The cult of science. As it gains more and more prestige, it attracts opportunists and charlatans spewing an ocean of nonsense... more »
Authenticity is overrated. It's pretense and flagrant artifice that create culture. We'd have no art without it... more »
"I wonder why Arab prisons are not full of writers," says the poet Adonis. "I wonder why, because it means that Arab writers are not doing their jobs"... more »
“The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper,” declared Mao, who liked his meals spicy. Turns out, he may have been on to something... more »
Growing up Mann. Thomas was distant and severe to his six children, who lacked his talent. In Klaus, this produced a fascinating and tragic restlessness ... more »
Everybody loves diversity. Nobody opposes it, especially on college campuses. But the link between demographic and intellectual diversity is, at best, tenuous... more »
Inspired by Nietzsche, the architect Philip Johnson went to Berlin to understand both art and power. There he marveled at blond boys in black leather paying homage to Hitler... more »
What word-processing wrought. The shift from typewriter to computer changed the way artists and intellectuals wrote. Derrida, for one, saw that his paragraphs were too long... more »
Tennis, the most isolating of games, draws the obsessive and brooding, those in search of agony and transcendence. Literary types, in other words... more »
Edward Copleston was a shrewd observer of the literary scene. His essay "Advice to a Young Reviewer" was published in 1807. It holds up disturbingly well... more »
A puzzle of the French Revolution: Paris was alive with scientific progress, yet many scientists were imprisoned or murdered... more »
The tragedy of Dorothy Parker. Intelligent and clever, she won fame early in life. Death and suicide, however, were never far from her thoughts... more »
How societies make progress. It can't be engineered or managed, as technocrats and many academics think. Rather, social institutions evolve... more »
If Christopher Hitchens was so good — clever, fearless, well read — why so bad? If he was so right, why so wrong?... more »
Oppressively earnest, quick to take offense, an aggressive drunk — Grace Hartigan didn’t make things easy for her friends, who included Frankenthaler, O’Hara, and Ashbery... more »
Nabokov made hundreds of magnified drawings of butterfly genitalia. What can his lepidoptery tell us about his literary output?... more »
What makes a dog a dog? Forty-two teeth, advanced auditory and olfactory senses, tight-knit social structure. But really it's all about food... more »
Baffled by the rise of ISIS? Spasms of barbarism are the norm when modernization outpaces civilization. John Gray explains... more »
Is academic prose really an unintelligible stew of bloviating inanities and polysyllabic gibberish? Sure looks that way... more »
Aged, skeletal, pancaked in makeup, Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo’s major-domo, was the philosopher-queen of "the will to please"... more »
What's the Homintern? The vast network of gay creative types who have for the past century been the foremost arbiters of the arts... more »
The cult of science. As it gains more and more prestige, it attracts opportunists and charlatans spewing an ocean of nonsense... more »
“The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper,” declared Mao, who liked his meals spicy. Turns out, he may have been on to something... more »
Inspired by Nietzsche, the architect Philip Johnson went to Berlin to understand both art and power. There he marveled at blond boys in black leather paying homage to Hitler... more »
Edward Copleston was a shrewd observer of the literary scene. His essay "Advice to a Young Reviewer" was published in 1807. It holds up disturbingly well... more »
How societies make progress. It can't be engineered or managed, as technocrats and many academics think. Rather, social institutions evolve... more »
Nabokov made hundreds of magnified drawings of butterfly genitalia. What can his lepidoptery tell us about his literary output?... more »
Is academic prose really an unintelligible stew of bloviating inanities and polysyllabic gibberish? Sure looks that way... more »
Meet Irv Teibel, the man who took his recording equipment to the seashore and came back New York's least likely media mogul... 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 »
Authenticity is overrated. It's pretense and flagrant artifice that create culture. We'd have no art without it... more »
Growing up Mann. Thomas was distant and severe to his six children, who lacked his talent. In Klaus, this produced a fascinating and tragic restlessness ... more »
What word-processing wrought. The shift from typewriter to computer changed the way artists and intellectuals wrote. Derrida, for one, saw that his paragraphs were too long... more »
A puzzle of the French Revolution: Paris was alive with scientific progress, yet many scientists were imprisoned or murdered... more »
If Christopher Hitchens was so good — clever, fearless, well read — why so bad? If he was so right, why so wrong?... more »
What makes a dog a dog? Forty-two teeth, advanced auditory and olfactory senses, tight-knit social structure. But really it's all about food... more »
Aged, skeletal, pancaked in makeup, Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo’s major-domo, was the philosopher-queen of "the will to please"... more »
Twain's autobiography - uncut, unexpurgated, unchronological - clocks in at half a million words. An uproarious and unmitigated delight, right? Well... 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 »
"I wonder why Arab prisons are not full of writers," says the poet Adonis. "I wonder why, because it means that Arab writers are not doing their jobs"... more »
Everybody loves diversity. Nobody opposes it, especially on college campuses. But the link between demographic and intellectual diversity is, at best, tenuous... more »
Tennis, the most isolating of games, draws the obsessive and brooding, those in search of agony and transcendence. Literary types, in other words... more »
The tragedy of Dorothy Parker. Intelligent and clever, she won fame early in life. Death and suicide, however, were never far from her thoughts... more »
Oppressively earnest, quick to take offense, an aggressive drunk — Grace Hartigan didn’t make things easy for her friends, who included Frankenthaler, O’Hara, and Ashbery... more »
Baffled by the rise of ISIS? Spasms of barbarism are the norm when modernization outpaces civilization. John Gray explains... more »
What's the Homintern? The vast network of gay creative types who have for the past century been the foremost arbiters of the arts... more »
James Baldwin's first novel was set in Harlem. His second had all white characters. His publishers were having none of it. You're a "Negro writer," they reminded him... 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 »
New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week.
Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
© 1998 — 2016
Arts & Letters Daily is brought to you by
The Chronicle of Higher Education