Consider the blurb. What began with a note from Emerson to Whitman has become pervasive — even though there's little evidence that blurbs sell any books... more »
Not all writers have an interest in punctuation. Wordsworth didn't care. Twain, however, ordered a proofreader shot for attempting to improve his grammar... more »
Hume’s philosophy was long overlooked. He was instead known for his lightly researched historical works and a talent for wrongheadedness... more »
“No more portraits," John Berger demanded in 1967 — the genre stood for social status and celebrity. Now the critic has pulled an about-face... more »
The decades-long correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark is marked by a tone of mutual affection. The knives came out in private... more »
Clive James vowed not to reread Conrad. But he must, because no other writer so perceptively presaged our world of radicalism, terrorism, and idealism... more »
Ivan Maisky — intelligent, spirited, polyglot — was Stalin's ambassador to London in the 1930s. His diary, while unreliable, is a revelation... more »
The science of well-being is a pernicious project based on a mistaken assumption: that we can engineer our own happiness. Blame Jeremy Bentham... more »
The age of annotation is upon us. But is Genius — a crowdsourced annotation website — really the future of close reading?... more »
Flaubert, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir: French intellectual culture was once the envy of the world. Now it’s mired in malaise... more »
William Styron once wrote that being a young novelist was like being a rock star. Ironic, because Styron’s own public persona was so boring... more »
Not warmth or decency, but ornament. We dress ourselves out of vanity — but fashion is pivotal to art, ideas, even history itself... more »
While heroes inspire admiration, do-gooders tend to provoke unease, as if there is something perverse about all that virtue... more »
“America, I am coming to conquer you!,” a young, impoverished Londoner declared as he crossed the Atlantic. He — Charlie Chaplin — was right... more »
“You ever loved two women at the same time?” asked Hemingway. His predicament began when he met Pauline Pfeiffer, a very rich girl who wouldn't be denied... more »
Picture Hamlet. Is he lean, pensive, brooding? Probably, because that's how the role has been cast. But what if Hamlet were fat?... more »
Neither victim or avenger, Primo Levi was a witness. And though he bristled at the label "Holocaust writer," it's in that role that he matters most... more »
Mark Edmundson was a Catholic for 12 years, a period he associates with feelings of shame and denial as well as gratitude. The church provided an education in ideals... more »
A belief in the universal appeal of Western liberal values has long been a feature of American opinion. But those values are losing sway... more »
Mary McGrory, for much of her career the only female pundit in the room, wasn't shy about giving advice to colleagues: “Subtlety is overrated”... more »
What does the American short story do well these days? Where is it failing or lacking? George Saunders and Ben Marcus discuss... more »
Consider the blurb. What began with a note from Emerson to Whitman has become pervasive — even though there's little evidence that blurbs sell any books... more »
“No more portraits," John Berger demanded in 1967 — the genre stood for social status and celebrity. Now the critic has pulled an about-face... more »
Ivan Maisky — intelligent, spirited, polyglot — was Stalin's ambassador to London in the 1930s. His diary, while unreliable, is a revelation... more »
Flaubert, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir: French intellectual culture was once the envy of the world. Now it’s mired in malaise... more »
While heroes inspire admiration, do-gooders tend to provoke unease, as if there is something perverse about all that virtue... more »
Picture Hamlet. Is he lean, pensive, brooding? Probably, because that's how the role has been cast. But what if Hamlet were fat?... more »
A belief in the universal appeal of Western liberal values has long been a feature of American opinion. But those values are losing sway... more »
The rents were low, the cultural world was small and buzzing with theories, markets, and movements. Ah, to be in New York in the 70s... more »
Over 11 days in New York in 1964, Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton engaged in one of the strangest experiments in movie history... more »
Did the Enlightenment have Buddhist roots? How Tibetan lamas, Siamese monks, and an Italian missionary inspired David Hume... more »
The faculty lounge was a good fit for a polymath like Saul Bellow, who thrived intellectually in the academy while deteriorating as a novelist... more »
Who is Joan Didion? We talk of her as an essayist and grief memoirist, as a political writer, and as a novelist. There must be a connection... more »
The current generation of black thinkers is distinct from its predecessors in many ways, not least this: They don't aspire to the Ivy League... more »
Philip Kelley has spent more than 50 years editing the correspondence – 11,601 letters – of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But don't call him a scholar... more »
Yes, Aldous Huxley liked taking acid, but he also liked Renaissance madrigals. The story of an unlikely icon of psychedelic music... more »
Real men do cry. Public male weeping was ubiquitous across the world for most of recorded history. Where did the tears go?... more »
Neuroaesthetics is the rage, and the possibilities are exciting. But art will always elude even the most advanced methods of cognitive science... more »
“Nature writing” has become a cant phrase. But whatever you call it, we're living in a golden age of such literature... more »
We author our own lives, and the narratives we tell become us. So say philosophers like Daniel Dennett. What does this even mean?... more »
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The totalitarian is the enemy." Christopher Hitchens's last interview... more »
The historian Robert Conquest was also a figure of great literary significance. His criticism reads like a manifesto of common sense... more »
The Library of America began publishing in 1982. But the idea was born in the mid-1950s, out of the friendship of Edmund Wilson and Jason Epstein... more »
After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, four million people rallied in France. To some, it was a repudiation of terrorism. For Emmanuel Todd, it was a travesty... more »
Perhaps you've heard of Amish “wisdom” books or “Plain” cookbooks, but Amish romance fiction? Inside the curiously popular world of the bonnet ripper... more »
Oliver Sacks — doctor, humanist, contrarian, neurological novelist — is dead. He was 82... Telegraph... Guardian... Michiko Kakutani... Jerome Groopman... Sabine Heinlein...... more »
In Chimen Abramsky's house of books – 20,000 titles – the walls were made of words. It smelled old and musty but was one of left-wing London's great salons... more »
It's been said that the novelist is the historian of the present and the historian the novelist of the past. Consider how Edward Gibbon aligned scholarship with art... more »
Irving Kristol, “godfather” of neoconservatism, was foremost an anti-utopian. Odd that neoconservative foreign policy is such a crusade... more »
The Henry Kissinger reputation restoration project is in full swing. Volume 1 of an authorized biography delivers 1,000 pages of unconvincing claptrap... more »
You've heard of it. You can picture it (think "armored bikini”). But the chastity belt was a myth, mostly... more »
Not all writers have an interest in punctuation. Wordsworth didn't care. Twain, however, ordered a proofreader shot for attempting to improve his grammar... more »
The decades-long correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark is marked by a tone of mutual affection. The knives came out in private... more »
The science of well-being is a pernicious project based on a mistaken assumption: that we can engineer our own happiness. Blame Jeremy Bentham... more »
William Styron once wrote that being a young novelist was like being a rock star. Ironic, because Styron’s own public persona was so boring... more »
“America, I am coming to conquer you!,” a young, impoverished Londoner declared as he crossed the Atlantic. He — Charlie Chaplin — was right... more »
Neither victim or avenger, Primo Levi was a witness. And though he bristled at the label "Holocaust writer," it's in that role that he matters most... more »
Mary McGrory, for much of her career the only female pundit in the room, wasn't shy about giving advice to colleagues: “Subtlety is overrated”... more »
The combustible household of Samuel Johnson included a bibulous doctor, a blind poet, and Johnson's servant and heir: Francis Barber... more »
Christian conservatism took root in 1950s America to oppose the welfare state, not godless Soviets. What lurked behind the movement? Big business... more »
Outside of science, there isn't much progress in the history of thought. Bad ideas don't fade away, says John Gray. They simply recur... more »
Wordsworthian breeze, Tennysonian damp, Dickensian fog: Writing has always been weatherbound. "English literature begins in the cold"... more »
Contemporary philosophy is laden with runaway “intellectualism” – everything is taken to be a product of thought. But some things just are... more »
Soviet bus stops. Among the styles: Gaudi knockoffs, open-fronted dodecahedrons, folksy mosaics. These ruins retain a surreal beauty... more »
The pianist and composer Béla Bartók found his sound – tonal, atonal, unorthodox – in the folk music of Hungary, Romania, and nearby nations... more »
What else is there to say about Isaiah Berlin? That his personality has come to seem more important than his intellectual achievements... more »
The Wright brothers: an interest, an obsession, a practical plan, and, most crucially, unshakable equanimity. And there they diverge from Elon Musk... more »
The age of psychedelia lasted only a few chaotic years, and today the term is lazily invoked. But its influence on pop culture endures... more »
Want to write a memoir? Success depends on being honest and vulnerable. As Mary Karr says, “One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit”... more »
Joseph Roth was a virtuoso of the short-form autobiographical essay. With an eye on the minutiae of human behavior, he captured his age ... more »
When a bag of urine taped to the leg of Clive James broke, a nurse mopped up. "I hope that sum total of my writings has been as useful to the world as her kindness"... more »
We are awash in biographical information about musicians. But Greil Marcus remains focused on how songs shape their singers... more »
What does it mean to time-travel? In literature, history is a text, and we are its readers. Fredric Jameson unpacks the idea of science fiction... more »
Shirley Jackson, known for the macabre, also had a genius for household comedy. What unified her work was a fascination with how we're governed by routine... more »
The problem of propaganda is that some amount is unavoidable in a large liberal democracy. The real question: How can it be used most productively?... more »
Squeezing, falsifying, accentuating, stiffening: Clothing has always been about artifice. And choosing what we wear has never been rational... more »
What kind of philosopher shows up at conferences in ski clothes? And goes into university administration to militarize it? Heidegger, of course... more »
Richard Dawkins insists that he's misunderstood. No firebrand, he's driven less by hostility toward religion than by enchantment with scientific reason... more »
Why are you reading Keats but not Barry Cornwall, Austen but not Mary Brunton? Fame is a fickle blessing – how is it conferred?... more »
Consider the octopus. "Devil-fish," according to Victor Hugo; Pliny called no animal more savage in causing the death of man. But oh, so intelligent and perceptive... more »
Hume’s philosophy was long overlooked. He was instead known for his lightly researched historical works and a talent for wrongheadedness... more »
Clive James vowed not to reread Conrad. But he must, because no other writer so perceptively presaged our world of radicalism, terrorism, and idealism... more »
The age of annotation is upon us. But is Genius — a crowdsourced annotation website — really the future of close reading?... more »
Not warmth or decency, but ornament. We dress ourselves out of vanity — but fashion is pivotal to art, ideas, even history itself... more »
“You ever loved two women at the same time?” asked Hemingway. His predicament began when he met Pauline Pfeiffer, a very rich girl who wouldn't be denied... more »
Mark Edmundson was a Catholic for 12 years, a period he associates with feelings of shame and denial as well as gratitude. The church provided an education in ideals... more »
What does the American short story do well these days? Where is it failing or lacking? George Saunders and Ben Marcus discuss... more »
On June 3, 1926, T.S. Eliot promised an essay, "The Contemporary Novel," to Edmund Wilson at The New Republic. It remained unpublished until now... more »
Picasso put most of his effort into painting. But was he a more natural sculptor? Peter Schjeldahl makes the case... more »
These days "Luddite" is a cudgel, an indictment of fuzzy-headed nostalgia. But the impulse to preserve a boundary between human and machine is anything but passé... more »
Bioethics has become a field for glib moralizing, a redoubt of knee-jerk naysayers. When it comes to ethics, don't trust bioethicists... more »
Writers have flocked to cafés for some years now. Do they go to write or to be distracted? 17th-century London offers some clues... more »
Simon Critchley asked his adviser if he could switch from a course on Foucault to one on Derrida. The response: “Man, that’s like going from horseshit to bullshit”... more »
Poetry has always been about myth, and the boom in poetry about celebrities can be seen as ridiculous, or deeply rooted, or both. Consider “Love Letter to Flavor Flav”... more »
According to Hemingway’s “Theory of Omission,” writing is what we leave out. But how do we decide what to omit? ... more »
The literary drunk is often assumed to be a man. But what of the alcoholic adventures of Elizabeth Bishop, Dorothy Parker, and Shirley Jackson?... more »
Ellen Willis, believer. She was skeptical, irreverent, a self-described “irrepressible crank.” But underneath lay a profound faith in the human capacity for happiness... more »
The glamour of writer’s block doesn’t extend to procrastination, which is all broken promises, evasions, and outright lies you tell yourself and others... more »
The story of the French Resistance – how a people liberated itself – is a touchstone of French identity. And almost pure poppycock... more »
The idea of portraiture rests on a simple premise: A face contains the ineradicable essence of character. That belief is under assault, says Simon Schama... more »
Ambiguity is usually a flaw. But in literature it's regarded as an asset, a special cleverness deserving of praise, not scorn. Nonsense... more »
Everybody's a critic. And everybody's in a rush to declare an opinion. But how one arrives there is often more interesting than the opinion itself... more »
The meaning of what we say can’t be divorced from its context. That's Wittgenstein, and it goes far to explain the sorry state of discourse on the Internet... more »
The obsolescence of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The verse of the poet who was obsessed with new forms now seem out of date. He wanted it that way... more »
“Men of high intelligence and sensibility,” it was said, tended to be enchanted by Hannah Arendt. Hans Morgenthau was no exception... more »
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