Articles of Note

Darwin did not take metaphors lightly. He honed them and defended them. That was the case with "natural selection," which wasn't his first choice for evolution... more »

When languages meet, one usually dies. And revival is rare. That’s a depressing thought for a linguist who finds English kind of boring... more »

Nathan Glazer is an intellectual loner by temperament and design. Also because he possesses that rare thing: a willingness to change his mind... more »

Was Shakespeare rich? He was well-to-do, akin to the minor gentry in Stratford-upon-Avon, but not wealthy. Nothing like his rival, Ben Jonson... more »

Camus in America. He was attracted by the hospitality but repelled by the superficiality. “The secret to conversation here is to talk in order to say nothing” ... more »

It's magisterial, built of mahogany with a leather writing surface. It even appeared on a book jacket. Will no one buy Saul Bellow's desk?... more »

Odd fact: More than a few jihadists have studied engineering. Why? It's not about nationality or religion, but about how they think... more »

They gather each morning at 8:30 in a converted warehouse in Long Island City. What brings them together is a shared belief that the 20th century ruined art... more »

Economics has a reputation for ideological diversity, even conservatism. But the field has a radical past that argues for a different future... more »

Journalism is in perpetual crisis. But a savior has emerged. It's called sponsored content, and it's surreal... more »

Hilary Putnam, dead at 89, led a life of reason and argument. He was a thinker of breadth. “Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one”... more »

Jan Gross forced Poland to reckon with its complicity in the Holocaust. Now an effort is underway to undermine the historian and sanitize the past... more »

The mattering instinct. Sure, figure out what matters to you, what’s meaningful in life. But resist the tendency to universalize... more »

How a cocky amateur violinist became a professional thief. The tale of the stolen Stradivarius has to do with the wall between one’s past and one’s present... more »

Far from helpless, young Emily Dickinson bombarded the world with her poems. As Camille Paglia puts it, "The brutality of this belle of Amherst would stop a truck"... more »

The riddle of the modern economy is not that overworked professionals are miserable. It's that they are not. When did work become a refuge?... more »

Does writer's block exist? Yes. And while blocked writers are blocked in their own ways, the remedy is the same: Think of something ludicrous... more »

The meaning of death. Diogenes wanted his body left outside for the animals. His request still shocks. Why?... more »

Whether "idiot optimist" or "art in every sense," Mickey Mouse, at 90, is American cinema's most durable icon... more »

Never fear: Earbuds are not atomizing society, isolating individuals even in a crowd. Musical experiences are inherently social, even when you listen alone... more »

1,885 paintings, 1,228 sculptures, 7,089 drawings, 30,000 prints, 150 sketchbooks, 3,222 ceramic works: That's what Picasso left behind. Then there are the fakes... more »

The idea that willpower is a finite resource, a muscle that can be exercised to exhaustion, is a staple of psychology. It also might be bogus... more »

How have M.F.A. programs affected the novel? Besides an increase in words like “lawns,” “stomachs,” and “wrists,” the answer seems to be: Not at all... more »

Saint Bartholomew was the most hideously tormented of the apostles. No wonder artists like Michelangelo identified with him... more »

If human consciousness could be uploaded into digital form, soon we'd have a box of a trillion virtual souls. This is the sort of scenario that preoccupies Stephen Wolfram... more »

Critics have long said that the life of Langston Hughes – not his poetry – is his true legacy. Time to put that notion to rest... more »

"Never forget" is one of humanity’s highest moral obligations, an unassailable piety of our age. But what we need is more forgetting... more »

Despite his success, Umberto Eco remained down-to-earth, not remotely narcissistic. He was no pompous master of thought, no Italian Jacques Lacan... more »

What constitutes a swear word? Why doesn't it function like other words? The answer requires distinguishing it from a slur... more »

George Orwell died alone. But in his last days he was visited by friends, some dating back to his days at Eton. Many had ties to the CIA... more »

New Books

The Marx Brothers were antic, zany, madcap, anarchic. Yet scholars and critics insist on attaching deep significance to the act. Groucho would object... more »

A typical German owns 10,000 objects. Britain is home to six billion items of clothing. How we became a world of consumers... more »

Susan Jacoby is a champion of irreligion. But perhaps despite herself, she makes the subject of religion contagiously interesting... more »

What can be gleaned about English grammar from a close examination of newspapers and magazines published on December 29, 2008? ... more »

Digital memory is ubiquitous and inexpensive yet unimaginably fragile. Result: The history of the 21st century will be riddled with silences... more »

In 1972, Joseph Brodsky, expelled from the Soviet Union, arrived in America. He'd become exactly what he didn't want to be: a dissident... more »

Culture shapes language, and language shapes culture. Moral change is therefore partly driven by semantic change. Charles Taylor explains... more »

Eleven books of short stories, eight of poetry, four children’s books, five nonfiction: How did Kay Boyle find time for husbands, children, and lovers?... more »

Finding Franz. Musings on beer, reports of the color of his eyes, a (failed) scheme to strike it rich: 99 ways of looking at Kafka... more »

By day Wallace Stevens was a casually racist insurance executive. By night he confronted the basic questions of art and life... more »

Adventures in lepidoptery. Nabokov regarded his 14-hour days producing comparative analyses of butterfly genitalia as the most rewarding of his life  ... more »

What is existentialism? The loosely defined current of thought became an intellectual movement in 1932 at a cafe in Paris... more »

This history of the 20th-century literary world is one of artistic insecurity. “What I suffer from,” said Alfred Kazin, is “the lack of  a working philosophy”... more »

King of the rock 'n' roll underworld? David Litvinoff was an aficionado of head-shaving, a vicious lowlife, and, says Eric Clapton, "a stupendous intellect"... more »

Stefan Zweig’s endless retreat. Devoid of political conviction, the displaced Austrian essayist wandered Europe, writing hymns to fraternity and brotherhood... more »

The ancient world had no conflict between science and religion. But there was a lot of doubt. Indeed, doubt about religion is as old as religion itself... more »

How Stanley Fish, literary theorist and scholar of 17th-century poetry, became a newspaper columnist. Hint: It's the way he thinks, not the views he espouses... more »

Sam Harris's science of morality is intuitive, appealing - and unjustified. Science itself cannot determine human values... more »

Hannah Arendt tends to be seen as a quintessentially European thinker. But she became an American citizen in 1951. And America changed her... more »

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, a sweeping and celebrated history of humankind, falls prey to the great intellectual temptation of our age: to reduce everything to science... more »

The business of surviving as a writer has always been precarious, and it remains so: The average professional earns $16,000 a year... more »

A book can open up the world. Death is integral to that world. Sontag, Sendak, Updike, Freud: What happens when a writer reaches the end?... more »

What fiction is for. Offering insight into humanity that cannot be replicated by psychology, sociology, or any of the social sciences... more »

Cynicism, romance, reality, grit: the private eye. His ambivalent appeal – a good person forced into dirty work – inspired an exacting literary style... more »

In May 1937, Orson Welles met Ernest Hemingway, who accused him of being gay. They swung at each other, then became drinking buddies... more »

Albert Speer had a flair for the theatrical, for colossal scale, and for self-preservation. But unlike the man he served, Speer lacked architectural imagination... more »

The manuscript of William Empson's The Face of the Buddha was thought to have vanished in a taxi in 1947. It's been found, and it's tremendous... more »

The men who built Hollywood. They made millions, created scandals, and, for the most part, ruined their kids. A story of
children and childish adults... more »

The story of the Brontë sisters is that of women with time. Isolated by geography, a needy father, and a drug-addled brother, they wrote constantly... more »

Essays & Opinions

Building design is largely absent from public debate. Our loss. It's time to rescue architecture from the depredations of elite opinion... more »

Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mario Vargas Llosa ran for office. They all failed. Politics is unkind to writers... more »

T.S. Eliot believed that to understand a writer requires reading her complete works. He overlooked the advantages of ignorance... more »

How to read The Divine Comedy. Few of us any longer try to tackle what the poet called his versi strani, strange verses. But patience pays off... more »

In 1970, Kate Millett filed the dissertation that would become Sexual Politics. Reading it, an adviser complained, was like “sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker"... more »

Magnanimous and cosmopolitan, prudent and traditional, humanitarian and realist: Will the real Edmund Burke please stand up?... more »

What futurists get wrong. The next frontier of intelligence might not be silicon-based. Machines might want to go back to biology... more »

To sum up, to explain, to glimpse the darkness, to leave the world with words: The morbid appeal of the suicide note as literary genre... more »

Is there a point at which scientific development can no longer be described as progress? Thoughts on the human toll of human ingenuity... more »

A familiar pattern: Liberal writer with Muslim background criticizes Islam. Western intellectuals recoil. It's a problem, and it's happening again... more »

Consciousness is a spectrum; the mind flows from one mental state to another. Software could imitate this spectrum. How would humans fare in a world of superhuman robots?... more »

Does the novel provide communitarian mortar, showing us how to live together? Or — in an age of connectivity — does it teach us how to be separate?... more »

In an academic and intellectual culture that emphasizes safe and comforting patterns of thought, what becomes of free thinking - and what happens to the clash of ideas?... more »

Literary translation is an imperfect art; errors and omissions flourish. Finding the original is like seeing an oil painting after the discolored varnish has been removed... more »

Art and arson. Arshile Gorki, Robert Rauschenberg, Alfred Leslie, John Baldessari: Why do artists' studios so frequently go up in flames?... more »

What happens when a poet who writes about fame becomes famous? Eileen Myles, renegade outsider, is now an insider. Welcome to the hall of mirrors... more »

The Jean Sibelius paradox: Why did the feted and revered composer feel neglected and misunderstood? Blame Mahler, who called him a purveyor of Scandinavian kitsch... more »

Art and politics. Art made submissive to politics is unhealthy for both. The critic's task is to find the edge where art meets the world... more »

Literature is where we go to identify ourselves, where we shake off attitudes and beliefs. The novel, says Arthur Krystal, is the vehicle of our discontent... more »

"Is it possible to write criticism — or even to write critically — while at the same time refusing the critic’s authority?"... more »

Sociology is a suspicious, even paranoid science, an attempt to suss out the reality of reality. What can it teach us about spy fiction?... more »

Science may be impartial, but scientific culture is not. Ask a female scientist about unwanted advances, jokes that aren't funny, grabbing that isn't an accident... more »

What happened to Annie Dillard? She seemed like a Thoreau for our time, a major voice in letters. Then came hypocrisy, spiritual snobbery, and silence... more »

Constance Fenimore Woolson was a popular American writer beset by depression, deafness, and an inability to make a romantic connection. Then, in 1879, she went abroad... more »

Pink teacups, crumbling frescoes, and a brown typewriter. What can one learn from a journey to James Baldwin’s house in Saint-Paul de Vence? A great deal, it turns out... more »