The English poet Stevie Smith has been dismissed as an amateur, an oddball, an ingénue. It’s time to take her seriously... more »
We remember her German years and the romance with Heidegger, but the current climate demands a different Hannah Arendt, one we have forgotten: philosopher of statelessnes... more »
When T.S. Eliot’s writing was good, it was very, very good. When it was bad, it neared horrid. Cue the snobbery, the schoolboy nastiness, the racism... more »
The problem with Wikipedia. This is not about factual reliability, but about monopolistic ubiquity. We run the risk of living in an information monoculture... more »
The Kama Sutra has long been misunderstood as a handbook on what to do in bed. It is, in fact, a series of devious strategies for seduction... more »
Poets and their birthdays. An annual excuse for mopey and rueful words: It's their party and they’ll cry if they want to. And poets want to... more »
"We don’t learn much of anything from the past," says David Rieff. The crimes of then provide no prophylactic against those of now... more »
Have you ever wanted to be a badger? A goat? The long, weird history of artists and intellectuals trying to become animals involves Tolstoy, Joyce, Heidegger... more »
Reading Edward Said in a warming world. The critic had no time for tree-huggers, who he felt lacked a proper cause. But tree-huggers should make time for Said... more »
Esperanto enthusiasts tend to be optimistic, forward-looking idealists. Except when the topic turns to the global dominance of English... more »
Cultural critics and English professors face the same problem: How to articulate a positive case for art and literature, and talk as if they actually matter... more »
Edgar Allan Poe and his admirers. Baudelaire revered him, as did Tennyson, Hardy, and Yeats. Edmund Wilson thought him the finest critic America ever produced... more »
Emily Dickinson was known in her own time as a naturalist and botanist. Her gardens provided her with tropes, narratives, and imagery... more »
Want to eat like Alfred Hitchcock? Learn what Joan Crawford thrived on, apart from anger, spite, and bile? Now there's a book for that... more »
Speak, butterfly. How the intricate structures of Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire were inspired by Nabokov's dissections of butterfly genitalia... more »
Many scholars seek a solemn, serious life, like monks determined to eradicate frivolity. Benedict Anderson favored jokes, digressions, and sarcasm... more »
How to describe late Henry James? Rebarbatively abstract, recondite, complicated, confusing -- all true. It's his difficulty that helps makes him worth reading... more »
Every day about 300 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook. An estimated 204 million emails are sent every minute. How do we decide what to keep?... more »
If moral responsibility and the social institutions that enforce it depend on belief in our own agency, what happens when we lose faith in free will?... more »
Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky regarded Alexander Herzen as one of the finest prose writers. Then Lenin praised him, and his reputation never recovered... more »
The art of suffering. In private, Edith Piaf was a practical joker. On stage, she personified deprivation, pain, loss -- and she never broke character... more »
The English poet Stevie Smith has been dismissed as an amateur, an oddball, an ingénue. It’s time to take her seriously... more »
The problem with Wikipedia. This is not about factual reliability, but about monopolistic ubiquity. We run the risk of living in an information monoculture... more »
"We don’t learn much of anything from the past," says David Rieff. The crimes of then provide no prophylactic against those of now... more »
Esperanto enthusiasts tend to be optimistic, forward-looking idealists. Except when the topic turns to the global dominance of English... more »
Emily Dickinson was known in her own time as a naturalist and botanist. Her gardens provided her with tropes, narratives, and imagery... more »
Many scholars seek a solemn, serious life, like monks determined to eradicate frivolity. Benedict Anderson favored jokes, digressions, and sarcasm... more »
If moral responsibility and the social institutions that enforce it depend on belief in our own agency, what happens when we lose faith in free will?... more »
Kant declared fashion "foolish." To Kierkegaard, outer garments kept us from ascertaining inner truth. But clothes are a form of thought, freighted with meaning... more »
Inside the thrilling, heretical world of Albert Murray. He celebrated the jazzman and black equality. He was also a genuine elitist... more »
Reproductive systems are not much like clocks. So why the persistent idea of women’s biological clock? It's a story of science and sexism... more »
Do wealth and status turn decent people into incorrigible brutes? An inquiry into the moral conduct of powerful people... more »
Hazel Elizabeth Hester was a file clerk, an Air Force veteran, and a hoarder. She was also a pen pal of Flannery O’Connor and Iris Murdoch... more »
The mark of a great mind, La Rochefoucauld said, was to “say many things with few words.” Thus the remarkable lifespan of the aphorism... more »
Economists like to think of themselves as the most scientific social scientists. But they mistake elegant equations for truth... more »
Tom Vanderbilt is in his 40s. His daughter is 4. Together they're learning how to play chess -- and, unwittingly, about the brain as it ages... more »
To be a writer is to accept abuse. Here's D.H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell: "The article you send me is a plausible lie, and I hate it." They were friends... more »
How to launch a psychological theory: Take an old idea and give it a catchy name, suggesting rough-hewn authenticity and old-fashioned virtue. Call it grit... more »
That Robert Hughes had literary chops is beyond dispute. His judgment in art is a contested matter, but it shouldn't be... more »
Nietzsche completed his first memoir at 13, and wrote another five over the next decade. He wrote to see who he was. What he was was a mama's boy... more »
On April 6, 1922, Albert Einstein met Henri Bergson at Société française de philosophie. The encounter marks the beginning of philosophy's eclipse by science... more »
Pumpkin, Basil, Citrus, Red Pepper, Artichoke, Cherry, Buttercup. What's with the oddly horticultural lingo of Israeli soldiers?... more »
A mad old man who imagines himself a knight rides forth on his frail horse, Rocinante. The modern era - and with it the novel - is born... more »
Lord Acton had a library of 67,000 volumes, scrupulously cross-referenced. His miscellanea fill some 50,000 pages. But he never published a book... more »
Jenny Diski - virtuoso novelist, memoirist, essayist, pessimist, misanthrope; - is dead. She was 68... more... more... more... more... more »
For Walt Whitman, the body was the basis of democracy. So he was a health nut, a fount of advice on sex, bathing, exercise, footwear... more »
The history of war is typically written by winners. But not the Spanish Civil War. Our version has been Orwell's version. And it's time for a change... more »
When Romanticism meets romance. From Flaubert onward, it’s clear that literature gives us the wrong idea about love... more »
Camille Paglia and a life of observation. She doesn't sit in a university. She doesn't go to conferences. She listens to conversations at the mall... more »
Poetry and money. Eileen Myles sent poems to The New Yorker for 30 years. Finally, one was accepted. Payment: $600 and two nights at a motel... more »
Here's what we know: Shakespeare was buried on April 25, 1616. How did he die? Many theories - alcoholism, typhus - but little evidence... more »
We remember her German years and the romance with Heidegger, but the current climate demands a different Hannah Arendt, one we have forgotten: philosopher of statelessnes... more »
The Kama Sutra has long been misunderstood as a handbook on what to do in bed. It is, in fact, a series of devious strategies for seduction... more »
Have you ever wanted to be a badger? A goat? The long, weird history of artists and intellectuals trying to become animals involves Tolstoy, Joyce, Heidegger... more »
Cultural critics and English professors face the same problem: How to articulate a positive case for art and literature, and talk as if they actually matter... more »
Want to eat like Alfred Hitchcock? Learn what Joan Crawford thrived on, apart from anger, spite, and bile? Now there's a book for that... more »
How to describe late Henry James? Rebarbatively abstract, recondite, complicated, confusing -- all true. It's his difficulty that helps makes him worth reading... more »
Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoyevsky regarded Alexander Herzen as one of the finest prose writers. Then Lenin praised him, and his reputation never recovered... more »
A tale of two architects. Frank Lloyd Wright, genius; Philip Johnson, highbrow aesthete. How were they rivals when one so eclipsed the other?... more »
The Romanovs ruled for 304 years, a reign that was particularly bleak for women yet great for female rulers... more »
Wittgenstein’s charisma. He lived philosophy as a personal struggle. That made him severe, ruthless, censorious, and depressed. And bewitching... more »
So you want to have a baby. Why leave anything -- gender, intelligence, personality, propensity for disease -- to chance? Welcome to the future of sex-free reproduction... more »
Burglars remake the built environment to conform to their own needs, upending basic assumptions about how buildings work.... more »
How plot works. Flashbacks, prefigurations, parallel subplots all rest on the subtle relationship between chronology and artistic effect... more »
Courtier, politician, scientist, explorer: Sir Kenelm Digby, 17th-century English polymath, lived a literary life of rakish excess... more »
A man of principle and an opportunist, scoundrel, snob, con man easily fooled, coward and hero, generous, mean, clever, stupid: the true Casanova... more »
Slapstick and the Soviets. Charlie Chaplin turned industrial labor into a circus act. This connected with Petrograd's avant garde - at first... more »
David Hume failed to get an academic job. Today he is a hero of academic philosophers. Why? His decorously veiled attacks on theism, for one thing... more »
Loneliness is endemic to urban life: the acute feeling of isolation in a big crowd. Think of Warhol, surrounded always by people but never true friends... more »
"Deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop.” That was Time in 1966 on gays in the arts. What was the Homintern?... more »
How Patti Smith spends her days: On a bizarre, bohemian death cruise, taking blurry Polaroids of writers’ graves and meditating on pebbles... more »
What word processing wrought. Easily, endlessly editable text lets you go on revising forever. It’s a blessing. And a curse... more »
If secularism is a powerful force, why is it so often on the losing side of history? Because religion is no atavistic holdover; it's here to stay... more »
The cult of the unfinished. Incomplete paintings, sculptures, novels, and musical compositions are undeniably seductive - too seductive... more »
Frank Gehry, known for egomaniacal arrogance and an inability to stick to a budget, made his name by turning a shack into a shrine... more »
Stalin's henchmen. Vile murderers and treacherous cowards, they were also a musical bunch. They could have made a competent chamber ensemble... more »
It’s all well and good, intellectually, to praise forgetting. But collective amnesia is something else entirely. Where to draw the line?... more »
The history of virility - Henry VIII’s codpiece, Louis XIV's dancing - was a lively topic. Then a team of French academics went to work... more »
Sexism across the centuries. In classical music, the torch of white, male genius is passed from generation to generation. Time to reconsider female composers... more »
The Aeneid plays an outsize role in the cultural literacy of the West. A reminder of the confusing and disturbing pleasures of epic narrative... more »
When T.S. Eliot’s writing was good, it was very, very good. When it was bad, it neared horrid. Cue the snobbery, the schoolboy nastiness, the racism... more »
Poets and their birthdays. An annual excuse for mopey and rueful words: It's their party and they’ll cry if they want to. And poets want to... more »
Reading Edward Said in a warming world. The critic had no time for tree-huggers, who he felt lacked a proper cause. But tree-huggers should make time for Said... more »
Edgar Allan Poe and his admirers. Baudelaire revered him, as did Tennyson, Hardy, and Yeats. Edmund Wilson thought him the finest critic America ever produced... more »
Speak, butterfly. How the intricate structures of Pnin, Lolita, and Pale Fire were inspired by Nabokov's dissections of butterfly genitalia... more »
Every day about 300 million photographs are uploaded to Facebook. An estimated 204 million emails are sent every minute. How do we decide what to keep?... more »
The art of suffering. In private, Edith Piaf was a practical joker. On stage, she personified deprivation, pain, loss -- and she never broke character... more »
Toxic adverbs! Prose today is polluted by them. They are an abomination, evidence of dullness in the choice of verbs and adjectives... more »
English departments are always in search of the next big theory -- structuralism, ecocriticism, evolutionary criticism. Now it's digital humanities... more »
Virginia Woolf thought the Brontës' social isolation — not to mention their knitting and piano playing — enfeebled their true genius. The opposite is closer to the truth... more »
To see Shakespeare performed live is to confront language opaque to a degree that no skilled actor can remediate. For some reason we tolerate this and call it a “poetic” experience... more »
Allegory first appeared in the waning years of the Roman Empire. It is a rich and wonderful literary tradition. And it's being ruined.... more »
Utopian ideas about nature go one of two ways: nature catering to human desire or nature transforming human desire. Where does the Anthropocene fit? ... more »
Oceans “brim,” skies “bleed” -- fiction is inundated with descriptive language. But below the surface, is the spirit of literature being lost? Will it vanish altogether?... more »
Christopher Hitchens was no admirer of Isaiah Berlin. But the preservation of liberty depends on both types of men: Hitchens for his courage, Berlin for his tolerance... more »
Maybe you discovered Jane Austen in your teens. Reread her and you may find that your feelings have changed. The novels are no less addictive, but they are less romantic... more »
In the 1960s, free speech was a weapon of the left against the right. Now campus leftists endorse the suppression of ideas. What happened?... more »
When it comes to talking about sex, we need fewer lessons and more stories – especially more inventive sex writing by women... more »
Philosophers once needed books, writing tools, and perhaps a glass of sherry. Now they think with the Internet. Cognition itself is connected to the web... more »
Yes, fitness clubs can be dehumanizing orgies of exhibitionism and self-regard. But intellectual scorn for exercise misunderstands why we work out... more »
Sincerity and irony in art. What can beatniks, punks, and hipsters teach us about commitment, both aesthetic and political?... more »
The value of simplicity and complexity in art is a matter of taste. In science, the search for simple theories is a requirement. But is simpler better?... more »
When black intellectuals interpret black life for white audiences, the question of racial authenticity arises. What is authentic black knowledge?... more »
Nationalism is back, along with a politics of grievance, belligerence, and isolation. It's a moment for Benedict Anderson, who diagnosed nationalism’s insurgent appeal... more »
Chernobyl, the novel. How an airborne toxic event came to represent postmodernism. A story of alienation and technological hubris... more »
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