victorian melodramatist?... [more]
In her Disneyfied memoir of the 1960s, Sheila Rowbotham tries to redeem the dream from a scornful world that's lost its capacity to dream... [more]
Denis Johnson has created yet another narrator in a state of weary stupor. Only this time it's not an addict, it's a professor... [more]
If Hilary Putnam wants to attack cognitive science he should show that its so-called truths are spurious. But that would be hard work... [more]
"This is an amazing book. The reader can't help but offer up a prayerful Thank you, God, that human beings still have the audacity to write like this"... [more]
Woody Allen's Alvy Singer may be a whiny jerk in Manhattan, but he's a veritable philosophe on the Champs-Elysées... [more]
Shakespeare was a mortal writer, says Frank Kermode, prey to flats and sharps. Whole plays can be tedious or unconvincing... [more]
Forced to take speech lessons for his lisp, David Sedaris bought a pocket Thesaurus and memorized an s-free vocabulary... [more]
Steinbeck, Wallis, Brinkley, and others found inspiration on Route 66, that long stretch of asphalt once called the Main Street of America... [more]
Yes, Harry Potter promotes Satan and molds young killers, but he's not all evil. He's also against welfare programs and for Ayn Rand... [more]
Historian Robert Darnton has been drinking the Kool-Aid: he's now a true believer in the Web's power to transform academic publishing... [more]
Judy Garland relished her gay fans and had visions of them singing Over the Rainbow at her funeral. Too bad she kept falling in love with gay men... [more]
Karl Kraus was the Platonic ideal of the Jewish journalist in German literary culture. Today there's but one man to fill the vacuum he left... [more]
Romeo and Juliet are supposed to kiss. But in Iran, Romeo has to settle for brushing his cheek gently with the back of Juliet's fingers... [more]
Dance perfectly suited the innate rhythmic thrust of Stravinsky's musical temper, just as the cultural climate of prewar Paris suited his antiromantic streak... [more]
Most ecologists stridently oppose introducing "non-native" species into ecosystems. But can ecology really tell us which landscapes are "better" than others?... [more]
How many dollars per bar? A sombre reading of Brahms' 4th may become even more sobering when you realize that the conductor's fee was $100,000... [more]
Physicist Julian Barbour thinks time does not exist. Nor does motion. It's a feeling you may know if you sat through Eyes Wide Shut... [more]
Paul Virilio ponders Larry Flynt, mainstream pornographer: can the world of the night be dragged into the light and still be itself?... [more]
If Germany were to erect its own Statue of Liberty, it might read: "Give me your smart, your under-30s, your qualified masses yearning for a high income"... [more]
South Africa's Truth Commission has been chided for "trading truth for justice." But to demand justice only because it heals or deters is to misunderstand it... [more]
How does one compute the odds of an intellectual breakthrough? Faber and Faber, after all, has made a bet against the solution of Goldbach's conjecture... [more]
We look at paintings hoping to find some secret, says John Berger. A secret not about art, but about life, a secret words cannot locate... [more]
Be whole. Be true. Learn to trust yourself. Oprah Winfrey's magazine is a warm spit bath of affirmation, says Marjorie Williams... [more]
The Unplinthable Bede. Who'll occupy that vacant space for one more statue in Trafalgar Square? Surely not a Christian exponent of rational history... [more]
A psychiatrist was once asked about Thomas Szasz. "Oh, he's crazy!" he said, thus proving Szasz's point that we use "mental illness" to stigmatize our enemies... [more]
Religion is selfish, blinkered, and immoral, says A.C. Grayling. Consider the real acts and values of the vast Judaeo-Christian moral tradition... [more]
Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe feels that there has never been a humanism in Japan. In France and America, there have been periods of it... [more]
Yes, Americans do lack a sense of irony, says Michael Kelly. French intellectuals, the British upper classes, they're ironic. So where's it gotten them?... [more]
Frank Schirrmacher argues that technophobic Europe should try to be more than just a source for the software of ego crisis, identity loss, despair, and melancholy... [more]
We should allow a little space for paranoia in our lives, says Oliver Stone. Paranoia is healthy precisely because, after all, conspiracy never sleeps... [more]
That Claus von Bulow once had a small (unpaid) role in the movie industry is for him yet another reason for living in London... [scroll down]
Critics claim Southern women writers have two feet planted on the front porch. But are they overlooking a lush literary tradition of bravura and grotesquerie?... [more]
The Dianafication of politics: Tony Blair's trembling lip and breaking voice mask the deep emptiness of a talented actor, says Melanie Phillips... [more]
Has irony clogged the arteries of mature debate by forging an easy alliance with ignorance? Or is it an elegant means for the impotent to flatter themselves?... [more]
Today's magazines of ideas are funded like 18th century string quartets, says Lewis Lapham. Instead of Esterházy, though, it's Murdoch or Newhouse... [more]
It's My Party confronts a question that has baffled mankind down through the ages: why are some people loyal Republicans?... [more]
The Holocaust Industry? A maverick academic who has clashed fiercely with his fellow Jews is set to ignite a huge row... [more]. Norman Finkelstein in his own words, and still more from a Holocaust survivor. Also: Jan Karski obituary. The Telegraph calls Finkelstein's book exploitation and says the Guardian should be ashamed of itself. A further review.
In 1991, two scientists created the first web camera to find out without walking downstairs if their coffee pot was empty... [more]
Ulysses S. Grant "had no gait, no station, no manner." But from Belmont to Appomattox, what he did was nothing less than phenomenal... [more]
Evolutionary Psychology's latest crime, claim its enemies, straining hard: it's helped with the tragic dismantling of the welfare state... [more]
An algorithm is the ultimate abstraction. Its use is purely rote, calling for no intelligence or insight, yet what it does is meaningful... [more]
The three great philosophers of German history are Hegel, Schlegel, and Bagel. Alas, no one understands Hegel, no one reads Schlegel, and as for Bagel... [more]
Poet Mark Levine has passed through the postmodern maze. We are wounded, partial, always already guilty machines, he says, but we still need art... [more]
Like Greek tragedy, Mafia lore is a "family based" genre with a high body count, where betrayal and revenge are elevated to high art... [more]
Once upon a time there was an independent gay movement in the US. Then along came the marketeers, the corporates and their ad agencies... [more]
The endless conceptual ramparts that defend Ronald Dworkin's fortress of theory may exhaust even his most sympathetic readers... [more]
Lionel Trilling was a critic and teacher who refused to cultivate disciples, a sorcerer who took no apprentices... [more]
Norman Podhoretz should open his door to an America beyond ideology and egoism, and stop giving patriotism such a small, sad name, says Jim Sleeper... [more]
Salvador Dalí could be such a genial host: "I am going to my room to masturbate before a light lunch, if you would like to come and watch"... [more]
Kerouac and Ginsberg: their picaresque battles with psychic monsters were laced with Blakean delusions of grandeur... [more]
Move over, Bridget Jones. Dude Lit is here, gelded by the girlified rituals of dating and relating, sapped by the can-do spirit of the boom economy... [more] ... [still more]
Christopher Hitchens and Ronald Radosh square off on the Spanish Civil War, which began 64 years ago... [more] Plus: profile of Radosh and original 1936 article on the Franco uprising in the New York Times.
Richard Rorty says religion kills debate, for you can't argue with the pious when God steps into the picture. Just like secular philosophy... [more]
An imaginatively linked Web site should have the beauty of a collage or an art gallery, says Jenny Lyn Bader. Its links should resonate like literary allusions... [more]
Postmodern Nursing. Power, gender, and class may explain its social aspects, but nursing still must be rooted in biological reality... [more]
Lech Walesa, meet Shane. Film posters of Poland have long been one of that country's most politically vivid art forms... [more]
From biting nuns, to Salem witches, to UFOs and the vanishing genitalia of Nigeria, what a scary millennium it's been... [more]
Betrayal of feminism? For a woman corporate battler, weary from the slog up the career ladder, a life of finger painting is infinitely appealing... [more]
Sticky-fingered food writers. It's not the first time that a major cookbook's "old family recipes" have turned out to be, uh, borrowed... [more]
When architect Rem Koolhaas speaks in his vague, jargony way, you wonder what, if anything, he means. Luckily, we can look at his designs... [more]
National Geographic hailed a suspect fossil as the missing link between birds and dinosaurs. Now its editors have dinosaur egg on their faces... [more]
Would you like to be anointed a MacArthur Genius? Some simple rules: be a professor, live in Manhattan, promote a leftoid doomsday theory, avoid libertarians... [more]
Some sugar for your maple syrup? The paintings of Thomas Kinkade have made him very rich. They ought to carry an advisory for diabetics... [more]
Sherman Alexie freely admits he has played the Indian Author angle for all it's worth. "What makes me original is that I'm a rez boy"... [more]
Reliable photo? If it opens when you try, here's an unreliable link to a photo AFP claims is Edward Said throwing stones at Israeli soldiers.
The new economy has spawned a new poetics of labor, where the worker is not despised à la Marx as a commodity, but becomes rather a wretched advertisement... [more]
Child prodigies are common in math and chess. But can we imagine a child prodigy historian or sociologist? Hardly... [more]. Then there are the teenage computer gurus.
"We've got a business plan built around helping people find things they're not looking for." Now, what kind of web site would say a thing like that?... [more]
Behind the Fringe: Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore walked onto a stage in 1960, and Britain was never the same again... [more]
In 1975, film promised one day to become the greatest of all narrative arts, beyond theater, fiction, or painting. In 2000, it's just one more data stream... [more]
Robert Putnam's trendy Bowling Alone theory is rife with errors. Why has it been so praised? asks Garry Wills... [more]. Andrew Sullivan says the theory just gives communitarians another excuse to boss us around.
18th-century London swarmed with whores and pickpockets. Pleasures included street fights, cheap gin, bawdy houses (straight and gay), and public hangings... [more]
The New York Times does not care what anyone says. It will run its stupefying series How Race Is Lived in America every day till it gets a Pulitzer... [parody]
Violent media is good for kids. Fear, greed, rage, hunger for power: these are better experienced through the stories of others... [more]
New York Jewishness was revered in Will Self's family. "Sure, I grew up in north London, but culturally we went to Woody Allen movies"... [more]
Letters of recommendation: sure, they're padded with accolades and peppered with code, but we can get underneath the rhetoric. Alison Schneider shows how... [more]
To forswear marital fidelity is to open yourself up to other ideas about what love is, what desire is, what happiness is, says Jane Smiley... [more]
Do actresses prefer doing nude scenes as blonds? Do directors like blond hair on naked actresses? Such questions make Ray Sawhill's head spin. He's happy... [more]
The Olive Garden restaurant does not present you with food from an actual mom 'n' pop joint. It's rather our idea of their food, if mom and pop had ever perfected it... [more]
Would Marilyn Monroe consent to have her photo taken with HUAC's chairman? If so, they'd likely be willing to cancel Arthur Miller's hearing... [more]
There are huge imbalances, says Martin Amis, in the memory of the West. We joke about the Russian experience in ways we'd never about the Holocaust... [more]
America is littered with the bones of failed utopias, but the Oneida Community stands out for its long life... [more]
Christopher Isherwood's Lost Years is a sad effort, full of intimate anatomical detail and boastful lists of sexual conquests... [more] and yet [more]
Bridget Jones led the charge of sassy, young, urbanite heroines beset with love and diets. But the Chick Lit formula has gone stale... [more]
Biographer Francis Wheen is far too keen on Karl Marx's alcoholic high jinks, his flatulence, and his boil-ridden penis... [more]
Show me a man's tattoo, and I will show you his soul c or at least his criminal record, says Theodore Dalrymple... [more]
Marjorie Garber has written a book so silly, so untroubled by any whiff of a serious idea, as to invite a kind of awe... [more]
James Dickey told tall tales of a debauched life, yarns that made Hemingway look like a florist from the Midwest... [more]
You may disagree with Peter Singer. You may hate him. But you never have any doubt about where he stands, says Ian Hacking... [more]
Patricia Highsmith is a not a writer who criticizes our mores for the sake of a higher morality. She goes after morality itself... [more]
During their brief reign, Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti were the John and Jackie Kennedy of the ancient world... [more]
Do serious writers really live in California? Do they frolic on its white beaches and drive down Pacific Coast Highway?... [more]
Today's pioneers of science are edgy, flashy mavericks, media savvy leaders refusing to be squelched by lack of funds or precedent... [more]
Moralistic critics of urban sprawl need to recognize that suburbia exists because it happily serves some people's needs... [more]
The short story is a minor art form that, in the hands of a very few writers, becomes major art, says Joyce Carol Oates... [more]
The Uninvited tells the amazing tale of William Osunde, who survived hardship by chewing leaves, sucking water from sandy mud, and drinking his own urine... [more]
Trimalchio was the first version of The Great Gatsby. The fit is poor, but its rumpled look can't disguise the muscle of a masterpiece... [more]
Does the Kansas Board of Ed now need to take a vote on teaching Einstein? Members of the radical anti-relativity underground think so... [more]
Oxford University has lost control of its name. It creates overseas students who think they study at Oxford, when it's providing no oversight... [more]
George Price first explained the evolution of altruism. This wasn't just an intellectual puzzle for him, it was the central challenge of his life... [more]
The French Revolution made idols of both Voltaire and Rousseau, champions of freedom against the ancien régime. They loathed each other... [more]
Today's magazine editors can polish blurbs and make cute pop culture references. But they can't edit a long story. Some may have never even read one... [more]
The Bishop of Winchester swings by for dinner. The son of a viscount drops in as well. What is proper etiquette for seating them — and do you really care?... [more]
Fat divas are losing opera roles to slim, inferior singers. Critics worry: "If you want to launch a rocket, you need a big booster"... [more]
The Mullah was asked if any good comes out of America. He thought for a moment. "Candy," he answered finally. "Candy comes from America"... [more]
Call it post-fascism. It finds its niche easily in the new world of global capitalism, but it does so sans Führer, sans one-party rule, sans SA or SS... [more]
Many physicists are upset to see Richard Feynman, brilliant as he was, elevated to the status of Einstein. But no one finds the hype more annoying than Murray Gell-Mann... [more]
Oprah Winfrey has achieved a kind of perfection, slinging truths, half-truths, and outright nonsense to flatter America with its favorite fallacies... [more]
To link literature and science is the main task of the 21st century, argues E.O. Wilson. Truth and artifice must merge their reciprocal powers... [more]
R. Eirik Ott dressed in black, listened to The Cure, smoked clove cigarettes. After years of being taunted, he penned the Wussy Boy Manifesto... [more]
Amartya Sen's economics goes beyond the realm of private consumption out into the real world, where families and friends have claims on us... [more]
Richard Gold teaches juvenile offenders to write poetry. They often prefer to rap, but that's just blowing smoke. He wants to get to the cinders... [more]
It's hard to pin down the precise alchemy by which a bookstore turns good business sense into a valuable civic presence, but Square Books has it... [more]
Plans to publish Ha Jin's Waiting in China have been stymied by the Beijing media, which consider the book part of a U.S. plot to demonize China... [more]
Universities may have been imitating Harvard for too long, trying to excel at everything. Will the thriving schools in the coming century be de-Harvardized?... [more]
David Horowitz once embraced the Black Panthers and socialist revolution. His leftism is gone, but he still sees things in black and white... [more] Plus: Horowitz replies.
The Rosenbach manuscript is a snapshot of Ulysses at an earlier stage of its evolution, a rare glimpse of James Joyce's incredible creativity... [more]
What can you know about a stranger after talking with him for an hour? Perhaps even less than you think, reports Malcolm Gladwell... [more]
Writer Anchee Min grew up in a world turned upside down by ideological enthusiasm, a carnival of terror presided over by Mao Zedong and his wife... [more]
Andrea Dworkin was drugged and raped. "I felt overwhelming grief as if I had died. I felt grief for this sick world. I started hating every day"... [more] Her graphic account of being raped does her -- and us -- no favors, says Catherine Bennett.
Liposuction is the most popular cosmetic surgical procedure in America. But it is also more likely to kill you than a traffic accident... [more]
Cuban sculptor Kcho's 1996 show was picketed by angry exiles who said that any support for a Cuban artist helped the Castro regime... [more]
Alice Neel's provocative, sometimes nude portraits of art world stars like Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg made her a true artist's artist... [more]
If Tina Brown had to assign a piece on herself, how would she do it? "Oh, as a target. As a moving target," she says. "As a major takedown"... [more]
Mayday was not the end of modern protest. Not even the beginning of the end. But it was the sad end of the beginning, mourns Jay Griffiths... [more]
Eadweard Muybridge made his name taking pictures of animals in motion, showing artists a new world of truth... [more]
Yugoslavs are exposed to a volatile mix of pop culture, nationalism, and deliberate sensory overload, a combo that can be called "Balkan Hardcore"... [more]
Intellectual property rights are very much needed, but you don't have to be a communist to worry about fetishizing them, explains Lawrence Lessig... [more]
"Dearest Britney, I hear you've been jousting with the tabs over your alleged breast enhancement. I endured a similar row when I had my teeth straightened. Love, Martin"... [more]
Six of his novels sold three million copies in just twelve years. He once graced the covers of national magazines. It's about time we revived, uh, John Marquand?... [more]
Aleksandar Hemon has been compared to Nabokov and Conrad. "It's absurd," says the first-time author. "It makes no sense for me to be compared to them"... [more]
In England, Benjamin Britten played a role in the nation's musical life that was very similar to the one Aaron Copland played in America... [more]
Everything is up for grabs. The grand sweep of intellectual landscape lies before us, argues David Gelernter, and profound changes are afoot... [more]
"The truck was going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down, jerk?" George Saunders says we use "like" because we need it. It's meaningful... [more]
These days, it's extremely hard to be a man at all connected to a brain. The pathetic state of men's magazines is only the half of it, says Andrew Sullivan... [more]
Neurology and neuroscience have taken over the world of novels, shaping literary form and content in the way that Freud's ideas once did... [more]
The TV show Friends is an entree into the comic world of Shakespeare. Jerry Springer? He brings you closer to Euripides and Greek tragedy... [more]
Is Susan Sontag a plagiarist? Her new book borrows heavily from other sources, yet buries its citations in unusual, furtive places, notes Judith Shulevitz... [more]
Linnaeus hoped to feed the poor of Sweden, and so he tried to grow bananas, coffee, and other tropical imports in frigid Uppsala... [more]
Sam Lipsyte's wry, stripped-down prose captures the addled humanity of his characters -- and smashes a window into their hopelessness... [more]
G.H. Hardy used to boast that his work in math would never be useful. Today, he must be turning in his grave... [more]
Just as white lies are vital to healthy social dealings, flattery moves life along in an efficient and painless way... [more]
Orestes Brownson was a curious 19th century New England weathercock who never wavered in his search for truth... [more]
The Married Man is the latest episode in Edmund White's series of "auto fictions"... [more] Plus: White's nephew has written an ode to his uncle.
Loan sharks, drug dealers, crime lords, kick boxers, and jaded journalists populate Robert Bingham's posthumous debut novel... [more] ... [eulogy]
Thomas Kuhn's famous book was the ideal '60s product. And since he managed to publish it in 1962, his success was assured... [more]
We are merely guests on this planet, living at the indulgence of the maggots, flies, beetles, and cockroaches who will outlive us... [more]
Robert Fogel says we have good public health and a strong economy, but we lack "equity" of "spiritual assets." Whatever could that mean?... [more]
Elizabeth Hardwick's stellar mini bio of Melville is the classiest Cliffs Notes you'll ever find on Moby-Dick and Billy Budd... [more]
The stories in Gig add up to a reproach of the New Economy that Studs Terkel would admire, says Susan Faludi... [more]
The social construction of reality, truth, knowledge, and everything else. Is this a cliché that's run its course? Ian Hacking wonders... [more]
Thirty-eight years after his birth in the murky waters of Dr. No, the celluloid James Bond has become the ageless hero of modern global culture... [more]
Jane Smiley has written ten works of fiction and her latest, Horse Heaven, finally mines her obsession with horses to tell a complex story... [more]
We're all alone out there. We don't meet people like we used to. We don't know our neighbors. We bowl by ourselves... [more]
Liberace capsized gender with little hot pants, flamingo feather capes, and make-up that put him in some strange third sex: "He, She, and It"... [more]
On becoming right-wing scum: one day you begin to think affirmative action isn't fair, and before you know it you've joined the NRA... [more]
They are only too happy to classify themselves as archaic. Günter Grass and Pierre Bourdieu agree they are dinosaurs... [more]
Liberals and conservatives agree that "Third Way" is an empty, abused phrase. But discussion of it is still alive and well, provided you don't call it by name... [more]
Detroit is where the wheels came off the wagon of civilization. It has a derelict beauty that recalls the ruins of antiquity, writes Geoff Dyer... [more]
The Bertelsmann empire hopes that the sleepy little town of Gütersloh will one day be the site of the world's top online media company... [more]
Elijah Muhammad was a "squeaky little man teaching hate." Yet for all his foibles and failures, he did alter the course of black culture and politics... [more]
Betty Friedan's estranged husband has accused her of "a streak of lunacy in her personality" for what he says are false charges of wife abuse... [more]
What do you call a genre of art that has little history and few antecedents? Web artist Miltos Manetas wants to call it "Neen." Neen?... [more]
The discovery of mirror neurons in the brains of monkeys will do for psychology what DNA has done for biology, predicts V.S. Ramachandran... [more]
C. Wright Mills's daughter was only six years old when her father died. But the time she's spent collecting his letters has deepened their relationship... [more]
Carjackers made him strip his clothes. One kicked him in the face. Another shoved a pistol in his mouth. Visiting Kenya isn't what it used to be... [more]
In person, Norman Mailer is a much smaller, cut-price version of the Brooklyn roustabout, the Goliath of sexism, the Beelzebub of vanity we expect... [more]
Was poetry being held hostage, or did the New York Times, Random House, and "America's most popular poet" gang up to bully a small university press?... [more] Update: Bruce Weber replies.
Kurt Weill's model was Mahler, minus nostalgia and bombast. To Mahler's irony and tragic sense Weill added a sharp, bitter aftertaste... [more]
A woman in academia has about 1/50th of a man's chances of getting tenure. The solution? Shove a sock in your pants, says Laurie Essig... [more]
John Leonard says he's like a tribal warrior in the Ramayana, throwing dice, juiced on soma. He wants to tell some stories and brood out loud... [more]
Novelists have always tried to give their work authority by means of whatever tactic seems appropriate to their time, explains E.L. Doctorow... [more]
If poets wrote poems whose titles were anagrams of their names: Toilets by T.S. Eliot; Skinny Domicile by Emily Dickinson; Hen Gonads by... [more and more]
A bill passing quietly through the House of Lords may mean that Brits are now guilty until proven innocent. So why don't they care more?, asks John Naughton... [more]
It's life in the fast lane for a movie critic at Cannes: 16 movies in 5 days. And then into the slow lane for one meal in 5 hours. Roger Ebert explains... [more]
The Best American Poetry of 1999 has set out to eradicate what little remains of the old, valuable distinction between prose and poetry, says Joan Houlihan... [more]
Jacques Barzun's history of Western civilization is bound to go down as a classic — if one day there's still a history for it to go down in... [more]
It's the pampered comfort of our lives that is making us miserable, argues James Dellingpole. That's why we invent illusory threats and dangers for ourselves... [more]
Can nudists wear clothes and still remain nudists? This vexed question divides Europe's largest nudist movement... [more]
Sad news: one of the media sites we've admired the most here at Arts & Letters Daily has gone bust. NewsWatch is no more... [more]
All those dot-com layoffs are a sign of health in the economy, says former Labor Secretary, Robert Reich... [more]. "Robert Reich?", asks Jeremy Lott. What kind of a Left is this?
Will we ever get the full story of T.S. Eliot, the man and the work, as long as his widow controls his estate? Ian Hamilton wonders... [more]
Bob Dylan has made a career out of dropping hints that no one picks up. Just consider the esoterica of "Desolation Row," says Greil Marcus... [more]
A TV talk show calls you just before air time. You're not really sure where Zimbabwe is but, what the hell, you grab the Times and an atlas, and start to cram... [more]
Ten years ago, the idea of a re-born Jewish Forward did not excite Irving Howe. Indeed, it seemed to repel him, recalls Jonathan Rosen... [more]
Scandinavian writers are enjoying a success not known in those chilly, wind swept lands since the days of Henrik Ibsen and Hans Christian Andersen... [more]
Stephen Sondheim is right to scoff at the state of theater today. But he's wrong to think our "recycled" culture is any more recycled than before... [more]
Greek lyric poet Sappho is both a rich mine and a black hole, a space for filling the gaps, connecting the dots... [more]
P.G. Wodehouse, the master of literary sweets, is about to get his just deserts: his entire output in eighty volumes... [more]
Virginia Woolf said a book that needs an introduction is like a table that needs a beer mat jammed under one leg to level it... [more]
Poet James Dickey has been ill served by his son, his literary executor, and his biographer. They simply cannot grasp his genius... [more]
The Surrealists were famous for playing jokes on the public. What a shame that they had no sense of humor about themselves... [more]
Brit Zadie Smith's novel is not an African slave saga. It's about the African as willing migrant to a nation of bad weather and bad food... [more]
The word "Elizabethan" evokes a bewigged, ruffed, and white-faced monster of a queen. But that image may be mere flummery... [more]
Virtual reality is such old news. So why did super savvy Richard Powers make it the theme of his newest novel?... [more]
V.S. Naipaul can visit a country and make the most outlandish, racist, unscholarly, and inaccurate statements -- and still be taken seriously... [more]
Trigger Happy views video games as part of an aesthetic continuum, from ancient art forms to today's cinema and television... [more]
After 150 years, Harper's is still an official organ of the American ruling class, offering it flattery, stimulation, and guilt in equal measure... [more]
Kissing a high-caste Hindu could pose a problem, as J.R. Ackerley found out: "Not on the mouth! You eat meat! You eat meat!"... [more]
"Martin Amis," both narrator and hero of Experience, is easily the most likeable main character so far to have shown up in the Amis canon... [more]
William Randolph Hearst liked to go to costume parties. He was more than a passable yodeler. His favorite dish was rare duck... [more]
The Enlightenment is known for having been rational and reformist, skeptical and secular, French and philosophe. But J.G.A. Pocock has another view... [more]
It's true, ladies: men are slime. But did you ever notice the charming novels, poetry, music, and art they create? Mother Nature wants you to notice... [more]
You might think that Jane Jacobs has at least a minimal grasp of economics, since it is the subject of her newest book. Sadly, she doesn't... [more]
Relativism even in math? Imre Lakatos acted as though he thought so. But then his dishonesty had already been proved in the revolution in Hungary... [more]
Sure, Ravelstein is a roman à clef. But that says nothing about Saul Bellow's artistry, the glad coatings he gives to a terrible world... [more]
The Web is at once a steamy swamp of smut and debauchery, a new Library at Alexandria, and all else in between, says Jonah Goldberg... [more]
You can eat it, drink it, snuff out a blaze with it or dance in it -- perhaps even build a spacecraft with it. Interesting stuff, this foam... [more]
Final Curtain: a chain of theme park cemeteries, with holiday tours, galleries, neon death notices, and the "Dante's Grill" cafe. Is this for real?... [more]
Literary acknowledgments used to be simple: an editor, colleague, assistant, and spouse. Now there's a need to name-drop, to flatter oneself, to self-flagellate... [more]
At 16, Theodore Kaczynski was duped into taking a series of brutal psychological tests. They may have shaped his belief in the evil of science... [more]
Did Ed Daily murder women and children at No Gun Ri? His sensational Korean War atrocity story appears to be a tissue of errors and lies... [more]
Of course it's racist to think that a single intellectual could tell The Truth About Blacks. It'd take at least, say, two or three. Conveniently, they're all at Harvard... [more]
Did Aids originate in the 1950s when a live polio vaccine was introduced to Africa? This often ridiculed theory may just be right, reports Matt Ridley... [more]
Over the course of a year, drivers in America's largest cities spend a week stuck in traffic. The land of car lovers is getting fed up... [more]
Compulsive shopping disorder is a serious disease that strikes millions of women. What luck the drug companies have finally found a cure for it... [more]
Today's lawyers see pro bono services as penance that they pay for serving capitalism. Elite corporate firms thus oblige the left's "entitlements revolution"... [more]
You see them in every coffee shop: nomad writers with laptops. Who are they? What are they typing? Don't they have jobs?... [more]
Big Brother is the hottest TV show in Holland. But when German officials saw it, they declared it a massive violation of their constitution... [more] ... [still more]
The "dark continent" of the soul was Freud's asinine description of female sexuality. Inspired by the success of Viagra, modern science can do better... [more]
Professor Overton was a private man, valued for his quiet, unfaltering loyalty. "But now that he is dead," his closest friend said, "I can speak the truth"... [more]
Prize poet Ruth Stone feels that there is no bad poetry. "There is corny verse, but sentimental slush may mean a lot to some people"... [more]
Look at India if you want to see the danger in using privacy "rights" to advance the cause of women's equality, says Martha Nussbaum... [more]
The traditional French lover who asserts his dominance is gone, castrated by feminism, says Veronique Jullien. So she's founded a school... [more]
Call it literary destiny: the faith that great writing will survive because it has value. But in art as in life, chance is a key factor... [more]
For the Global Soul, who scarfs Big Macs in Bangkok, risotto in Reykjavik, and pho in Philadelphia, home and abroad have become the same, says Pico Iyer... [more]
Libertarians? They are nothing more than conservatives without morals, says a moralistic conservative. Maybe that's a problem, and maybe not... [more]
The life of C. Wright Mills was cut cruelly short, but his restless, engaged, brilliant, and bracing mind still challenges us today, says Todd Gitlin... [more]
Kathryn Hughes got through the 1980s pleased with herself for not using "Zeitgeist" or "creative." Was she caught in a linguistic time warp?... [more]
Socialism is what occurs when French rationalism meets German sentimentality, says Balint Vazsonyi. As for multiculturalism, well... [more]
Edward Said says his single, forlorn meeting with Sartre was a minor episode in a grand life, only worth recalling for its ironies and poignancy... [more]
Great philosophers are obsolete, and it's Max Weber's fault. His vision of rational and valueless social science has taken their place -- for now... [more]
Art stars have ruined the art world. The Cindy Shermans and Julian Schnabels don't make art -- they just offer canny responses to market pressures... [more]
Alfred Russel Wallace, that most unlucky of naturalists, was once thought to be one of the two most important figures in the 19th century... [more]
Mansfield Park's Fanny Price hears faint, distant wailing from a passing slave ship. Hello? What's a slave ship doing in the English Channel?... [more]
Groucho Marx gave up his dream of being a doctor in order to please his Jewish mother. No wonder he developed a sense of humor... [more]
For Deirdre McCloskey, the gush of sympathy is a one-way street. She's transsexual, so it's owed to her. As for her former wife of thirty years... [more]
It's politically quixotic to try to rid human beings of features that are universal among cultures, argues Peter Singer... [more]
Christopher Hitchens grew up with the Amis family. He's read Martin's new memoir and Kingsley's candid letters. Oh, he's been tempted to chime in... [more]
Harold Bloom's practical advice on how to access poetry's "self-help" value is comically lame: "read aloud," "read slowly," "read closely"... [more]
Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project threatens to burst the confines of two covers, to become a three-ring circus of the mind... [more]
If the English, said Samuel Beckett, title a book The Camel, the French will call it The Camel and Love. The Germans? The Absolute Camel... [more]
Actor John Gielgud has died at the age of 96: obit. Flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal is dead at the age of 78: obit.
Vladimir Nabokov simply did not like homosexuals. His own gay brother was a source of shame, confusion, and regret -- as well as literary inspiration... [more]
Publishing? "A bullshit industry, with a bunch of phonies in it," snaps literary agent John Brockman. His authors love him, but the industry... [more]. Visit Brockman's Edge.
Einstein versus Bohr: their passionate debate about the fundamental meaning of quantum physics is one of the greatest stories in all of intellectual history... [lucid!]
Unemployed philosophers are often loath to seek jobs outside of academe. But is critical thought really found only in the ivory tower?... [more]
Human beings share 98 percent of their genes with chimps. So what? For a skydiver who's fallen only two percent of his way to the earth, there's no turning back... [more]
The new Martin Amis memoir presents us with a chap who's been name dropping since he first said "Daddy": profile and appraisals from peers, view of the stepmother part 1 and part 2, Oedipal issues (and more), plus John Carey on Kingsley and Geoffrey Wheatcroft on the man who stole his wife.
Eton offers superb training for today's rioters. Etonions are big and fit. They love smashing things. And they don't mind wearing silly clothes... [more]
The world regarded Theodor Herzl as a crank, but in the end Jews got their own country. Andrea Dworkin now wants women to have their own country... [more]
Too many media critics? Not really. Given the huge number of media outlets, it still comes in at about the ratio of chickens to poultry inspectors... [more]
"Organically grown carrots" sound so wholesome. Would as many people eat them if they were properly labelled as "grown in excrement"? David Cooper asks... [more]. Prince Charles has doubts about genetic engineering. Richard Dawkins has doubts about Prince Charles.
Proust can change your life -- if you're 19. By the time you're middle aged, no novel or poem is going to alter your worldview, sighs Michael Dirda... [more]
Psychologist Adrian Raine argues that for a small minority, violence is not a matter of choice. So is it right to judge them by our moral standards?... [more]
Barbara Ehrenreich pitched her story idea to the editor of a glossy magazine. "Okay, do your thing on poverty," he said, rolling his eyes, "only make it upscale"... [more]
Robert Frost was a boor, Evelyn Waugh a bigot, von Karajan a Nazi, Hammett a deadbeat dad, Brecht a crook. Picasso? "Don't get me started," says Robert Fulford... [more]
When Freeman Dyson looks at the glory of stars, galaxies, forests, and flowers, he's sure of only one thing: God loves diversity... [more]
It ain't over till the fat lady, Janet Reno, and the warbling dolphins sing. Gripping, heart-warming, and mildly nauseating, John Leo presents Elian: The Opera... [more]
The clearing of its own skirts lends to the Vatican's apologies a kind of self-praise that does not comport with true remorse, says Garry Wills... [more]
Postmodern fiction doesn't exist. It pains Michael Bérubé to have to admit this because he teaches a college course on the subject... [more]
The popular success of Earth Day hasn't been matched by equal success in the predictions of the green prophets who helped create it, says Ronald Bailey... [more]
John Travolta's Scientology sci-fi movie, a kind of Planet of the Oafs, makes Ed Wood's efforts look dignified... [bad ... awful ... worse ... still worse]. Dumb movie, but what a smart producer. Update: Church of Scientology demands we run a correction.
Suspense is delay. It is the lovely agony of waiting for something to happen. During moments of suspense, nothing happens. Nothing. At all. Happens... [more]
What did Simone de Beauvoir see in that "boring old fart"? For years, Jean-Paul Sartre's reputation has been in decline. Now there's the hint of a comeback... [more]
Jacques Derrida says he cannot listen in earnest to anyone talking in a southern French dialect. Do serious thinkers really need to axe the accent?... [more]
Bourgeois bohemians: rich, tolerant, easy-going, and spoiled rotten. This is what the Boomers have become, says David Brooks... [more ... second opinion ... interview ... excerpt]
If Gloria Steinem was stern and aloof - the Virgin Mary in a bad mood - Betty Friedan was raucous, party-loving, and affectionate to men... [more ... interview]
The Maths Gene argues that the same features of the brain which enable us to use language also make for our talent with numbers... [more]
The author of Fat Man On The Left is a nephew of Yehudi Menuhin, who cut him out of a family will for having "no class"... [more]
Kathryn Harrison's pet topics are child sex abuse, incest, rape, bulimia, and breast cancer. And now: foot binding... [more]
Why did the human brain evolve beyond its pleistocene needs into a weeping, Wagner-loving, high art idolater? Geoffrey Miller has an answer... [more ... interview]
For centuries, dust was prized as the divide between visible and invisible. But the rise of the microscope swept it to the margins... [more]
Scottish nationalism is just a game played at the end of history, according to Francis Fukuyama. It creates a fuss, but little will change... [more]
Was it Tim Leary, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the SDS, Lyndon Johnson and Tonkin Gulf? Something happened in America in 1964... [more]
With his guts and verve and genius, novelist Paul Beatty is already being hailed as the new Ralph Ellison... [more]
Egypt is trapped in the fire of its own kind of Salman Rushdie affair. A new novel has ignited a violent student protest... [more]
There's a large market in the US for a brand of fictive Irishness. If the Irish can't supply it, the Americans will do it for themselves... [more]
America's most unpredictable legal thinker is perhaps its most brilliant judge. Richard Posner rules for nude dancing, in favor of wealth, and against moralizing academics... [more]
Multiculturalism and Great Books do not need to conflict in practice, reports a professor who learned firsthand -- teaching political thought in Singapore... [more]
Heisenberg's ideas are often used incorrectly in popular writing to convey the mundane point that the presence of an observer can influence the observed... [more]
"I'd rather take a hot stick in the eye than deal with your bureaucratic nonsense." Chris Brown's master's thesis was a tad hostile to its readers... [more]
Update: Charges against Robert Hughes have been dismissed, but the trial has had an odd aftermath. Earlier: the men that Hughes crashed into, one of them a convicted bank robber, have been charged with extortion... [more]
J.K. Rowling's fourth book in the Harry Potter series is due out this July, and it's already topping the charts -- on advance orders alone... [more]
School discipline is dead, killed off by court decisions and do-gooder federal laws that have reduced principals to psycho-babbling bureaucrats... [more]
A fake Emily Dickinson poem was forged with no success by a huckster in the 1980s -- until it was sold by Sotheby's in 1997... [more]
Essayist and jazz critic Stanley Crouch is most happy when he's jamming his finger in the electric socket of controversy... [more]
Herbert von Karajan steps into a taxi. "Where to, sir?" he's asked. "It doesn't matter," the great conductor replies. "They want me everywhere"... [more]
Shakespeare is not well cared for, says Frank Kermode. People visit Stratford and buy souvenir mugs, but few of them preserve the Bard's poetry... [more]
Holocaust fatigue. Edith's Story, an Anne Frank-like memoir, nearly didn't find a publisher in the US, where readers have reached a saturation point... [more]
With their long necks and big breasts, John Currin's warped female nudes suggest both Old Master madonnas and Playboy pinups... [more] <!-- <hr width="80%" size="1" noshade="" color="#999999">
Philosopher Hilary Putnam has written five books with the words "realism" or "reality" in their titles. He's still obstinately defending our common sense... [more]
Nietzsche has long served as a patron saint of postmodern discourse. But wasn't he really just an aristocrat, obsessed with hierarchy?... [more]
John Keay's scenes from the history of India are viewed from a first-class railway carriage window: they unfold to an objective, distanced eye... [more]
A muddy, light green does not itself bring to mind any specific time or place. But avocado refrigerators send you right to America circa 1967... [more]
The rescuers of Jews in WWII must not be forgotten. Just as to the evil we say, "never again," so to the goodness we must say, "again and again!"... [more]
Need to escape the frenzy of crowds and the tumult of your overworked mind? Get thee to a novel! orders Cynthia Ozick... [more]
Michael Frayn's Copenhagen is worse than crude Holocaust denial -- more harmful to the integrity of art, of science, and of history... [more]
It said I love you, so she tried like crazy to open the message. Her ancient email system wouldn't allow it, like mother warning her about some cad... [more]
What will be the final fate of fuzzy logic? Its enemies still call it "the cocaine of science," but its practical success has been undeniable, says Jim Holt... [more]
Is the human female orgasm adaptive? In insisting against the evidence that the answer is "no," Stephen Jay Gould continues his private war on sociobiology... [more]
"I offer no empty panaceas. No New Deal, no Old Deal. The venerable False Shuffle is good enough for me." The absurdist anti-politics of W.C. Fields... [more]
Radiant wit, critic, author, editor, and public thinker, William F. Buckley, Jr. has given his final performance. The Republic's finest debater is retiring... [more]
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, André Aciman admits. But for a Jew it could be a symbol of success and assimilation. Think of Freud, Schnabel, Einstein... [more]
Human development is like chess. The rules are simple, but the games that can be played are enormously complex, says Patrick Bateson... [more]
Charlotte Hays's aunt wore ties and Panama hats, smoked cigarettes, and cussed a blue streak. But she was never an outcast, not even in Mississippi... [more]
Some words cannot be defined except through actions. In Spanish, piropo - flirtation, and more - is one of those special words. Julie Kruger explains... [more]
The Internet makes marketing, sales, shipping, and warehousing cheaper. It might return book publishing to what Jason Epstein remembers as its Golden Age... [more]
Germaine Greer meets strangers who wander down her drive with a "Can I help you?" that sounds more like "Can I slit your throat?" ... [more ... profile]
The future won't be unrecognizably exotic, says Steven Pinker. For all the dizzying changes that shape history, our stone-age minds remain basically the same... [more]
Nearly everyone these days seems to be a freemarketeer, says Robert Kuttner. Is the end of ideology really at hand, or is this a deceptive consensus?... [more]
The authors of The Social Life of Information want us to realize that information is not isolated: it comes with context, history, background, common knowledge... [more and excerpt]
Memo to all waiters. (1) Please do not introduce yourself. (2) Don't ask "how is everything?" (3) Don't assume I'll pass on dessert. (4) If you see that my plate... [more]
What stance should a revamped New Left Review adopt in today's world of rampant capitalism? Hard, brave, stubborn realism, says Perry Anderson... [more]
The leisure society the experts predicted back in the 1960s didn't happen. Instead, writes Fay Weldon, we work harder and longer, and achieve less and less... [more]
There's a dark, dirty little secret that professors share among themselves: in this fast-paced age, they just don't have time to read books... [more]
The new, anarchic version of the New Left, so noisy in Seattle and DC, is bold, fun, and very, very stupid, says Franklin Foer... [more]. It's only the privileged rich who need fear the WTO, adds Lord Meghnad Desai.
Canadians have at last found something that taps into the essence of national identity and makes them swell with patriotic pride. It's a beer commercial... [more]
For the young Andrei Codrescu, poets worked at the summit of art, high above scribblers of complete sentences, the slaves of narrative and continuity... [more]
If genetic discrimination is so unfair, so morally offensive, why do you discriminate between people on the basis of their genetic make-up? Yes, you. Michael Kinsley explains... [more]
"Molière with a crayon": Honoré Daumier met brutality with exposure, folly with laughter, and pomposity with a twinkling prod... [more]
"I'll be back," warns Sideshow Bob, on his way to prison. "You can't keep the Democrats out of the White House forever!" Is The Simpsons TV's most conservative show?... [more]
Curiosity doesn't kill cats, it saves them. Neuroscience may someday explain the aesthetic response, says AS Byatt, but our experience of art will be no less vivid for it... [more]
Jeanette Winterson wanted to turn herself into a dot-com, but found that an unemployed philosopher already owned her name. Along with 130 other writers... [more]
Fascism is dead. Jörg Haider does not present a Nazi threat. But he is an alarmingly common example of the xenophobia to be found in Austria, France, Italy... [more]
Recordings of Auden, Merrill, and Plath are almost too entrancing. To break the spell of the poet's voice, read aloud to yourself and breathe new life onto the page... [more]
Virtual war is not just war that takes place on screens. It is war that makes unreal demands: war without risk, in the name of abstractions... [more]
First we'll kill all the editors! The e-book insurrection may seem good news to disgruntled authors, says Jonathan Yardley, but who'll read the resulting dross?... [more]
David Patrick Stearns owes his early passion for opera to his family: luckily for him, they all hated it. "Opera became my way to rebel"... [more]
"The finitude of human life is a blessing," intones a bioethics expert. He's part of an important, new pro-death lobby, says Virginia Postrel... [more]
Are you a better-than-average driver? Of course you are, along with 95 percent of the rest of us. Do you have a better-than-average sense of humor? Well, naturally... [more]
The history of walking might seem like a pedestrian topic, but Rebecca Solnit makes a nimble, engaging guide... [more]
The CIA's ivy-league spooks did in the Cold War what no spy agency has ever done before or since: they bankrolled the avant-garde... [more]
Helen Gurley Brown, a true skinflint, thinks of herself as merely "thrifty." But how generous of her to share with readers a secret tip for a free facial... [more]
German curators who didn't flee Hitler were mediocrities with abysmal taste in art. Their aesthetics perfectly suited their politics... [more]
Cuba may be an oppressive and corrupt state, but a new book claims at least that Cuban baseball is "pure," untainted by American greed... [more]
Aesthete, vagabond, crackpot, fabulist, fugitive: a new bio allows us to hold all these Bruce Chatwins in focus simultaneously... [more]
The Tipping Point is typical New Yorker fare, says Nathan Glazer: we meet fashionable people who seem so much better connected than you or I... [more]
Jealousy doesn't arise from culture, capitalism, media, patriarchy, or neurosis, David Buss contends. It's simply biologically adaptive... [more]
Noam Chomsky scores valid points against NATO's actions in Kosovo, but they are sullied by a torrent of ad hominem accusations... [more]
Wayne Booth celebrates the joy of amateurism in an innocent little bunny of a book. So why is he so infuriating?... [more]
Robespierre was a man like a gem, sparkling and multifaceted. Intending to look only at him, we are startled to find the reflection of ourselves... [more]
Saul Bellow's roman à clef about his friend Allan Bloom has a kind of muted ethereality... [more]. Is Ravelstein an act of homage or betrayal?... [more]
Taboo argues with some force that black athletic success is in part genetic, but it spares us the ambiguities of data that conflict with its thesis... [more]
"We reach, we grasp, and what is left? A shadow." Is this a Zen koan? A Buddhist adage? No, it's the religious wisdom of Sherlock Holmes... [more]
The cynicism of High Art Lite isn't found in its pictures of suicides, torture victims, or corpses, but in what it turns its back on... [more]
The plot of Euripides's Alcestis, which Ted Hughes adapted and translated, bears an uncanny likeness to Hughes's own life. Merely coincidence?... [more]
Witty, arch, wise, acerbic, and graceful, Rebecca West was one of the great masters of the English prose sentence... [more]
Stephen Jay Gould is a genius at salvaging and reviving old stories, tying together science and the human predicament... [more]
Did Charlie Chaplin Jr. really show Marilyn Monroe how to masturbate? Did DiMaggio beat her? Did the CIA believe she once slept with Lassie? Ask Joyce Carol Oates... [more]
Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, educated in Paris, and lived in the American grain. We are still enveloped in his sounds... [more]
Anthony Giddens's Third Way is but an ill-disguised Second Way, a sugar-coated despotism that tries to coax slaves into loving their masters... [more]
When a dog is hit by a car, it doesn't lie down and die. Dazed, it circles, trying to mimic normal behavior. If your sister is murdered... [more]
Thom Gunn's poems are rough, leathery, and well-worn. Like men at the gay bars he has often described, they pose defiantly... [more]
Proust's new biographer is a man after Proust's own heart: he knows that reading a great work of literature makes us deeper readers of ourselves... [more]
Jane Jacobs's yuppies are back, slicing kumquats into their Perrier as they hold forth on bifurcation, feedback controls, and bonobo chimps... [more]
Eric Hobsbawm gets his 19th-century history wrong and gives a hesitant account of events of only last year. He's lost his ideological bearings... [more]
Douglas Coupland's best novels involve a bunch of people sitting around whingeing, while his worst are just plain forgettable... [more]
The Natural History of Rape is the kind of specious tale that scientists swap over a few beers at the faculty club... [more]
The CIA's covert backing of Encounter shows no one is safe. Intellectuals think they are free, but they are pawns in an insidious game. Or not... [more]
Hemmed in at home and bottled up in Harlem, young James Baldwin "read books like they were some kind of weird food"... [more]
De Gaulle pardoned citizens who didn't actively collude with the Nazis, but he executed novelist Robert Brasillach anyway. "Talent," he explained, "is a responsibility"... [more]... [excerpt].
Nietzsche did lose his mind while seeing a horse beaten in the street. But most rumors about him are inventions... [more]
Preserving high culture is not just to the benefit of the right wing, Terry Eagleton reminds us. There's radicalism in Shelley, Tolstoy, and Brecht... [more]
Noam Chomsky's linguistics has been attacked because it isn't a science like old-style physics. His critics, he says, don't understand Newton... [more]
Our schools, so the myth goes, favor boys and grind down girls. The truth is opposite: in the classroom, it's boys who are now the second sex... [more]
Tension between destruction and creation is intrinsic to Western culture, says Jacques Barzun. In the West, decadence can lead to a new dawn... [more]
The end of capitalism was the avowed aim of the London protestors. The Times's Justin Rigby dyed his hair a funny color in order to find out why... [more]
The literati may presume they're superior to dullards who watch Jerry Springer, but their attacks on each other are just as ugly, tacky, and phony... [more]
The literary fame? The prize money? The speech in Stockholm? No, what really excited Günter Grass about his Nobel Prize were the free pipes... [more]
Why have shopping carts tripled in size since 1975? Richer consumers? Fewer shopping trips? Credit cards? Steven Landsburg would dearly love to know... [more]
A kitschy Beethoven biopic once had the famous Fifth inspired by a knock at the door. Maybe the real inspiration was a white-breasted wood wren... [more]
Germaine Greer has been attacked and held hostage in her countryside home in Essex by a fixated university student... [more ... update]
The only prize left for Philip Roth is the one that dares not speak its name. He doesn't campaign for it, but the Nobel must be on his mind... [more]
The typical American's problem with authority has helped make the US the world leader in science. It's also spawned the noxious creation science movement... [more]
"Child-rearing experts burden parents with standards so high nobody can meet them," says Judith Rich Harris. You don't have to be a perfect parent... [more]
Could you imagine Salman Rushdie moving to your town? "It's so passive aggressive of him," complains a nervous New Yorker. "We have enough trouble here"... [more]
The august Berlin Philharmonic will cut back on Mahler, and cut loose with a Bernstein musical. Simon Rattle is set to make the orchestra swing... [more]
The feds may one day make it illegal for artists to use low-contrast colors or eye-straining optical effects. For now, they're only going after Web designers... [more]
Luke Skywalker is gay? Heard the naughty rumors about Capt. Kirk and Mr. Spock? Welcome to the strange worlds of "slash" and "fanfic"... [more and still more].
Lovers Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir stood out from middle-class conformity like angels carved in high relief, wings arched back in opposite directions... [more]
Drawings by artists born blind aren't impressive works of art. But when you realize they show a world known only by feel, they become minor miracles... [more]
Artist Edward Gorey, author of comically macabre tales, is dead at the age of 75. Obits: New York Times, Boston Globe, LATimes, MSNBC, San Jose Mercury. Earlier profile: Salon.
Director Oliver Stone says he never claimed to be a historian. But annoyed scholars can be forgiven for viewing him as treading on their turf... [more]
Michael Ondaatje's new book is hard on marriage, which it calls the ransom of a quarter of your heart. "A quarter, or a half? That line got rewritten a lot"... [more]
Language was probably born of soap opera: the structure of human society is so complex that we had to evolve the gift of the gab... [more]
"Grit lit" and rock 'n' roll writer Nick Tosches is hard to pin down. His admirers run the gamut from Regis Philbin to Don DeLillo... [more]
Last month, a British woman patented herself. A joke? Perhaps, but in today's surreal world of intellectual property rights, it may have been prudent... [more]
In love with your contractor: it's the ascent of the sensitive but pallid cybermale that has women longing for blue-collar brawn, according to Linda Nichols... [more]
Historian David Irving has lost his libel case in a London court where he has been judged a "racist" and a "Holocaust denier." Complete coverage from the Telegraph, trial highlights from the Times, John Keegan essay, extensive background from the BBC, the Independent, and the Guardian. Earlier article from the Atlantic. At Irving's own site: Ouch!
Bangalore was once India's Los Alamos, a center for weapons and aeronautics labs. Today its scientists and engineers are creating India's Silicon Valley... [more]
Hillary Clinton has built her child-care policy on a curious -- and false -- theory of human development. Where do her ideas come from?... [more]
Suppose pig and potato DNA are combined to create self-fattened French fries. Are they kosher? There are two ways to answer this question... [more]
The name Georgia O'Keeffe brings to mind oils of giant poppies and bleached cow skulls. But her dark, secret passion was sketching on paper... [more]
Margaret Drabble's new novel is based on her early family life. A bitter rival novelist, AS Byatt, is not at all happy about her sister's idea... [more]
David F. Noble says Web-based distance education -- Internet U. -- is fool's gold, and he's eager to point out who the fools are... [more]
Testosterone injections give Andrew Sullivan a quicker wit, but his judgment is "more impulsive," he claims... [more]. His article is "dangerously misleading," says Judith Shulevitz.
Academic realist art used to attract only mink stoles and bad toupées to auctions. Now you'll see Armani suits and cellphones... [more]
Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, was an atheist, an erudite Jew, and an eminent conservative. Few know that he was also gay and that he died of AIDS... [more]
Capitalism's best feature is that it doesn't ask us to be better people. But does that mean there's no room in the market for Gandhi's wisdom?... [more]
Would photographer Annie Leibovitz take a free dust-jacket photo for a fellow Random House author? For a thoughtful, first-time story writer, she was willing... [more]
Epitaphs are less playful than they once were, says George Will. "She said her feet were killing her," reads an old tombstone, "but nobody believed her"... [more]
Composer Philip Glass denies being a musical minimalist, but the label sticks, no matter how grand and bloated his scores become... [more]
We've a bad case of "expertitis" in the field of bioethics: we cede control of policy decisions to a precious elite of academic and legal ideologues... [more]
The English upper crust has no time for euphemism. Consider Churchill's response when, seated on the toilet, he was informed of a visit from the lord privy seal... [more]
Kipling's poetry of army life was hardly the stuff of recruiting posters. It is full of sunstroke, terror under fire, and inglorious death... [more]
After British pilots started dropping bombs on Aleksa Djilas a year ago, he began to reconsider his anglophilia... [more]
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The marriage that launched a thousand books will now launch a thousand more, many of which will restore Hughes's reputation... [more]
High-tech heretic Clifford Stoll still insists computers have no place in the classroom... [more]. His views accord with Todd Oppenheimer's classic attack on computers in education.
Romans did not consider male genitalia obscene or lewd, or even very arousing. Instead, erect penises were regarded as good-luck charms... [more]
For A.J. Ayer and his ilk, only genuine questions have answers. But the trouble with questions is precisely the need for answers, replies a psychotherapist... [more]
Saul Bellow writes insightful essays in the guise of novels -- well stated but going nowhere. Stephen King, at least, can tell a story... [more]
When Kansas voted to reject evolution, free thinkers got a taste of their own skeptical medicine. After all, if religion is a mere preference, why not science?... [more]
Lennard Davis teaches the work of Foucault and Judith Butler. He thought himself tolerant. But was he prepared to shop with his son for fishnet stockings?... [more] Davis is guilty of "effete liberal haughtiness disguised as soul-searching," says Jonah Goldberg... [Oh dear!]
Restaurant kitchens are brutal places. They teach one that refinement has a cost. Expert cooking is about technical skill, not flexibility and creativity... [more]
By jamming people into tall buildings in a small area and by using high-tech foods and fuel, cities leave most of the earth free for green, wooded wilderness... [more]
Britain is set to follow the US by drowning itself in lawyers. Hyperlitigation, Andrew Sullivan calls it... [more]. Are there really too many lawyers?
Innovation has always relied on certain kinds of regulation, says Lawrence Lessig, the kinds that keep control out of the hands of a select few... [more]
Predictable and scripted, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? does not entertain or educate. It is a mundane yet popular strain of performance art... [more]
America is drowning in its own soundtrack. Music crams every inch of public space. You can't even find a bar where you can nurse a quiet drink... [more]
For all the money and talent wasted, the Elton John/Tim Rice version of Aida is still neither Egypt, nor Italy, nor Broadway, nor theatre. It's television... [more]
Disney's efforts to suppress its own Song of the South using current intellectual property statutes shows how copyright can erode freedom of speech... [more]
Reader's block: "I've become, if not a child, then an adult of soundbite culture, unable to concentrate on anything that does not offer me immediate gratification"... [more]
Rumor had it that Epicurus ate so much he had to vomit twice a day. And what his students got up to between lectures! But he created a philosophy worth knowing... [more]
A ghastly gift of sociology to our worldview is the concept of role model, a dimwitted scoutmaster1s notion of how to motivate the young... [more]
There are two Salvador Dalis, says Robert Hughes, the disruptive youthful genius and the pretentious, obsessive, boasting, whorish old fanatic... [more]
Affirmative action is at its worst giving white liberals warm feelings of moral satifaction while making blacks feel smug in their sense of victimhood, says Ward Connerly... [more]
Touchy, tormented, violent, and greedy for human warmth, Arthur Koestler was less a user than an abuser -- of women, alcohol, cars, drugs, and ideas... [more]
The British set the high bar for academic satire, but the foibles of American colleges give US writers a step up... [more]
Susan Sontag broke into tears reading Middlemarch, as it dawned on her not only that she was Dorothea, but that she had married Mr. Casaubon... [more]
Long after the war, someone asked Winston Churchill which year of his life he would like to relive. "1940," he replied... [more]
Historian Howard Chudacoff wants to exalt bachelor life. In truth, when living single is more than a phase, life becomes nasty and cluttered... [more]
Henry A. Wallace was the abjectly naive politician who was the best secretary of agriculture the US ever had, says Arthur Schlesinger... [more]
Tamara de Lempicka was a helluva girl. No ordinary woman could stare at a man's trousered crotch with such icy elegance... [more]
The flyers were slipped under visitors' windshield wipers: "Welcome to Dachau, welcome to McDonald's. We're happy for your visit! Your McDonald's Restaurant, Dachau"... [more]
Edmund White has chronicled an age erased by Aids. He's the final musician left on stage, "squeaking away on my violin"... [more]
Lenin's politics were based on violence. He rarely showed emotion and deprived himself of music or flowers, because they made him "soft"... [more]
Daniel Bell argues that credit cards destroyed the Protestant ethic. Did he ever notice that 96 percent of plastic debt gets paid off?... [more]
"Can I look at your big dic?" was once a polite question you could put to any librarian. It merely meant you wanted to check the OED... [more]
Walter Benjamin said that telling stories requires "human and cultural density." By this logic, writers from Texas -- say, Larry McMurtry -- should not exist... [more]
For the stunningly pretty Mary McCarthy, men were the natural, bumbling dunces in a series of mean novelistic jokes... [more]
Girls who dream of being the erotic project of an older man, said Colette, have an "ugly desire which they expiate by fulfilling"... [more]
Libertarians once predicted the tech revolution would bring about the end of big government. So where's the brave new world?... [more]
Hobbes or Rousseau? The hawk sees human nature as nasty, but there's a dovish view too. Here's a book that takes a middle way... [more]
When your son becomes a man, an Arab proverb says, make him your brother. This is exactly what V.S. Naipaul's kind and generous father did... [more]
The new Stravinsky bio reveals an artist who was incapable of telling the truth about much of his life and work... [more]
Brian Boyd's baroque reading of Pale Fire creates an intricate pattern in the spirit of Nabokov, who valued aesthetic and moral concord above all... [more]
Evelyn Waugh mocked his son's stutter and compared his daughter to a toad. Being family, they got off rather lightly... [more]
Male vulnerability should help to put an end the whole idea of the gender war's "victim lottery," and not just add men to the pool of contestants... [more]
Some magnificent thing lies in the soul of each of us. Work has been devised to prevent us from ever achieving it... [more]
At his best, Seamus Heaney does not translate the voice of Beowulf into modern English: he ventriloquizes it... [more]
Reading Michael Lind's new book on Vietnam, it's hard to believe that he's actually been awake for the past thirty years, says Eric Alterman... [more]
John Seabrook says we live in a world glutted with brands and billboards. Not really: that's only where we shop... [more]. Seabrook on Tina Brown.
Thanks to Frederick the Great, Prussia was not a state which possessed an army, but an army which possessed a state... [more]
No novelist was more fluent than Martin Du Gard in the poetry of skepticism. But he grew cold in that climate of doubt... [more]
Working with Woody Allen is like holding a puppy. It's nice, but if you hold on too long he'll piss all over you... [more]
A storm of ripe confession and savage humor from Kingsley and Martin Amis is due to burst over the heads of the literary world this summer... [more]
Monkeys can count to three. They seem to be able to recognize themselves in the mirror. But can monkeys empathize?... [more]
Americans and Britons are free to read Mein Kampf . But can Swedes, Turks, Croats, or Czechs be trusted to read it? Certainly not... [more]
Malthus was wrong. Though populations may grow faster than food supplies, ideas can grow even faster -- and they create endless resources... [more]
Anne Carson's poetry should not work, says Harold Bloom, but somehow "she makes it work"... [more] She has an ancient track running in her head, she told Ken Chen... [more]
Dreams are like the color of blood, or a heart beating. They're like the space between two arches in a cathedral. Or dancing the tango... [more]
Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time, is dead at the age of 94. Obits: NYTimes, Telegraph, Evening Standard, Independent,Times, Guardian.
Idle rich ladies, off-duty cab drivers, and local eccentrics debate truth, beauty, and the meaning of life as part of the Philosophy Café Movement... [more]
Even biblical moralists will now defend their codes of conduct with psychobabble. How did self-esteem become religion's chief objective?... [more]
Anyone with half a brain who pays good money for a "Ph.D. in 27 days" must know he's cheating. Yet diploma mills can be oddly convincing... [more]
Sex and Schopenhauer: why are so many people so sadly unlucky in love? Because, alas, happiness was never part of the plan... [more]
Isolation, private property, ethnic homogeneity, and deep traditions of rights are the conditions of democracy. When they join together, it's a happy accident... [more]
What's wrong with being a sex object? asks 78-year-old Helen Gurley Brown. "At least it means men want to go to bed with you"... [more]
Who has saved more lives than anyone else in history? Despite his Nobel Peace Prize, you may never have heard of Norman Borlaug... [more]
Well, peel me a grape! Mae West is back, and guns in their pockets or not, most people are just glad to see her... [more]. Mae West quotes.
Are genes for blue eyes and a winning smile one step away from being the next direct-mail must-have? Matt Ridley is the man to ask... [more]
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is an unlikely Oscar nominee. His big-screen heroes are self-loathing, painfully observant, and often deeply unattractive... [more]
Ian Potter, childhood friend of JK Rowling, claims that he, and not a book by US author Nancy Stouffer, was the model for Harry Potter... [more]
Collaboration in art is a messy business. As in politics and war, artistic collaboration carries the taint of compromise and betrayal... [more]
"People used to think I was just full of ideas," Susan Sontag says with a laugh, "but I have stories, and I love telling stories"... [more]
Independent film makers are in a funny kind of Golden Age. With 175 indie releases in New York last year, who can even remember them?... [more]
Bilbao's Guggenheim is the work of a man now regarded as the greatest architect in the world. Yet Frank Gehry is alienated from everything that defines Western architecture... [more]
"Come on over and let's watch some records." It's a technology that never quite got invented, but it's finally arrived, fifty years too late... [more]
Much of today's popular Indian writing in English is not penned on the subcontinent. Like Hemingway, the writers find that distance helps... [more]
J.W.M. Turner's many erotic drawings were viewed by John Ruskin as a "failure of mind," but he still couldn't bring himself to burn them all... [more]. Further to Ruskin's moralism...
A vampire: besides her literary ambitions, the great obsessions of Sylvia Plath's journals are her plans to seduce, reject, use, hurt, overwhelm, or defeat men... [more]
Hans Haacke knows how art can bully the viewer, says Judith Shulevitz. He's been bullying for years, with works that function like episodes of 60 Minutes... [more]
Since when has a bachelor's dirty flat been reason to commit a man for madness? Especially one who knows that to keep a pet in such conditions would be cruel... [more]
Arch skeptic Robert Park tells us never to underestimate the human capacity for self-delusion. He admits that even he once believed in UFOs -- for a few seconds... [more]
The puritanical prosecution of DJs, raves, and clubs disguises the sad fact that rave subculture has been fully consumed by the mainstream, hip capitalism... [more]
"Al Gore knows that faith is critical to strong families," his Web site boasts. Susan McCarthy, a third generation atheist, figures that Gore never met her family... [more]
The Jörg Haider episode offers the frisson of risk-free excitement, says Tony Judt, a chance for chattering classes everywhere to score moral points off foreign "fascists"... [more]
Pythagoras did not discover the theorem that bears his name. Indeed, he may not have even understood its import. Such radical misnamings abound... [more]
For every literary snob who resists the lure of detective novels and spy thrillers, there are dozens of eggheads who revel in the crime genre... [more]
H.L. Mencken would have loved today's diet and nutrition gurus, with their outlandish, mutually contradictory theories, all backed up with rock-solid scientific ''findings''... [more]
Clueless in Seattle. The WTO street protestors wanted to halt technology, save jobs, and save the environment. Their agenda would produce the exact opposite... [more]
Forget the faddish French trio of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, advises Camille Paglia. The real intellectual treasures of the 1960s were McLuhan, Fieldler, and Brown... [more]
Memes have taken over our brains, so the theory goes. They are not our creations: we are theirs. It's an idea that skates close to nonsense, says Martin Gardner... [more]
It's not nostalgia that upsets you when they bulldoze your childhood sledding hill. It's seeing the hill replaced by a suburban parody of Leave It to Beaver... [more]
Theodore Dalrymple's father one day decided to burn a stack of 19th-century paintings in a garden bonfire -- a savage, brutal, nihilistic act... [more]
New Englanders deny that racism ever existed in their region. By doing so, they deny that it exists there today... [more]
Radical egalitarianism has had a few nasty "setbacks" in the last century. Richard Ellis agrees, so why does he still keep the faith?... [more]
Elaine Scarry's zany theories are supposed to be friendly to the literary imagination. In truth, they are deeply hostile to it... [more]
When John Ruskin died, just 100 years ago, stupidity, avarice, and ignorance breathed a sigh of relief... [more]. A new guide to The Stones of Venice has appeared.
The kidnappers sent body parts with each new ransom demand. But frankly, how much was his girlfriend worth to him without ears, thumbs, or nipples?... [more]
What causes frog deformities, and should they worry us? Seems a simple question, but it's driving scientists crazy... [more]
William S. Burroughs's final journals reveal a Looney Tunes leftism lurking under various mossy, post-hippie stones... [more]
"You wanted to write a controversial work, and you have," Tom Bradley was told. "I doubt you'll ever get it reviewed"... [more]
Patently Absurd: the patent system is in crisis, thanks to philosophically muddled judges. Mere thoughts and ideas must not be given legal protection... [more]
Professors at the George Bush School of Government have found their freedom to speak out is curbed by loyalty to the Bush family... [more]
Evolutionary psychology is often said to be a boys club of gender clichés. So how come so many of its star theorists are women?... [more]
The world was horrified by 1992 TV footage showing starving prisoners in a Serb death camp. Were those shots faked?... [more]. Update: ITN has won the case.
Tattooing is part of a neo-tribal revival. Its deep appeal may be less a matter of looks than of an eternal sense of being... [more]
Fundamentalist Hindus claim that Deepa Mehta's new film attacks religion and exploits the hardships of India. Have they even read the script?... [more]
What mysterious factors make some marriages thrive and others explode into shards of acrimony and loneliness? John Gottman thinks he has the answer... [more]
"Academic-industrial complex" may smack of the tired radical rhetoric of the 1960s. But more and more, colleges are acting like for-profit companies... [more]
Amphibians in Asian food markets are pounded to death and stacked up in frog-shaped globs of pale pink jelly. Culture, cruelty, or both?... [more]
Rubinstein's Chopin was marked by a perfect sense of place: every piece had its beginning, middle, and end, and he always knew infallibly where he was... [more]
Novelist and grandmother Carol Shields knows an awful lot about breasts and genitals: awkward for those who prefer grannies to stick to knitting... [more]
Some men send flowers, but that's a little too humdrum for the pioneering space cowboy Bob Farquhar. He got his wife an asteroid... [more]
University librarians once spent much of their time acquiring books. But in the age of digital rights, they've become artists of legal negotiation... [more]
Jeffrey Dahmer, the Boston Strangler, and Son of Sam tortured animals before targeting humans. Why? One of B.F. Skinner's disciples thinks she knows... [more]
Why is there no perfume called "Subway at Rush Hour"? Why doesn't Chanel produce "Essence of Oil Refinery on a Humid Day"?... [more]
Whitney Stewart thought that after her first book was published, she would feel complete. In fact, the hollow of anxiety only deepened... [more]
When You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown was revived on Broadway last year, Charles Schulz was leery of the "black Schroeder"... [more]
Bernard Baran was the first victim of the wave of daycare sex-abuse hysteria that swept the US in the 1980s. He still languishes in jail today... [more]
The century just past was, by all accounts, the bloodiest in history. Can we make sure it will never happen again?... [more]
Andrei Codrescu says that all second comings are farcical. After all, they take a lot more exertion, and are a lot less spontaneous... [more]
Swollen brains and shriveled wombs were once viewed as a risk of educating women. Today's gender worries may someday seem as silly, says Elaine Showalter... [more]
Sybille Bedford has known literary and criminal Europe for the best part of a century. Oh, the stories she tells... [more]
Alone in the big city? Want to meet people? Want to fall in love? Latest research confirms: first get yourself a dog... [more]
Forget about class, soccer, or royalty: the deepest region of the British soul is occupied by notions of do-it-yourself and a hot cuppa tea... [more]
Data moves around the Web in standardized packets: so do the myriad things bundled into shipping containers. These too criss-cross a global Internet... [more]
Billy Graham has for years preached the impending return of Jesus. He's pretty safe: prophetic flops never seem to make an impression... [more]
Babies will stare the longest at pretty faces. Why? At two months, no infant has yet been brainwashed by the images in Vogue... [more]
Do you surf the Net five hours or more a week? Then you may be as sick and alienated as many of the subjects of a new Stanford University study. Laughing it off are the San Jose Mercury and Wired.
Just a false alarm, but the fireman was amazed by what he discovered in the old building: "What's a classy magazine like The New Yorker doing in a dump like this?... [more]
"At home, I am in Elysium," said a William James of his quaint Cambridge house. Sad news, Professor: 95 Irving Street is going condo... [more]
Shmuel Yosef Agnon, who died thirty years ago, is Israel's only Nobel Prize winner for literature. Like England's national Bard, he remains an enigma... [more]
Douglas Coupland has cast off his "slacker" tag and is now grappling with adult issues deeper than the slogans and lists of Generation X... [more]
Foaming and sputtering, Tom Wolfe has spent the past year trying to convince the world that he's no mere social satirist, but a serious artist... [more]
Despite the success of DNA profiling in fighting crime, testing lags because of stubborn, ill-founded opposition by the ACLU... [more]
Ordinary Germans: more than a mere handful of brave people protected Jews during the war. The stories of these quiet heroes are still unsung... [more]
What is today's most neglected news story? Literary agent John Brockman asked a melange of the world's thinkers to come up with the answer... [more]
Malcolm Gladwell thinks that all problems in America can be solved with nifty tactics, like the ones used to sell Airwalk sneakers... [more]
Americans disdain lawyers and politicians. Yet they love the death penalty, perhaps the most heinous act those knaves can commit... [more]
Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen could easily have shot Hitler in 1932, and wished he had: "But I took him for a character out of a comic strip"... [more]
John Updike's new novel is Hamlet without the prince: it pries us loose from the perspective that has always dominated the play... [more]
The Harry Potter books have gone underground, with a new plain cover edition for adults who don't want to be seen reading a children's book... [more]
As Clemenceau said, "Military justice is to justice as military music is to music." There's a fine example in the court marial of A.J. Geddes... [more]
Look up "unreadable" in a thesaurus, and you'll find a string of synonyms that sum up David Mamet's impenetrable new book... [more]
The concerto is a predictably dull spectacle: the soloist will be a Russian brat or an accurate woman of Asian descent... [more]
Zero was once feared as a sign of sorcery and the devil. For something that stands for nothing, that surely is something... [more]
Departing from the facts can sometimes improve a historical film. But The Hurricane should have given more respect to Rubin Carter's true story... [more]
Economists have tended see nature as both a supplier of free raw materials and as a bottomless sink for waste. It is neither... [more]
A.J. Ayer had a towering IQ, wives and lovers aplenty, and a taste for lighting firecrackers in intellectual nursing homes... [more]
The letters of the literary often astonish: they're either just what you expected or they carry a complete surprise... [more]
Life's too short for Goethe. There is too much of him. More is known about him than almost any man in history... [more]
How could Darwin have been so right overall, despite being wrong about what underpins his theory? Easy: he let facts speak for themselves... [more]
What is the relation of art to crime? One painter's life affirms Oscar Wilde's claim that high culture masks murderous desires... [more]
It's hard to price a piece of information until you know what the info is, after which you can't return it. That's why ideas make bad commodities... [more]
Senator John McCain -- with his rudeness, violence, insensitivity, and instinct -- does not have a courtly bone in his body. He isn't charming, says Philip Weiss, he's thrilling... [more]
Foreign nationals entering the US are asked, "Are you a member of a terrorist organization?" What kind of terrorist says yes to that?... [more]
Discreetly excised from histories of the Raj are the White Moguls, Anglos who for power, sex, or mere affinity were induced to go native in India... [more]
Central heating is slowly destroying the British family, which used to huddle around a single warm hearth. It improved their social skills, you see... [more]
Did Ian Frazier want to visit the hideout of a deranged killer? All in all, no. Then he thought some more, and decided he did... [more]
Ethnic affiliation is a source of real pride. But we've lost sight of the balance between group identity and what we share in common... [more]
The narrowing of scientific fields is far too often criticized, says Freeman Dyson. Specialties let small groups of rebels escape the dogma of their elders... [more]
Thought Reform 101. Colleges can now require first-year students to line up by skin color and explain how they feel. It's really just Maoist reeducation... [more]
Every little feature of Word was created by a Microsoft staffer who decided to "own" it, says James Fallows. So who owns that damned talking paper clip?... [more]
Leptis Magna was built in Libya some time between the ancient days of Raquel Welsh's fur bikini and the chariot race in Ben Hur... [more]
Marshall Berman longs for the days of "jaytalking." The sixties taught us to talk back, to talk against the lights, to talk outside the lines... [more]
It cost the Allies $36,485 to kill a German soldier in WWI, whereas Germany could kill a British soldier for $11,344. So why did Germany lose the war?... [more]
Publishing is "a bullshit industry, with a bunch of phonies in it," declares literary agent John Brockman. His authors love him, but the industry... [more]. Visit Brockman's Edge.
Philosophy has been a closed, insular, academic pursuit for years. Now two new popular magazines are trying to change that... [more]
The art world is reclaiming its old, outdated aesthetic values. Beauty in today's art? Some mistake, surely. Or perhaps it's just a marketing ploy... [more]
Seamus Heaney is a poet of such stunning natural talent that he couldn't write out a shopping list without winning some kind of an award... [more]
Modern architecture should not be about who has better taste, say the New Urbanists. Success is whether your kids have more friends than before... [more]
It fires the imaginations of boys with nature lore, ritual, and a code of duty, honor, and manliness. That's why today's elites hate the Boy Scouts... [more]
Once a soldier under Mao, novelist Ha Jin still has trouble speaking English. So how is it that he can write like Henry James?... [more]
It isn't only anti-Semites who, in T.S. Eliot's ugly words, find "free-thinking Jews undesirable." The Holocaust is still contested territory... [more]
Enjoying melodies may be a mere function of brain wiring. Roll over Schoenberg, and tell Adorno the news... [more]
Africana is a reference book, yet most of us are deeply ignorant of its contents. Just pick it up and start reading... [more]
Despair is often a spur to creativity. Giving voice to gloom can deflect thoughts of suicide. This was the case with Tchaikovsky... [more]
You always knew it, didn't you? Now science confirms that it's true: your baby is a genius... [more]
Gamesters don't like to hobnob with grifters. The Big Con is required reading for suckers who think they can spot a criminal... [more]
Translating literature is a mug's game, because you always lose. Still, there are degrees of defeat, and the new Stendhal is a failure... [more]
By dramatizing Oscar Wilde's life, you become a sort of detective, sniffing out the roots of modern ideas about sex and art... [more]
The breezy title of On the Rez pegs the author as an outsider eager to portray himself as an insider, says Sherman Alexie... [more]
"You were silly like us; your gift survived it all," said Auden in his eulogy of W.B. Yeats. Actually, Yeats was sillier... [more]
If a Schubert lover can torture a fellow human being, what hope is there for the human race? Günter Grass wants to know... [more]
Adventure travel implies the lure of far-off places, says Paul Theroux, but a nearby destination you've been warned against can exert a fatal attraction... [more]. Theroux now sports an ankle tattoo.
Without Bauhaus, eight out of ten of Germany's largest companies wouldn't be using Helvetica for their corporate typeface... [more]
The new South Africa is a model of reparation. But with no disrespect to Nelson Mandela, it's Nadine Gordimer's vision that will endure... [more]
Wearing nothing but his drawers, Pico Iyer was grilled by customs agents: why had he brought anti-histamines into the peace-loving islands of Japan?... [more]
Consumers have free will, argues Thomas Frank, but they're stuck in a world that is not of their choosing. Wearing Nikes isn't the way out... [more]
Reactionary! Gradgrind! Melanie Phillips has always viewed herself as a liberal. But when she started to question the fashionable pieties of the left... [more]
Trapped in Flatland. Rereading years later diary entries from his first academic post in Texas, an ivy-educated professor blushes at his snobbery... [more]
Ten years ago, literary hypertext was the new frontier for merging art and tech. The golden age of the genre is over, says Robert Coover... [more]
Stanley Fish is a nice guy whom easy success has left naïve about the world -- at heart, that is, a typical American academic... [more]
If Desmond Morris's mother hadn't so enjoyed vast plates of greasy, fatty meat, she might have lived to be 100 -- instead of only 99... [more]
Pure mathematicians don't have much in the way of practical or financial aims. They are innocents, driven by curiosity and passion... [more]
The vivid, exasperating characters in V.S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness are products of a lively literary mind, but they're also real people... [more]
Nobody can recall the sound of George Orwell's voice. But it might have been thin, for he smoked and had been shot in the neck... [more]
Having visited a bordello, Duchamp gave his friend an odd souvenir. Was it a child's plaything, a sex toy, or a work of art?... [more]
Whether you're abducted by aliens or snatched by savages, your captivity story will likely echo current public anxieties. Victims become anti-nuke, or eco-freaks... [more]
In Iraq's version of Stalin's Great Terror, Saddam doesn't just murder his enemies, he kills their families and fellow tribe members... [more]
Gore Vidal scoffs at trivia buffs who comb the lives of authors for pointless tidbits. Yet his own biographer does just that... [more]
Noam Chomsky argues that the "moral state" is an oxymoron. The history of war shows scant evidence of compassion... [more]
"If they cut off my hands, I will compose music holding the pen in my teeth." So promised a defiant Shostakovich... [more]
You bungle your hapless way from child to adult, maybe finding yourself at last in a life you passionately detest. Like the whore, Clara... [more]
Imagine Richard Rorty as Galileo: "I hope the dominant language game will accept as a useful convention the orbit of the earth"... [more]
Funds once used for the study of flu have been given over to HIV. Next time a 1918-like flu epidemic strikes, this may seem unwise... [more]
For ten years, Robert Wright has described Stephen Jay Gould as a scientific pariah... [more] Trouble is, Gould seems not to have noticed... [more]
This isn't a movie review: its subject is a Disney product called Bicentennial Man, and there is no way to see it. Not unwatchable, but unseeable... [more]
Articles and screenplays are often stolen outright from biographies. Worse, lazy fact checkers think nothing of ringing up the biographer to verify the filched info... [more]
Serendipitous meetings, missed planes, and odd mistakes shape and reshape our lives. The tiniest change may alter our future -- or the future of the world... [more]
Opponents of animal rights contend that animals can't feel pain, care for themselves, or read. The same used to be said of human slaves... [more]
Polymath Umberto Eco can dazzle his readers to the point of blindness. His "argument" bobbles and feints like a butterfly in flight, says Simon Blackburn... [more]
Ernestine Schlant is not your typical candidate's wife. Sure, she has a pet cause, but it's the neglect of moral duty in postwar German novels... [more]
Scientific theories can never elude the subjective grip of the time and place where they arose. This doesn't mean they can't be true... [more]
The cosmos has the big bang and evolution has Darwin. But climate has no big idea: the weather is just one damned thing after another... [more]
How do you write a comic memoir about your parents' deaths? You might ask Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius... [more]... [still more].
Universities are funding new chairs for the K-Mart Professors of Marketing. Tweed and Nietzsche are out. The consumer mind is gilding the ivory tower... [more]
Cheaters beware! After you turn in that pirated term paper, your prof can check it for plagiarism with a click of the mouse... [more]
Ashamed about some great, fat, worthy book you've never read? Relax: Fay Weldon has never finished Persuasion, while Julian Barnes... [more]
Sperm genes evolve faster than any others in humans. The need for sexual speed may be more important than personal survival... [more]
Liberal legal scholars are passing live ammo to the NRA. The Bill of Rights may finally grant you the claim to own a gun, after all... [more]
Victor Pelevin holds up a mirror to the Russia of today. He may not like the portrait staring back at him, but she remains his tarnished muse... [more]
Why have club DJs and conductors become such stars, when all these middlemen do is perform other people's music?... [more]
Proust lived in a cozy, cork-lined room, but he wasn't timid: His letters have political fervor and the vigor of billiard-room bawdry... [more]
David Foster Wallace has a bad case of "the anxiety of influence." Anxiety? It's more like unrelenting panic... [more]
Purists won't react well to John Updike rewriting Hamlet. But stealing plots is exactly what the Bard himself once did... [more]
Sallie Tisdale still longs for her mom's sandwiches: Velveeta with Miracle Whip on white bread, fried in margarine... [more]
Vincent Crapanzano has a proper sense of superiority to the yokels he studies: they with their weak coffee and hermeneutic confusions... [more]
Asked why he altered rhythm so often, Igor Stravinsky was stunned: "Often? I change it only when it is absolutely necessary"... [more]
The democracies of our time, the US foremost among them, are creating a military tradition that is paltry, mean spirited, and timorous... [more]
Symbols sans substance, no contrasting views, no engaged debate: why do politicians bother with campaign books?... [more]
On the features of language, shallow or deep, Steven Pinker is a master explainer, and a great collector of amusing examples... [more]
Cosmically speaking, do we last a long time for our size, or a short time? In truth, humans are too small for their life span... [more]
Biotech will someday enable whites to choose a permanent tan, and blacks to opt for a degree of whiteness. Goodbye to the myths of race... [more]
Lust has replaced rage as the hip feminist passion. But what if you're in your sixties? Do you watch the next wave from the geriatric sidelines?... [more]
Philosophy is often dense and overly technical. That something is obscure should never increase our respect for it, argues Bryan Magee... [more]
Indulge yourself! Better yet, find some cash-starved church to do it for you. Coming soon: online indulgences with instant credit card acceptance... [more]
Americans may not be the brightest bulbs ever to walk the earth, nor the most tasteful or literate, says Jeremy Lott. But they are the fattest... [more]
Catch-22 lacks the courage of its convictions. As art, its failure of nerve is frustrating. As a mistaken jeremiad, that failure is its saving grace... [more]
TV is about emotion, not argument. Magic, not science. Dreams, not art. Legend, not history, says Lewis Lapham... [more]
Free enterprise works for Martha Stewart. Now it can work for Sarah Lawrence, says Michael Bérubé. How about the Burger King School of Animal Husbandry?... [more]
There's a void at the heart of Judith Butler's idea of politics. It may look liberating, but watch out, says Martha Nussbaum (new online)... [more]
Get out of the bedroom! Right-wing moralists and hectoring feminists have nothing to say about sexual reality, writes Cathy Young... [more]
Evolutionary psychologists are being embarrassed by the stench of anti-semitism in the work of one of their own, says Judith Shulevitz... [more]. Responses from Kevin MacDonald, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven Pinker.
Connecticut is no hub of Russian politics, it's just where Soviet dissidents landed after exile. They still languish there today... [more]
How did a felon and trivia author manage to persuade a major New York house to publish a slack, defamatory book on George W. Bush?... [more]
Thousands of people had conspired to fool Mark Mason into believing that Afghan thieves have their hands chopped off. Or so he wished... [more]
Beethoven, who held heroic passion slightly at a distance, shared with Kant an uneasy sense of the sublime inadequacy of art... [more]
Hildegard of Bingen has become a golden calf for feminists, New Age healers, and even dress-code rebels. They're wrong: this nun was one tough sister... [more]
Stop agribusiness! Free the seed! Venture capitalist scum will be taking their bags of money elsewhere if the biotech vandals have their way... [more]
Armchair theories about daft artistic geniuses are cheap and easy. But for Glenn Gould, Asperger's Syndrome is strikingly apt... [more]
"The rascals -- they'll kill me, you know," said Ken Sawo-Wiwa, and the room shook with his laughter. Anthony Daniels didn't believe him... [more]
In 1899 a list of the hundred best novels was drawn up by The Telegraph. It provides a sobering lesson in how fleeting fame can be... [more]
The Royal Academy's 1900 show is a giant net dipped into the ocean of art history, with a catch that ranges from the sublime to the risible... [more]
Quackwatcher: how Mark Fefer tracked down, and yelled at, the biggest mail-order peddler of health remedies in North America... [more]
Media execs have dumbed down TV, the papers, and the news weeklies, imagining people want less content and more froth. They're wrong, says Michael Kelly... [more]
A curious 10-year-old plays doctor with his little sister and ends up handcuffed in court. Is this the zero-tolerance we want?... [more]
'Tis enough of Angela's Ashes: the Frank McCourt industry, with its clones and sequels, churns on, but some people are mightily tired of it... [more]
Lies that heal: placebos are "effective" for many medical problems, saving time and money. Imagine: they could even be prescribed by "doctors"... [more]
They called Isabel Allende to identify her father's body at the morgue. How could she? She hadn't seen even a picture of him since she was three... [more]
Seinfeld wasn't created with philosophy in mind, but the show still touched depths. One man's TV is another's metaphysics... [more]
Cladistics is an odd word, but if you want to know why scientists think birds evolved from dinosaurs, you'd better learn it... [more]
Philosopher Imre Lakatos coerced a suicide and betrayed friends during the Hungarian Revolution. No wonder he was better loved in England... [more]
By incessantly citing his "dream" and heaping honors on an airbrushed legacy, smug followers have rendered Martin Luther King meaningless... [more]
Victor Mature liked to eat slices of cardboard with ketchup and his extremities swelled when he fretted about his lines. It was all so endearing... [more]
The New Yorker's feuds and grudges look like an unhappy family. In Renata Adler's telling, the problem began with father... [more] ... NY Times story [here].
Everything about the Mona Lisa, even a background which fails to marry left to right, is lovingly made to resist interpretation... [more]
It's easy, maybe too easy, to laugh at the corny mental hygiene films made for the moral benefit of high school kids in the 1950s... [more]
FDR was once a pleasant, breezy governor. But the 1932 trial of New York City's crooked mayor showed he could be tough as nails... [more]
Albert Einstein was a sort of natural visionary, a human tuning fork resonating with the forces at work in the heart of matter... [more]
Alfred Russel Wallace had no wealth, poor health, and bad luck. Yet he overcame all, and deserves to stand beside Charles Darwin... [more]
Like his novels and stories, John Updike's nonfiction is witty and observant in recording fashions and manners, or in viewing the life within... [more]
There's an artfulness to the awfulness of Jed Purdy's irony manifesto. It's not just bad, it is a richly bad book... [more]
Seeking the single, unitary truth that would cure mankind's ills, Arthur Koestler remained, alas, all antennae and no head... [more]
Isaiah Berlin, the late icon of liberalism, is vilified by both left and right. A man of stature under siege from pygmies and their darts... [more]
Ecclesiastes was much on Jack Miles's mind: "A time to rend, and a time to sew, a time to keep silence, and a time to speak." He'd been rent and sewn... [more]
Our love-hate affair with cell phones and "press zero" menus will blossom into true romance only when new tech stops shifting costs to an unhappy public... [more]
The language used in the media to depict catastrophe is soppy and clichéd. Give us anything to break the mold of phony, pre-fab compassion... [more]
Utopian thought has a dismal record, but the idea is still kicking. Steven Weinberg cautions against five new visions of the perfect society... [more]
The color line means nothing to young Americans, yet blacks and whites remain apart. Why? Because there's a culture line, and race demarcates it... [more]
Scientific know-how can be put to use unthinkingly. Those who refuse to bow before the altar of technology may be tomorrow's heroes, says Gertrude Himmelfarb... [more]
Lady Astor was all the things Vanity Fair admires: rich, beautiful, English. But the peddlers of celebrity porn failed to note her pro-Nazi tilt... [more]
To hell with the putrid grad degree writing style, says David Mamet. The humble genre novel will outlive today's so-called literary gems... [more]
Eugenics will soon be a crusade of the Left. Once we can spot inequality in DNA, genetic engineering will come to the rescue of social engineering... [more]
The AOL/Warner deal has pundits worried. So when was the media's Golden Age? When we had three TV networks and James Reston told us what to think?... [more]
Any major work of fiction will demand serious effort from the reader. Paradise Lost, for instance, may require travel to Guatemala... [more]
McNikeSoft rulz. It's 2050, and there is only one company left. This makes life easy for lawyers, since it means there's only one large defendant to sue... [more]
Marriage is not a mere strategy to propagate our DNA, argues Roger Scruton. It also serves the deeper moral purposes of our society... [more]
Armchair theories about daft artistic geniuses are cheap and easy. But for Glenn Gould, Asperger's Syndrome is strikingly apt... [more]
"The rascals -- they'll kill me, you know," said Ken Sawo-Wiwa, and the room shook with his laughter. Anthony Daniels didn't believe him... [more]
In 1899 a list of the hundred best novels was drawn up by The Telegraph. It provides a sobering lesson in how fleeting fame can be... [more]
The Royal Academy's 1900 show is a giant net dipped into the ocean of art history, with a catch that ranges from the sublime to the risible... [more]
Quackwatcher: how Mark Fefer tracked down, and yelled at, the biggest mail-order peddler of health remedies in North America... [more]
Media execs have dumbed down TV, the papers, and the news weeklies, imagining people want less content and more froth. They're wrong, says Michael Kelly... [more]
A curious 10-year-old plays doctor with his little sister and ends up handcuffed in court. Is this the zero-tolerance we want?... [more]
'Tis enough of Angela's Ashes: the Frank McCourt industry, with its clones and sequels, churns on, but some people are mightily tired of it... [more]
Lies that heal: placebos are "effective" for many medical problems, saving time and money. Imagine: they could even be prescribed by "doctors"... [more]
They called Isabel Allende to identify her father's body at the morgue. How could she? She hadn't seen even a picture of him since she was three... [more]
The New Yorker's feuds and grudges look like an unhappy family. In Renata Adler's telling, the problem began with father... [more] ... NY Times story [here].
Everything about the Mona Lisa, even a background which fails to marry left to right, is lovingly made to resist interpretation... [more]
It's easy, maybe too easy, to laugh at the corny mental hygiene films made for the moral benefit of high school kids in the 1950s... [more]
FDR was once a pleasant, breezy governor. But the 1932 trial of New York City's crooked mayor showed he could be tough as nails... [more]
Albert Einstein was a sort of natural visionary, a human tuning fork resonating with the forces at work in the heart of matter... [more]
Alfred Russel Wallace had no wealth, poor health, and bad luck. Yet he overcame all, and deserves to stand beside Charles Darwin... [more]
Like his novels and stories, John Updike's nonfiction is witty and observant in recording fashions and manners, or in viewing the life within... [more]
There's an artfulness to the awfulness of Jed Purdy's irony manifesto. It's not just bad, it is a richly bad book... [more]
Seeking the single, unitary truth that would cure mankind's ills, Arthur Koestler remained, alas, all antennae and no head... [more]
The color line means nothing to young Americans, yet blacks and whites remain apart. Why? Because there's a culture line, and race demarcates it... [more]
Scientific know-how can be put to use unthinkingly. Those who refuse to bow before the altar of technology may be tomorrow's heroes, says Gertrude Himmelfarb... [more]
Lady Astor was all the things Vanity Fair admires: rich, beautiful, English. But the peddlers of celebrity porn failed to note her pro-Nazi tilt... [more]
To hell with the putrid grad degree writing style, says David Mamet. The humble genre novel will outlive today's so-called literary gems... [more]
Eugenics will soon be a crusade of the Left. Once we can spot inequality in DNA, genetic engineering will come to the rescue of social engineering... [more]
The AOL/Warner deal has pundits worried. So when was the media's Golden Age? When we had three TV networks and James Reston told us what to think?... [more]
Any major work of fiction will demand serious effort from the reader. Paradise Lost, for instance, may require travel to Guatemala... [more]
McNikeSoft rulz. It's 2050, and there is only one company left. This makes life easy for lawyers, since it means there's only one large defendant to sue... [more]
Marriage is not a mere strategy to propagate our DNA, argues Roger Scruton. It also serves the deeper moral purposes of our society... [more]
Philosophic therapists are not doctors treating disease, they are thinkers facing reality. Mental anguish may be more than just a matter of feelings ... [more]
Patrick O'Brian, whose twenty seafaring novels of the Napoleonic wars brought a lost age to life, is dead at 85. Obituaries: NYT ... Guardian ... London Times.
Teleconferencing creates a close human contact that will finally replace the old business meeting. E.O. Wilson is selling his airline stocks ... [more]
Jeepers creepers! Imagine our very own planet invaded by 200 million demonic horsemen. Mind you, that's even before Armageddon and the Last Judgment ... [more]
How did George Orwell come to 1984 as the title of his magnum opus? Theories are rife, and here is the latest ... [more]
High-income poverty: it may seem like a lot, but $35,000 a year is hardly enough to scrape by on, if you live in the wrong neighborhood ... [more]
Of media chatter about his sex life, Stephen Hawking says complaint would be hypocritical: "I can generally ignore it by going off to think in 11 dimensions" ... [more]
Peter Singer's views on humans and animals, murder and euthanasia, have provoked angry debate. Too bad his actions don't square with his ideals ... [more]
How do movie stars who arrive half-naked at glitzy film openings in freezing weather manage to look so warm and radiant? ... [more]
His latest book nearly killed Peter Ackroyd. He'd just affixed "the end" to his biography of London when he felt short of breath ... [more]
Fame, clout, rivalry, revenge: if MIT economist Paul Krugman ever gets a Nobel Prize, it won't be the one for peace ... [more]
"The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance." In 1917 the TLS dismissed Prufrock ... [more]
It's a wake-up call for cliché addicts! Slate's cliché contest applied a search engine to the Congressional Record. The winner is ... [more]
Shakespeare, a Jacobean media tycoon, loved both art and money. He died close to being a millionaire in today's dollars ... [more]
The Parisian arcade was for Walter Benjamin the high altar of capitalism, witness to the sacred rites of mass production ... [more]
Stanley Fish once quipped that with objectivity dead, you no longer need to be right. You just have to be interesting ... [more]
The Hebrides are dying, strangled not by pollution, but by the well-meaning saviors of the isles ... [more]
Günter Grass has lost his enthusiasm for Willy Brandt or the Sandinistas. Only his hatreds -- Yankee imperialism or German nationalism -- still rouse him ... [more]
Entrepreneurs are inventive risk-takers who have creativity, vision, and luck. Right? Not exactly, says Amar Bhidé ... [more]
Institutional racism, a figment of kitsch Marxism, allows black leaders to avoid facing real problems in their own communities ... [more]
Marilyn Monroe carried sexual freedom to new heights in the movies, but lived a real life of loneliness and pain ... [more]
John and Yoko trashed the dressing room and Chevy Chase stood him up. Twice! All in a week's work for Mike Douglas ... [more]
The post-photographic age is at hand, says David Hockney. For art it is going to be the most exciting time of all ... [more]
Exhausted by its history and the incessant demands of its dark past, Germany wants only a self-image of blandness ... [more]
Bad prints of fine art, lava lamps, and ducks on the wall. It's all kitsch, a favorite weapon for intellectuals to aim at inferior souls ... [more]
Odd couple: when Saul Bellow's wife moved out of their decaying mansion, Ralph Ellison moved in. With, alas, his chien de race ... [more]. Just in: Saul Bellow a father again at age 84 ... [more]
Futurists could only see the coming of a flattened, uniform society. They didn't factor in the quirky power of vanity, chance, novelty, or fun, says Virginia Postrel ... [more]
Clive Thompson never thought there was a correlation between the video games he loves and real-life violence. Then one day he was handed a gun ... [more]
"God is an invention of Man, and thus but a shallow mystery. The deep mystery is the nature of Man": Brian Aldiss on belief and consciousness ... [more]
Disney's new movie about Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock may endorse left-wing dissent, but pay to see it, and you shake hands with the devil ... [more]
Stephanie Herman's husband could live on $50 a month, while she dusts and polishes all the stuff she seems doomed to buy. Are women hard wired to shop? ... [more]
What's worse, the crimes of communism or nazism? You might as well ask if it's worse to die of leukemia or a brain tumor, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft ... [more]
Ours isn't a golden age of pianists: more an age of tin. Oh, they're adequate, writes Jay Nordlinger, but that's not enough ... [more]
The monstrous narcissism of writers is fed by a popular delusion that they have important advice for us about how to live our lives ... [more]
Eric Hobsbawm refuses to make apologies for his left-wing views. That he should for that reason be unable to be published in France is most curious ... [more]
Dot-coms keep going by selling shares, not products. The day they run out of cash, says Michael Wolff, the big media players will step in ... [more]
Good manners are linked in the British mind with wealth and depraved elitism. Purity of heart is thus proven by vileness of conduct, says Theodore Dalrymple ... [more]
Germaine Greer seems at long last eager to feel some genuine love and respect for women. Still, it's an eagerness signaled in strange ways ... [more]
The democracies of our time, the US foremost among them, are creating a military tradition that is paltry, mean spirited, and timorous ... [more]
High-income poverty: it may seem like a lot, but $35,000 a year is hardly enough to scrape by on, if you live in the wrong neighborhood ... [more]
Of media chatter about his sex life, Stephen Hawking says complaint would be hypocritical: "I can generally ignore it by going off to think in 11 dimensions" ... [more]
Peter Singer's views on humans and animals, murder and euthanasia, have provoked angry debate. Too bad his actions don't square with his ideals ... [more]
How do movie stars who arrive half-naked at glitzy film openings in freezing weather manage to look so warm and radiant? ... [more]
His latest book nearly killed Peter Ackroyd. He'd just affixed "the end" to his biography of London when he felt short of breath ... [more]
Fame, clout, rivalry, revenge: if MIT economist Paul Krugman ever gets a Nobel Prize, it won't be the one for peace ... [more]
"The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance." In 1917 the TLS dismissed Prufrock ... [more]
It's a wake-up call for cliché addicts! Slate's cliché contest applied a search engine to the Congressional Record. The winner is ... [more]
Günter Grass has lost his enthusiasm for Willy Brandt or the Sandinistas. Only his hatreds -- Yankee imperialism or German nationalism -- still rouse him ... [more]
Entrepreneurs are inventive risk-takers who have creativity, vision, and luck. Right? Not exactly, says Amar Bhidé ... [more]
Institutional racism, a figment of kitsch Marxism, allows black leaders to avoid facing real problems in their own communities ... [more]
Marilyn Monroe carried sexual freedom to new heights in the movies, but lived a real life of loneliness and pain ... [more]
John and Yoko trashed the dressing room and Chevy Chase stood him up. Twice! All in a week's work for Mike Douglas ... [more]
The post-photographic age is at hand, says David Hockney. For art it is going to be the most exciting time of all ... [more]
Exhausted by its history and the incessant demands of its dark past, Germany wants only a self-image of blandness ... [more]
Bad prints of fine art, lava lamps, and ducks on the wall. It's all kitsch, a favorite weapon for intellectuals to aim at inferior souls ... [more]
What's worse, the crimes of communism or nazism? You might as well ask if it's worse to die of leukemia or a brain tumor, writes Geoffrey Wheatcroft ... [more]
Ours isn't a golden age of pianists: more an age of tin. Oh, they're adequate, writes Jay Nordlinger, but that's not enough ... [more]
The monstrous narcissism of writers is fed by a popular delusion that they have important advice for us about how to live our lives ... [more]
Eric Hobsbawm refuses to make apologies for his left-wing views. That he should for that reason be unable to be published in France is most curious ... [more]
Dot-coms keep going by selling shares, not products. The day they run out of cash, says Michael Wolff, the big media players will step in ... [more]
Good manners are linked in the British mind with wealth and depraved elitism. Purity of heart is thus proven by vileness of conduct, says Theodore Dalrymple ... [more]
Germaine Greer seems at long last eager to feel some genuine love and respect for women. Still, it's an eagerness signaled in strange ways ... [more]
Each of the natural and social calamities Mexico has recently faced is serious; together they may plunge the country into anarchy ... [more]
For the fiercely independent mind of Richard Posner, the worst sin of a scholar, or a judge, is conformism. He's the law's great iconoclast ... [more]
The Telegraph has devised an amusing after-dinner pastime with its Great Millennium Arts Quiz. Inflict it on the family know-it-all ... [more]
Thomas Aquinas did not have the advantage of the Hubble Space Telescope. But on the question of creation, he could see farther than the astronomers ... [more]
Walk with bare feet on broken glass. Dip your hand in molten lead. Lie on a bed of nails. Not to worry: physics will protect you ... [more]
A great teacher will ignite sparks in the classroom. Paul Pflueger did just that, but then found himself consumed in the flames that followed ... [more]
What did James Levine think of a three-minute version of Beethoven's 5th? "If it's the right three minutes, no problem." Roy Disney knew he'd found his conductor ... [more]
Gamma-ray bursts, which kill anything within 100 light years, are a daily event. Is that why we seem to be alone in the universe? ... [more]
Color-programmable paint and floorless elevators. Soil will be turned into food and we'll talk with telepathy. It's the unreal world of nanotechnology ... [more]
Kerosene, ice boxes and coal furnaces were once modern domestic comforts. But "comfort" and "modern" were always relative terms ... [more]
Classics is now so clotted with jargon that Peter Jones falls weeping with gratitude on this wonderful 1903 guide to Virgil ... [more]
Online commerce, online romance, and even online marriage. There are eerie adumbrations of the Internet in the story of the telegraph ... [more]
Picasso: "You couldn't forget who he was because the imagination and the brilliance shone through all the time." He could also be vastly cruel ... [more]
This pointy-head new bio-pic about the Partisan Review girls -- McCarthy, Stafford, Hardwick, Arendt -- does its best to avoid their ideas ... [more]
Gas guzzlers may be safer, notes Thomas Sowell, but with the money you save driving a small, light car, you can afford a fancier funeral ... [more]
A swine in Harvard Yard? David Mamet's new kid's book puts Ivy League angst in the heads of babes, or at least in the head of one reviewer... [more]
Working mostly in black and white, Billy Wilder captured the human heart in its shades of gray. He could be bleak, but he was never a cynic ... [more]
Earl Tupper's dreams may seem laughable now, but he charted a new, ambiguous course of change for women with his Tupperware ... [more]
The great invention of the past thousand years? Printing, maybe the microchip? It might be something rather more humble, Umberto Eco suggests ... [more]
Gutenberg's Triumph: a free library, with stacks a place to wander in and make discoveries, empowers us as nothing else, says William Gass ... [more]
The sick state of the classical recording industry is nowhere more apparent than in its dismissive attitude toward sound engineers ... [more]
The warm-puppy gush that's greeted news of the end of Peanuts masks an awkward fact: this once-great comic strip has gone into steep decline ... [more]
The inevitable next stage for an age of irony is a new generation of post-ironic, anti-rebel artists who are immune to smirks ... [more]
Shakespeare in trouble: in a threatre world plagued by narcissism, even the Bard must struggle to be heard above preening din of the directors ... [more]
Before we accept this week's new theory on the Star of Bethlehem, let's consider its countless older competitors. Martin Gardner explains ... [more]
Beauty is the pleasure of seeing that a work of art is funny, moving, elegant, sweeping, or new. As Kant grasped, no rules govern beauty ... [more]
Democracy needs experts to advise voters, argued Walter Lippman, while John Dewey said no, give us open debate. The dispute is unresolved, writes Eric Alterman ... [more]
Is your income above the median? Are you richer or poorer than average? Or are you, like most Aussies, living in a delusion of disadvantage? ... [more]
The Guardian has adopted the US practice of running daily corrections on its editorial page. It shows how to be contrite with wit and style ... [more]
Many think digital images with vastly greater clarity will soon replace film projection in movie theatres. Think again, says Roger Ebert ... [more]
Joseph Heller, novelist of the dark insanity of war who defined the paradox of the no-win dilemma, is dead at age 76. Obituaries: NYT ... CNN ... Telegraph ... London Times. Robert Brustein's classic TNR review of Catch-22 here.
The girlish souvenirs of poet Mark Doty's sister were beautiful to him because they evoked a world secretive and forbidden and rich with life ... [more]
John Silber is proud that Boston University marches to its own drum, "the least politically correct university in the country" ... [more]
Everyone's trying to rewrite Lolita -- and often, the resulting lawsuits make a lot better reading than the actual, execrable works themselves ... [more]
Return to year zero. Paris had a huge new Ferris wheel to mark 1900, an underground railway, and the greatest paintings on earth ... [more]
Webmadam Heather Corinna wants a better grade of erotica on the Internet. Caught between the prudes and the porn industry, she finds it a hard slog. ... [more]
It's no accident that IBM and the US government are sick in the same ways: they grew up together. They may need the same medicine ... [more]
Stephin Merritt: visionary and crank, genius and charlatan, highbrow and lowdown. He's a human medley whose love songs cannot be ignored ... [more]
Call it Britart or Saatchi art: rude, bloody, and jokey, it doesn't live up to the hype. It's High Art Lite ... [more]
A new history of how an idea was put into brutal practice has provoked angry debate. It's The Black Book of Communism ... [more] and [still more]
Public journalism: it seemed a noble idea, but was soon accused making reporters into waiters who take their orders from the public ... [more]
Hector Berlioz, in prose at once passionate and caustic, lyric and ironic, became his own pre-eminent biographer, says George Steiner ... [more]
Angela's Ashes was carried along on one sustained note of hysterical anger. But when Frank McCourt tried it again with 'Tis ... [more]
He's the grand old man with a cranky tape recorder and a magic hearing-aid. When Studs Terkel listens, everybody talks ... [more]
Nothing can kill the human instinct to make poetry, which has been around far longer than our stultifying academic politics, says Marjorie Perloff ... [more]
Dehumanization and low self-esteem caused by lawyer jokes are intolerable, says an ABA spokesman. Lawyer jokes are a form of hate speech ... [more]
And now the planet turns / Earth brow and templed earth, the corbelled rock / And unsunned tonsure of the burial mounds: Seamus Heaney's poem for the Solstice ... [more]
Borges and Escher construct flashy, elegant puzzles that "make you think" (you think), but really just give off a fake odor of philosophy ... [more]
John Carey's Books of the Century provoked mail from a former student, a convicted torturer in prison for life. So much for the moral edification of literary study ... [more]
Was columnist David Horowitz to blame for the rape and murder of Betty Van Patter? An old friend from Horowitz's Berkeley days thinks so ... [more]
National standards for what all kids should have learned in school mask other agendas: punishing kids and giving up on equity, says Deborah Meier ... [more]
The benefits of free trade, like the oddities of quantum mechanics, may not be easy to grasp. That makes them no less true, argues Michael Kinsley ... [more]
The politics of literary reputation is ferocious. For dead white males, the canon is shrinking, and the House of Fame creaks as it collapses, says Alex Beam ... [more]
Bruce Gatenby thought it a swell idea! Teaching literature at a private school in the Swiss Alps. Just what an academic down on his luck needed ... [more]
Is bad writing a by-product of the search for deeper truth, or an evasion of intellectual and political responsibility? Who was right, Adorno or Orwell? ... [more]
Arthur Rubinstein wanted to make "a collection of happy moments, eternities, without ever stopping, so that they could replace life's moments of disappointment" ... [more]
"I'm not subtle," says philosopher John Searle. "The English hill country? Blah. I like the Grand Canyon at sunset. No chamber music, thanks" ... [more]
So long held captive by its binding, the book is about to be set free, says Jason Epstein. Its salvation is the Internet ... [more]
Judge Richard Posner is perhaps the brightest intellectual star in the U.S. legal galaxy. His thinking extends to literature and philosophy ... [more]. Background on Posner's new job as Microsoft mediator [here], further comment from Slate [here].
R.S. Thomas, perhaps Britain's finest living poet, writes about decidedly unsexy subjects: eternity, the soul, immortality, God ... [more]
Technical geniuses of IIT: Nehru's brainchild has created a brain-drain in India, and the winner, as usual, is Silicon Valley ... [more]
Out of Africa: from simple squares to fractals, African craft and art traditions show stunning, complex designs ... [more]
The brain has no center for intelligence, which has neither focus nor locus. Like the other higher faculties, it is everywhere and nowhere ... [more]
An historian's equivalent of a great jazz soloist, Simon Schama's riffs are pure Oxbridge bebop. As he speaks, his italics jitterbug ... [more]
Some artists, like van Gogh and Melville, are legends only after death. Long before the mass media, Beethoven was in life both idol and icon ... [more]
Universities are in crisis, in decline, dying. Yes, they always are, as they are always being reborn, solving their problems ... [more]
Elaine Scarry claims that beauty and justice are but two sides of a coin: fairness rightly has an aesthetic as well as a moral sense ... [more]
Adolph Reed Jr. has a project that is simple, yet bold: the undoing of black pretension and fakery in American politics ... [more]
Garbage guilt: the emotion felt by the eco-minded as they tip yet another load of trash into a designer bag. John Palattella explains ... [more]
Melanie Phillips says that "women have thrown away the trump they held in the mating game: the constraints they once imposed on their own sexual activity" ... [more]
With its anti-science dogma, Greenpeace is becoming in Britain a close equivalent of the religious creationists in the US, says Dick Taverne ... [more]
What dismays Thomas Hoving about the Sensation mess is not Chris Ofili's feeble pictures, but the phony medical alert that visitors may vomit ... [more]
Affirmative action is off the table, and now universities are being asked to lower standards for all. There's no reason to applaud this academic suicide ... [more]
Why bicker over artistic control when you can cede the whole museum to a sponsor? In this regard, the Metropolitan makes the Brooklyn Museum look like amateurs ... [more]
The worst part about being a travel writer, says Rolf Potts, has little to do with the threats of violence, theft, or disease. It's that you have to write ... [more]
Karl Marx was right. It is our destiny to see all fixed social relations, with their train of ancient prejudices and opinions, swept away by capitalism ... [more]
Where does patriotism end and fascism begin? Where does civic life end and tribalism begin? Václav Havel reflects on solidarity and mob rule ... [more]
Norman Mailer calls the war between Guiliani and the Brooklyn Museum a "fracas between the swamp flies and the scumbags." One of his milder opinions ... [more]
Psychoanalysis dead from drugs? Has Freud been made irrelevant by pills that really treat mental illness, instead of blaming some hidden trauma? ... [more]
Shell-shocked soldiers of the Cold War, dissecting the dead past, miss the point about communism in the United States ... [more]. A response to this article from Jonah Goldberg [here].
Apes with an oeuvre. We are not the only primates who can take paint brush in hand to create energetic, arresting canvases ... [more]
A century ago, Thorstein Veblen deconstructed the consumer culture of his age and discovered that man has an unslakeable thirst for status ... [more]
More than a sham, Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth is a mockery of the sacred bond between the artist and his work. Or is it? ... [more]
It was hard to believe at the time, almost a violation of the laws of nature, but in turbulent year of 1989 the Berlin Wall did at last fall ... [more]
Martha Nussbaum has no time for mandarin philosophers who refuse to use their theories to help wage the battle for freedom, justice, and equality ... [more]
Dame Edna Everage is as caring as she is observant. "I love that dress fabric," she told an overweight woman. "You were lucky to find so much of it" ... [more]
Darwin Wars: when radicals dumped a pitcher of water on E.O. Wilson at an AAAS meeting, S.J. Gould grabbed the mike, quoting Lenin on misuse of violence ... [more]
The great discoveries that science will make in the next century will answer questions we do not yet have the wit to ask, says John Maddox ... [more]
"The consumer is not a moron," David Ogilvy once wrote, "she is your wife. Don't insult her intelligence." After 50 years of TV, refreshing advice ... [more]
Book Soiler: for a small fee, he comes by your house, breaks spines, dog-ears pages, and spills a little coffee, so that you and your library look well-read ... [more]
Literary interpretation, says Yale critic Geoffrey Hartman, is like football: "you spot a hole and you go through" ... [more]
Annie Leibovitz's women can do most anything, except laugh, smile, or flirt. They may have come a long way, but they're not having much fun ... [more]
Photogenic bundles of joy? Hardly. Human babies are chubby to convince their perhaps skeptical mothers that they are worth keeping ... [more]
Alistair Cooke's writing sparkles with wisdom. You won't even miss the absent accounts of the sex lives of the great and good ... [more]
What if... Judah had fallen to Assyria? Cortes had been killed or D-Day had failed? The Greeks had lost at Salamis or the Spanish Armada survived? ... [more]
Clifford Stoll has found an excellent new use for his computer as a goldfish bowl. Far more valuable than using the machine in the classroom ... [more]
Freedom was the central value for Astolphe de Custine: freedom from fear, hypocrisy, and all that restrains the human spirit ... [more]
The American Dream, a home filled with all the gee-gaws we love, is a hedonism financed by consumer debt. Should this worry us? ... [more]
Galileo's daughter and Hitler's niece have recently had their say. Here's the next entry in the genre of footnote fiction: Ahab's Wife ... [more]
Is American fiction so starved for distinctive characters that writers have to buy them off the rack, from the ranks of history's monsters? ... [more]
The Che Guevara T-shirt made revolutions a fashion item. Once upon a time, they were taken a little more seriously ... [more]
Bach the Jew: in his strict adherence to the musical laws of his time, J.S. Bach betrays a deeply Talmudic cast of mind, argues Norman Podhoretz ... [more]
Frank Furedi's family was wiped out in Nazi death camps, yet he harbors mixed feelings about turning the Holocaust into a morality play for our time ... [more]
"In the comedy field, you only need a few facts to get you started, and sometimes it helps if they're wrong," writes Garrison Keillor ... [more]
Dumped! There's plenty of sad, uneasy truth in a new genre of fiction that treats the plight of the high-status woman ... [more]
It's not easy for a large, clumsy Midwesterner with a large clumsy name to sell his script idea to TV: a talking rat who smokes a cigar ... [more]
Love is about consumer choice. With Romeo dead and all, Juliet should have left the crypt, had a bath, and got herself a guy who was more alive ... [more]
Fears of a fascist revival in Europe are unfounded, writes Tony Judt. Our fixation with the Nazis prevents a grasp of a new kind of right wing ... [more] "Henry Louis Gates knows a great deal of white intellectual stuff, which whites always find amusing and entertaining in a Negro," says Gerald Early ... [more]
Academic freedom may seem a neat idea, says Stanley Fish, but make sure its pious, cheating PR machine doesn't roll you over ... [more]
Pukka sahib's revenge. Sweet, bland, creamy chicken curry, made in English factories to English taste, will soon be exported back to India ... [more]
X-factor, squirm factor, yuck factor, yuppie-scum factor. With so many factors being discovered, the social sciences are in a golden age, says Cullen Murphy ... [more]
Globalization is unfair to rich tourists: why travel the world if all you ever see is people living a clean, healthy life much like your own? ... [more]
After Mozart, says Colin Davis, the most nostalgic of composers is the sublime Hector Berlioz. The first bars of the Fantastic Symphony cast a spell ... [more]

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