In which 3,000 medievalists gather in Kalamazoo to cavort and dance and talk about what they love most: the deep past... more »
Isaiah Berlin's letters: four volumes, 3,000 pages, one million words. "I really must not go on" is a repeated, if rarely heeded, refrain... more »
Haters and killjoys, sadists and masochists: Critics are sometimes appreciated but mostly feared, resented, or ignored. A.O. Scott should know... more »
Each Wednesday a bottle of iced tea was placed at the head of the conference table. Then Saul Bellow would walk in, never late... more »
Hitler and home decor. He lived like a student until the age of 40, then moved to an expensive apartment. Were there clues in its aesthetic?... more »
It's rare for a book to both explain science and change it. Even rarer for that book to reach a wide audience. That's what Richard Dawkins did 40 years ago... more »
When someone declares "I have a novel in me,” that person will never be an artist, says Richard Sennett. You either do it or you don’t... more »
Why has tap, a delightful, exhilarating, once culturally dominant dance style, been so resistant to revival?... more »
Do you have a theory of biography? What about this: "We are not texts. Our histories are not narratives. Life is not literature"... more »
What does a tattered 17th-century map discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library reveal about Chinese enterprise and European curiosity?... more »
Since 1968, Roger Scruton has waged a war against the left. Most of his foes are dead, but he battles on... more »
In the summer of 1936, German émigré writers congregated on a beach in Belgium. They had nowhere else to go... more »
How a centimeter of clay in a 1,300-foot layer of rock in Italy explains one of the most important days in the history of life... more »
Citing the advent of the Internet, Will Self proclaims the novel dead. Not true — in fact, the novel profits from its own precarious position... more »
Beware the data based on multiple regression analyses. You’re quite likely to get no information, or misinformation... more »
Briefly a lawyer, Goethe turned to writing poetry and falling in love - and never stopped. At the age of 72, he proposed marriage to a 17-year-old... more »
“Destroy this and all letters,” wrote Iris Murdoch, “and keep your mouth shut.” What didn't she want revealed? Her “adult philosophy”... more »
"We go to our deaths asymptotically, never getting there because ‘we’ and ‘there’ can’t exist at the same moment"...... more »
For writers, economic freedom is artistic freedom. Today's writers tend to be insecure and in debt. As a result, they play it safe... more »
Russell Kirk - eccentric, dandyish, celibate into his 40s - articulated a conservatism nothing like the political doctrines of today... more »
Sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, and psychologists promise to reveal the terrorist mind. None bring the insight of novelists... more »
In which 3,000 medievalists gather in Kalamazoo to cavort and dance and talk about what they love most: the deep past... more »
Each Wednesday a bottle of iced tea was placed at the head of the conference table. Then Saul Bellow would walk in, never late... more »
When someone declares "I have a novel in me,” that person will never be an artist, says Richard Sennett. You either do it or you don’t... more »
What does a tattered 17th-century map discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library reveal about Chinese enterprise and European curiosity?... more »
How a centimeter of clay in a 1,300-foot layer of rock in Italy explains one of the most important days in the history of life... more »
Briefly a lawyer, Goethe turned to writing poetry and falling in love - and never stopped. At the age of 72, he proposed marriage to a 17-year-old... more »
For writers, economic freedom is artistic freedom. Today's writers tend to be insecure and in debt. As a result, they play it safe... more »
Economists fancy themselves rigorous social scientists. But science tends to foster consensus, and economists are as divided as ever... more »
Translators rarely become celebrities. Ann Goldstein — translator of Elena Ferrante, Jhumpa Lahiri, Primo Levi -- is an exception... more »
This is the era of the first sentence: supposedly a writer's only chance to entice a reader. Too often, however, a great first sentence is the only great sentence... more »
Triumphant yet beleaguered, liberalism is oddly hard to define. Is this evidence of an intellectual tradition that has lost coherence and credibility?... more »
Does it matter if the world is beautiful? It does to Frank Wilczek. His laws of nature are exuberant, harmonious, and symmetrical... more »
Every four seconds, Lee Child sells a book somewhere in the world. His daily regimen: 26 cigarettes, 19 cups of coffee, 2,000 words... 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 »
Isaiah Berlin's letters: four volumes, 3,000 pages, one million words. "I really must not go on" is a repeated, if rarely heeded, refrain... more »
Hitler and home decor. He lived like a student until the age of 40, then moved to an expensive apartment. Were there clues in its aesthetic?... more »
Why has tap, a delightful, exhilarating, once culturally dominant dance style, been so resistant to revival?... more »
Since 1968, Roger Scruton has waged a war against the left. Most of his foes are dead, but he battles on... more »
Citing the advent of the Internet, Will Self proclaims the novel dead. Not true — in fact, the novel profits from its own precarious position... more »
“Destroy this and all letters,” wrote Iris Murdoch, “and keep your mouth shut.” What didn't she want revealed? Her “adult philosophy”... more »
Russell Kirk - eccentric, dandyish, celibate into his 40s - articulated a conservatism nothing like the political doctrines of today... more »
Lady Jane Wilde saw women forced into lives of “vacuity, inanity, vanity, absurdity, and idleness.” Things were different for her son, Oscar... more »
Shelley’s jaw, Keats’s hair, Byron’s honeymoon-bed curtains — the Romantics fixated on objects of the dead. And then there were the Brontës... more »
The folly of the New Atheists: They've turned science into a religion — and become evangelicals in the process. John Gray explains... more »
Pity Juan Thompson, a shy, sensitive boy who grew up in terror of his trigger-happy, drug-addled father, Hunter... more »
For three weeks in 1974, Werner Herzog trekked from Munich to Paris. "Walking on foot brings you down to the very stark, naked core of existence"... more »
Since Clive James learned he had terminal leukemia, he's released six books, all reckoning with death. His latest is the most important... 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 »
Haters and killjoys, sadists and masochists: Critics are sometimes appreciated but mostly feared, resented, or ignored. A.O. Scott should know... more »
It's rare for a book to both explain science and change it. Even rarer for that book to reach a wide audience. That's what Richard Dawkins did 40 years ago... more »
Do you have a theory of biography? What about this: "We are not texts. Our histories are not narratives. Life is not literature"... more »
In the summer of 1936, German émigré writers congregated on a beach in Belgium. They had nowhere else to go... more »
Beware the data based on multiple regression analyses. You’re quite likely to get no information, or misinformation... more »
"We go to our deaths asymptotically, never getting there because ‘we’ and ‘there’ can’t exist at the same moment"...... more »
Sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, and psychologists promise to reveal the terrorist mind. None bring the insight of novelists... more »
John Dewey argued that publics never simply exist; they are created. Intellectuals should create the public for which they write. Few of them do... more »
Beware the scorn of Janet Malcolm. A new biography has her explaining what writers can and cannot do if they want to be regarded as honest and serious... more »
"The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter," wrote Brecht. How then should we handle this devious tool?... more »
Poetry used to be a performance, not a subject for close textual analysis. The century-old shift from poetry for the ear to poetry for the eye has not been good for poetry... more »
From Tolstoy to Bellow, Roth, and Knausgaard, it's male authors who are the real romantics, portraying love as mysterious, physical, and beyond explanation... more »
Our fascination with Augustine has led some scholars to try to know the unknowable, to spin flimsy hypotheses. Consider the semen-bread episode... 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 »
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