To read the world. In 15 years, Michael A. Orthofer has read and reviewed 3,687 books from 100 countries, originally published in 68 languages... more »
Pity Sartre! He spent three years wooing Wanda Kosakiewicz. Then Camus turned up and within days slept with her. Sartre never forgave him.... more »
There's bullshit and then there's bullshit in science: arguments, data, articles that have a veneer of truth and seem plausible, but aren't... more »
Brian Wood spent seven years among hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, studying what they ate and how they got it. He also learned about naturefaking... more »
The Code of Hammurabi, Pliny’s Natural History, The Joy of Sex: The reference shelf contains multitudes, from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia... more »
A sinister parasite on the work of Stravinsky, or a musical genius in his own right? The shady, irascible, exceptionally talented Robert Craft... more »
Digesting Knausgaard. An author both heralded and derided is sucked down the alimentary canal of academic literary criticism... more »
Our feel-good culture is allergic to ideas of sin and wickedness. These days the dark side of the soul is simply a dozen or so shades of gray... more »
How to distinguish good sex writing from pornography? Both require a dirty mind, but the former demands exactitude, daring, and cleverness... more »
Consider the personal life of Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist: the ganja, the time in a Jamaican prison, the afternoon drinks shared with a lizard... more »
The social sciences have failed to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical behavior. Surely there's more to life than the aloofness of intellectuals... more »
Criticism of technology cites design tweaks and economic analyses. To grasp the stakes, we need Gnosticism and Greek tragedy... more »
Genius has distinctions: Scientific genius is different from literary or painterly genius. Celebrity, however, is more predictable... more »
War photography obscures death, destruction, and displacement. The images tend to be heroic, inoffensive -- and false ... more »
Hemingway's published prose is muscular, energetic, lean, straightforward, his stories vivid and arresting. His letters are just plain dull... more »
The long-maligned Bad Quarto version of Hamlet, first published in 1603, reveals Shakespeare's evolution as an artist... more »
Slowly prolific, religious but tolerant, scholarly but unpretentious: Marilynne Robinson is a chastening figure in contemporary letters... more »
Beware the ex-believer, the heretic, the zealous ideological convert. How their hothouse style shaped American politics... more »
Thoreau and mortality. His brother’s death drove him to science — even ornithology — in an ontological quest... more »
The precarious history of “Las Meninas.” Velázquez's masterpiece was thrown out of a second-story window, nearly bombed by Franco, and dangled from a speeding train... more »
To get inside the head of Shostakovich, a rampant musical individualist, should we turn to the realism of history or the imaginative offerings of fiction?... more »
To read the world. In 15 years, Michael A. Orthofer has read and reviewed 3,687 books from 100 countries, originally published in 68 languages... more »
Brian Wood spent seven years among hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, studying what they ate and how they got it. He also learned about naturefaking... more »
Digesting Knausgaard. An author both heralded and derided is sucked down the alimentary canal of academic literary criticism... more »
Consider the personal life of Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist: the ganja, the time in a Jamaican prison, the afternoon drinks shared with a lizard... more »
Genius has distinctions: Scientific genius is different from literary or painterly genius. Celebrity, however, is more predictable... more »
The long-maligned Bad Quarto version of Hamlet, first published in 1603, reveals Shakespeare's evolution as an artist... more »
Thoreau and mortality. His brother’s death drove him to science — even ornithology — in an ontological quest... more »
The future belongs to automated, error-free prose, no stylistic vampirism, clichéd characters, or shopworn narrative devices... more »
Spurned by academe, W.E.B. Du Bois found a more important cause: “High on the ramparts of this blistering hell of life ... I sit and see the Truth”... more »
For six years, scholars dissected Mein Kampf sentence by sentence. The result spans 2,000 pages and 3,500 footnotes. It looks like the Talmud... more »
We speak of being consumed by envy but filled with gratitude. Oliver Sacks approached death with poignancy, stoicism -- and gratitude... more »
Robert Lowell in love. He was a depressive, philandering alcoholic who treated women terribly. Yet he saw them as intellectual equals... more »
Psychologists set out to provide moral guidance for society, but they have proven morally suspect themselves. It’s not easy to outsource ethical reflection... more »
Liberal democracy is so widely admired that we conflate liberalism and democracy. But democracy can be an illiberal train wreck... more »
Joan Didion is our Mother of Sorrows, our Saint Joan. Only she isn't. She’s cool-eyed and coldblooded. That's her genius... more »
"Pimp my muse." Is anything so transparently self-conscious, self-undermining, self-mocking as a video book trailer for literary fiction?... more »
So the great magazine story is dead, killed by the Internet? Nonsense. Magazines have been dying for as long as there have been magazines... 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 »
Pity Sartre! He spent three years wooing Wanda Kosakiewicz. Then Camus turned up and within days slept with her. Sartre never forgave him.... more »
The Code of Hammurabi, Pliny’s Natural History, The Joy of Sex: The reference shelf contains multitudes, from ancient Babylon to Wikipedia... more »
Our feel-good culture is allergic to ideas of sin and wickedness. These days the dark side of the soul is simply a dozen or so shades of gray... more »
The social sciences have failed to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical behavior. Surely there's more to life than the aloofness of intellectuals... more »
War photography obscures death, destruction, and displacement. The images tend to be heroic, inoffensive -- and false ... more »
Slowly prolific, religious but tolerant, scholarly but unpretentious: Marilynne Robinson is a chastening figure in contemporary letters... more »
The precarious history of “Las Meninas.” Velázquez's masterpiece was thrown out of a second-story window, nearly bombed by Franco, and dangled from a speeding train... more »
Dismissing art as “pretentious" often reveals the accuser’s own anti-intellectual snobbery. Ambitious art merits better treatment... more »
“The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings,” said Oscar Wilde. How a commitment to political and moral ideology is the enemy of pleasure... more »
A.O. Scott is a critic who doesn't like to pick sides. His is an ethos of winking worldliness, not philosophical and aesthetic commitment... more »
The toll of technology. We're engaged in “a race to the bottom of the brain stem.” Rewards go to those companies that keep us mindlessly attentive... more »
Forty-five years after publishing his first book, Giorgio Agamben continues to inspire condemnation, misunderstanding, frustration — and praise... more »
To understand modernism, pay less attention to poems and paintings than to faceless bureaucrats, agency acronyms, and legalese... more »
Orwell and the idea of Englishness. It took decades for the India-born writer to overcome his dislike for Britain... more »
Atheists in antiquity. What did Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris learn from Diagoras of Melos, the first known atheist? Not much... more »
Moriz Scheyer was a central figure in Vienna in the 1930s: friend of Mahler, Schnitzler, and Zweig. His wartime diary has been rediscovered... more »
If Ezra Pound is remembered, it shouldn't be because of his rambling and tedious Cantos. No surprise, given the author’s imperviousness to introspection... 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 »
There's bullshit and then there's bullshit in science: arguments, data, articles that have a veneer of truth and seem plausible, but aren't... more »
A sinister parasite on the work of Stravinsky, or a musical genius in his own right? The shady, irascible, exceptionally talented Robert Craft... more »
How to distinguish good sex writing from pornography? Both require a dirty mind, but the former demands exactitude, daring, and cleverness... more »
Criticism of technology cites design tweaks and economic analyses. To grasp the stakes, we need Gnosticism and Greek tragedy... more »
Hemingway's published prose is muscular, energetic, lean, straightforward, his stories vivid and arresting. His letters are just plain dull... more »
Beware the ex-believer, the heretic, the zealous ideological convert. How their hothouse style shaped American politics... more »
To get inside the head of Shostakovich, a rampant musical individualist, should we turn to the realism of history or the imaginative offerings of fiction?... more »
In which a critic reacts to a book with such intense antipathy that he decides he must meet the author. "I wanted to understand who he is and why he wrote this”... more »
What makes “professional critics” professional? Life in the prose factory, it seems, is full of self-importance, resentment, and desperation... more »
With an army of Dadaists, nudists, and drug addicts, the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio attempted to liberate the city of Fiume. Things quickly devolved... more »
Authenticity and art. When it’s possible to create visually perfect reproductions of famous works, will we discard the originals, or celebrate them anew?... more »
On the wall behind Gore Vidal's desk were 20 or so framed magazine covers with his face on each one. At work, he said, “I like to be reminded who I am”... more »
Proust was among the first to recognize that the shock of air travel wasn’t technological but intellectual: a new way of processing the world, a new habit of mind... more »
Have we moved beyond Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau? No, and nor should we. Their 18th-century debates are still our debates ... more »
War and Peace helped establish historical fiction but left open the genre's quandary: What's the right balance between history and fiction?... more »
Infinite Jest is 20 years old and shows its age. So why does the novel still feel so electrically alive? A few theories... more »
The identity museum has become so pervasive, its rules so rigid, that it's almost never commented upon. Then there are Jewish museums... 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 »
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