Violette Leduc - thief, smuggler, writer, lesbian - articulated a feminism of lived experience. Not like her mentor, Simone de Beauvoir... more »
Often dandyish on the page, Wallace Stevens could be vicious in person. He traded punches with Hemingway. He lost... more »
Marianne Moore’s poetry of the small produces “the feeling that life is softly exploding around us,” as John Ashbery put it. Is she our greatest modern poet?... more »
Cervantes and Shakespeare. One was a man of action, a warrior, and, for a time, a slave. The other preferred writing tales of men at war... more »
Hobsbawm, Foucault, Dworkin, Lacan — how far to the left were the thinkers of the New Left? Roger Scruton’s answer may surprise you... more »
We hear music with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles. Do we also hear with the color of our skin?... more »
Praise pretension! It’s a noble cultural yearning, an assertion of intellectual ambition, a refusal to be defined by a reductive understanding of oneself... more »
Pornography and its discontents. Consider life in a sexual utopia, a “pornutopia” in which anyone is up for anything. Result: Boredom... more »
African fiction is rarely discussed, and almost never in literary terms. The novels are read as mere political documents, catalogs of social ills and cultural themes... more »
Eugenics is now seen as harmful folly. But once it was beloved of progressives, reformers, and intellectual elites. And nowhere was it more central than at Harvard... more »
Charlotte Brontë’s awkwardness. The unrequited love, the early-morning wedding, the incident with the hairpiece -- her social life was in her writing... more »
Decisions, decisions, decisions — so many to make. We tend to forget that the truly important ones are out of our hands... more »
Adrienne Rich’s feminism changed her life and her poetry. It also placed her at odds with Susan Sontag, who regarded such moralizing as powerful but limiting... more »
The “taint” of commerce. When art becomes a stand-in for wealth and political influence, where does that leave those who collect for sake of collecting?... more »
Art in the Anthropocene. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic... more »
Paranoia, brutality, longevity: Stalin's three decades in power have the ingredients of a great novel. So why the dearth of Stalinist fiction?... more »
Thomas De Quincey's journey from riches to rags to posthumous fame as an opium eater began on a cheerless Sunday in 1804... more »
Inattention was long perceived as abnormal. Now it's normal. But people aren't distracted so much as uncertain about what to pay attention to... more »
Who was Terry Southern? Writer, faded celebrity, stoner-raconteur, and pioneer of all that was breathless, new, and weird in the '60s... more »
Museum work in America has always required an unusual mixture of scholarship, showmanship, and prodigous talent for raising money... more »
The study of creativity carries a quasi-scientific aura and a seemingly irresistible appeal to the business traveler. Thomas Frank is dubious... more »
Violette Leduc - thief, smuggler, writer, lesbian - articulated a feminism of lived experience. Not like her mentor, Simone de Beauvoir... more »
Cervantes and Shakespeare. One was a man of action, a warrior, and, for a time, a slave. The other preferred writing tales of men at war... more »
Praise pretension! It’s a noble cultural yearning, an assertion of intellectual ambition, a refusal to be defined by a reductive understanding of oneself... more »
Eugenics is now seen as harmful folly. But once it was beloved of progressives, reformers, and intellectual elites. And nowhere was it more central than at Harvard... more »
Adrienne Rich’s feminism changed her life and her poetry. It also placed her at odds with Susan Sontag, who regarded such moralizing as powerful but limiting... more »
Paranoia, brutality, longevity: Stalin's three decades in power have the ingredients of a great novel. So why the dearth of Stalinist fiction?... more »
Who was Terry Southern? Writer, faded celebrity, stoner-raconteur, and pioneer of all that was breathless, new, and weird in the '60s... more »
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 »
Often dandyish on the page, Wallace Stevens could be vicious in person. He traded punches with Hemingway. He lost... more »
Hobsbawm, Foucault, Dworkin, Lacan — how far to the left were the thinkers of the New Left? Roger Scruton’s answer may surprise you... more »
Pornography and its discontents. Consider life in a sexual utopia, a “pornutopia” in which anyone is up for anything. Result: Boredom... more »
Charlotte Brontë’s awkwardness. The unrequited love, the early-morning wedding, the incident with the hairpiece -- her social life was in her writing... more »
The “taint” of commerce. When art becomes a stand-in for wealth and political influence, where does that leave those who collect for sake of collecting?... more »
Thomas De Quincey's journey from riches to rags to posthumous fame as an opium eater began on a cheerless Sunday in 1804... more »
Museum work in America has always required an unusual mixture of scholarship, showmanship, and prodigous talent for raising money... more »
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 »
Marianne Moore’s poetry of the small produces “the feeling that life is softly exploding around us,” as John Ashbery put it. Is she our greatest modern poet?... more »
We hear music with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles. Do we also hear with the color of our skin?... more »
African fiction is rarely discussed, and almost never in literary terms. The novels are read as mere political documents, catalogs of social ills and cultural themes... more »
Decisions, decisions, decisions — so many to make. We tend to forget that the truly important ones are out of our hands... more »
Art in the Anthropocene. “What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic... more »
Inattention was long perceived as abnormal. Now it's normal. But people aren't distracted so much as uncertain about what to pay attention to... more »
The study of creativity carries a quasi-scientific aura and a seemingly irresistible appeal to the business traveler. Thomas Frank is dubious... more »
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 Gorky, 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 »
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