When Peter Lewis hired Frank Gehry, the estimate was $5 million. The cost would reach $82.5 million. But Lewis wasn't mad; a starchitect can do no wrong... more »
Christopher Hitchens could be pompous, arrogant, and bellicose. He could also be hilarious: a cross between loquacious barfly and literary artist... more »
Musicians need philosophy. Indeed, it is the absence of philosophical reflection that has produced so many half-baked ideas in music... more »
As society is pelted by sinister acts -- terrorism, surveillance, random violence -- "chick lit" is out. “Chick noir” is in... more »
The British haven't always had that stiff upper lip. Not so long ago, the nation would sob at every opportunity... more »
Bernard Williams saw his work as reminding moral philosophers of truths that are known to all adults except moral philosophers. He had a point... more »
Think of the great theorists of the past century. All European, right? Benedict Anderson proposes two American exceptions: Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman... more »
“I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water,” said Joseph Roth. His own approach was, “How many words, by when, and how much?”... more »
Housewives have been declared boring, but novelists can't seem to get enough of them. What gives? Laura Miller has the answer... more »
“The most difficult thing about doing fieldwork is remembering who you are,” said Erving Goffman. Enter his daughter Alice, an ethnographer…... more »
Universities were once places of unfettered inquiry. But already in Prof. Nietzsche's day, a new belief was on the rise: That intellectual life is no longer its own justification... more »
Reading online, are we mindless clickers racing against the onrush of published content? If so, it’s because of our expectations, not the technology... more »
In awe of his older brother, William, Henry James declared himself inadequate — to his family, as well as to the times. It improved his writing markedly... more »
Are there still new ways of writing the short story, or have we exhausted the form?... more »
Northrop Frye allowed that others were “infinitely more accurate scholars” than he. But, he said, he had something they lacked: genius... more »
The first email was sent in 1971. Since then email has gone from obscure to beloved to barely tolerated. Yet it endures. Why?... more »
When Isaiah Berlin suggested that Herman Wouk write a memoir, Wouk's wife protested: "Dear, you’re not that interesting a person.” Turns out she was right... more »
Is it practical to impose "equality" on people who no longer see it as a worthwhile objective? That is the question facing France. Emmanuel Todd has an answer... more »
All roads of American modernism didn't run through James Laughlin, but many of them intersected there... more »
Vermeer left three dozen paintings but no drawings, letters, or accounts of his working methods, including any use of a camera obscura... more »
Return of the chin-stroking shrink. Freud's view of the mind hasn’t fared well among scientists. But therapy isn’t -- and shouldn’t be -- science... more »
When Peter Lewis hired Frank Gehry, the estimate was $5 million. The cost would reach $82.5 million. But Lewis wasn't mad; a starchitect can do no wrong... more »
As society is pelted by sinister acts -- terrorism, surveillance, random violence -- "chick lit" is out. “Chick noir” is in... more »
Think of the great theorists of the past century. All European, right? Benedict Anderson proposes two American exceptions: Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman... more »
“The most difficult thing about doing fieldwork is remembering who you are,” said Erving Goffman. Enter his daughter Alice, an ethnographer…... more »
In awe of his older brother, William, Henry James declared himself inadequate — to his family, as well as to the times. It improved his writing markedly... more »
The first email was sent in 1971. Since then email has gone from obscure to beloved to barely tolerated. Yet it endures. Why?... more »
All roads of American modernism didn't run through James Laughlin, but many of them intersected there... more »
America’s most colorful academic? Maybe the renegade biologist Robert Trivers, a brawler and former Black Panther with some near-death experiences... more »
John Clare claimed to be Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. His poetry, like the asylum he inhabited, was a place of introspection, delusions, and despair... more »
A new model for the literary review? Tom Lutz’s Los Angeles Review of Books invites academics to avoid scholarly stuffiness... more »
"Money may not immediately kill people in the way terrorism does," says Luc Sante, "but it does change the fabric of daily life in much deeper and more insidious ways"... more »
The jurist as aesthete. Another side of the famously irascible Richard Posner is revealed in a book he wrote when he was 20: Yeats’ Late Poetry... more »
Intelligent, humane, suitably melancholy, The New Yorker at 90 has managed that rare thing in publishing: staying relevant... more »
Beloved by Montaigne, belittled by Voltaire and Napoleon, Tacitus was a literary artist, moralist, and historian — but in what order?... more »
The oldest art. Storytelling brings us together and helps us make sense of the world. It’s also primed for deception — and con artists have taken note... more »
The plight of the German-Jewish intellectual. For Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Gershom Scholem, “love of Israel” was a complicated issue... more »
Do Hansel and Gretel have inner lives? Not according to Phillip Pullman. "There is no psychology in a fairy tale," he insists — wrongly... more »
When the heroes of one era become the villains of another, the past is refought by the stone and bronze statues of piazzas, parks, and city streets... more »
The constrained scope, the proportional structure, the "handsome, clever and rich" heroine who is somehow likeable: Emma is the perfect novel... more »
In 1896, Paul Gauguin painted a young Polynesian woman with baby in a barn. Odd choice for a dissolute adherent of the
avant-garde... more »
War photography is brutal and beautiful. Indeed, the intensity of war makes the aestheticization of violence inevitable... more »
Rudyard Kipling's “If—” was an instant hit, a poetic paean to moral generalities, a classic of righteous certitude. But read it again; note the mounting anxiety... more »
Is an untestable theory science or science fiction? The question dogs modern physics. A three-day conference in Munich will try to answer it.... more »
Being Noam Chomsky's assistant means greeting students, political prisoners, politicians, musicians, overwhelmed fans, Cirque du Soleil clowns, lost souls... more »
The student revolt in Paris in 1968 gave rise to a generation of leftist thinkers and turned Roger Scruton into a conservative. At 71, he's still settling scores... more »
In a celebrated 1964 book, the British historian J.H. Plumb warned of a crisis in the humanities. He was wrong then. He's wrong now... more »
The tribulations of Rudyard Kipling. Physically abused from the age of 5, he would go on to lose his teeth, a daughter, a son... more »
Graham Greene had a taste for rebellion. "I was ready to be a mercenary in any cause so long as I was repaid with excitement and a little risk.” He found both... more »
"Am I a zealot, a terrorist, out on my own limb?" asks Gordon Lish. "Yes, with a vengeance!" At least when editing other people’s writing... more »
In 1913, Christopher Isherwood received a Kodak camera. Twenty years later, he wrote, “I am a camera.” What did he mean?... more »
Christopher Hitchens could be pompous, arrogant, and bellicose. He could also be hilarious: a cross between loquacious barfly and literary artist... more »
The British haven't always had that stiff upper lip. Not so long ago, the nation would sob at every opportunity... more »
“I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water,” said Joseph Roth. His own approach was, “How many words, by when, and how much?”... more »
Universities were once places of unfettered inquiry. But already in Prof. Nietzsche's day, a new belief was on the rise: That intellectual life is no longer its own justification... more »
Are there still new ways of writing the short story, or have we exhausted the form?... more »
When Isaiah Berlin suggested that Herman Wouk write a memoir, Wouk's wife protested: "Dear, you’re not that interesting a person.” Turns out she was right... more »
Vermeer left three dozen paintings but no drawings, letters, or accounts of his working methods, including any use of a camera obscura... more »
Michael Dirda is a writer. But in a truer sense, he is Bookman: a cheerleader for the old, the neglected, the marginalized... more »
We might think of magic as medieval, but its impulse permeates our own society. Consider modern physics or economic theory, suggests Rowan Williams... more »
Our digital lives in the social media make us four-dimensional beings. But is the “everywhereness” of virtual reality bleeding away our presence?... more »
When we’re sick, writing can help. But the illness memoir only occasionally rises to the level of literature. What was it about Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Oliver Sacks?... more »
Sex, violence, music: Frank Sinatra's life has been copiously documented. But when will his biographers move beyond uncritical adulation?... more »
Matt Ridley to pessimists: Relax, everything will eventually work itself out for the better, thanks to free markets and the evolution of ideas... more »
What draws us back, time and time again, to Augustine? Perhaps his frankness about descending into a “seething cauldron of lust”... more »
The Lord of the Rings, the country-house novel, the Mars bar. A culture curiously both high and low shapes the British national imagination... more »
Polyglot, erudite, dead at 48, Shahab Ahmed was a scholar of Islam. But he had contempt for the field of Islamic studies... more »
We read as detective-critics, uncovering meaning in the text. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Consider the limits of critique... more »
Much used — and abused — but little understood, realpolitik is about not only the art of the possible but also the messiness of politics... more »
Beethoven was full of noble aspiration: The Fifth Symphony makes everything seem possible. But applied to his personal life, it led to disaster... more »
Chimen Abramsky made room in his London home for 20,000 volumes, including first editions by Spinoza and Marx. Meet one of the 20th
century’s great bibliophiles... more »
Harry Frankfurt insists that his abstract, philosophical ruminations on inequality have no relevance to social or
political policy. Bullshit... more »
Ted Hughes believed that poetry originates from injury: The deeper the wound, the better the art. Yet some of his best poetry predates his worst wounds... more »
When biographies exonerate. Publication of an extremely charitable biography of Ezra Pound underscores a turn toward moral relativism in the genre... more »
When Martin Luther nailed an essay to the door of a German church, he forever altered what books look like and how they're marketed and written... more »
As a playwright, Arthur Miller was confident of his talent. As an essayist, he played interested amateur. It was an act... more »
Oscar Wilde is often considered in terms of his relationship with men. But women — especially his mother, Jane — made Wilde who he was... more »
Beauty can mask and distort reality. It's often ugliness — its seams all unconcealed — that gets closest to the truth... more »
The key to editing a two-volume collection of T.S. Eliot's poetry? Preserving the essential weirdness that makes it so powerful... more »
Bernie Vonnegut studied how to manipulate the weather for military gain. That might explain the moral anxieties of his younger brother, Kurt... more »
Musicians need philosophy. Indeed, it is the absence of philosophical reflection that has produced so many half-baked ideas in music... more »
Bernard Williams saw his work as reminding moral philosophers of truths that are known to all adults except moral philosophers. He had a point... more »
Housewives have been declared boring, but novelists can't seem to get enough of them. What gives? Laura Miller has the answer... more »
Reading online, are we mindless clickers racing against the onrush of published content? If so, it’s because of our expectations, not the technology... more »
Northrop Frye allowed that others were “infinitely more accurate scholars” than he. But, he said, he had something they lacked: genius... more »
Is it practical to impose "equality" on people who no longer see it as a worthwhile objective? That is the question facing France. Emmanuel Todd has an answer... more »
Return of the chin-stroking shrink. Freud's view of the mind hasn’t fared well among scientists. But therapy isn’t -- and shouldn’t be -- science... more »
The moral danger of reading a novel. We give authors enormous — potentially diabolical — power to shape our ideas, our politics, our selves... more »
The meaning of diversity in literature. Do we want fiction to present aspirational versions of ourselves, or do we want something else entirely?... more »
Oliver Sacks enjoyed Montblanc fountain pens, Norwegian sardines, and his T-shirt with a fern on it. But above all else, he loved to swim... more »
Beware the gratitude gurus and their creed of self-love masquerading as selflessness. "The current hoopla around gratitude is a celebration of onanism"... more »
Sidney Mintz told stories that no one else bothered to tell. His eye for both big ideas and small details changed how history is done and read today... more »
John Brockman's Edge question for 2016 asks scientists and other thinkers: What do you consider the most interesting recent news? What makes it important?... more »
Swearing is like songwriting — it structures the world around us. Mark Edmundson explores the philosophy of his favorite profanity: “shit”... more »
Pages vs. pixels. As reading is increasingly digitized, doomsayers sound the alarm. But there are good reasons to be concerned, says Michael Dirda... more »
The merits of being a pain in the ass. The virtue of defiance has been central to Western culture. So why have we pathologized it?... more »
Forty years ago, Laura Mulvey showed how Hollywood foisted a masculine point of view on audiences. Is the "male gaze" still relevant?... more »
Don't try to discern the “original intent” of the American founders – they contradicted one another. But this is clear: They had no intention to create a religion-based government... more »
Punk is in its fourth decade, but confusion remains about what, exactly, it is. The rules, aesthetic, and parameters are, at best, murky... more »
Academics are sometimes cautioned to put scholarship over politics. Benedict Anderson regarded this as a false and foolish distinction... more »
Academics are told to "engage the public," as if that were an intrinsic value. But real value might mean writing a book that few people will read.... more »
Mass surveillance may seem eerily futuristic, but it marks a return to a time when we were watched by an omniscient authority,. We called it God... more »
Information Age. Information Overload. Information Explosion: Our problem isn't a deluge of information, but a lack of self-knowledge... more »
Since Genesis, no story has been free of gossip. Without Cain and Abel, there is no Chaucer, no Boswell, no Jane Austen, no Proust, no Henry James... more »
The literature of listening. Flaubert called himself a human pen; Svetlana Alexievich, a recent Nobel laureate, calls herself a human ear... more »
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