The agonies of H.T. Tsiang: literary rejection, an imagined feud with Pearl S. Buck, a deportation order. His life was stranger than his fiction... more »
We know Goethe for The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, and his other literary work. But he thought most highly of his scientific studies. Was he right?... more »
The problem with “public intellectual.” The term has lost meaning as conditions have changed. It’s time to re-examine the relationship between thought and action... more »
In his youth, Voltaire, spendthrift and gambler, met writers who were "penniless and held in contempt.” He would avoid that fate. So he gamed the lottery... more »
American utopianism was not as popular with intellectuals as it might have been. As Thoreau put it, "I'd rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven"... more »
Tired? Don't blame the supposedly novel demands of modern life. Exhaustion is a timeless experience, as is theorizing about exhaustion... more »
Helen DeWitt went to Oxford to study Euripides and discovered she’d rather be Euripides. Now she rages against the publishing industry: “Plato did not have an editor”... more »
By all accounts, including his own, Evelyn Waugh had an aptitude for unpleasantness, beholden as he was to his personal trinity: religion, rudeness, and drink... more »
To be a wife is not to engage in “wifing.” To be a friend is not to engage in “friending.” Yet parents talk about "parenting." That verb is a big mistake ... more »
Sleep was once about the spiritual, the Greek gods, the Sandman. Now it’s about physiology, medicalization, insomnia. Philosophical consequences abound... more »
To be 50 is to feel like an old coin: "worn – worn down and worn out.” Or so memoirists of a certain age tell us. When did midlife become a problem to be solved?... more »
Wagner's The Ring Cycle is not the answer to life in a post-religious world, says Roger Scruton. But it asks real questions, and it shows us one way of confronting them... more »
Catullus’ corpus of 116 poems teems with rage and obscenity. He was Rome’s most erotic poet, but we know almost nothing of him. Cue the dark arts of speculative historical reconstruction... more »
What distinguishes a human being from a chestnut tree? It's the sort of question that preoccupied the apricot-cocktail-swilling set at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse... more »
Sure, the glossy magazines are leaking prestige, power, page counts, and glamour. But the allure remains, and James Wolcott can't get too many tales from the editors' desks... more »
11 Picassos, six van Goghs, five Cézannes and a rare pair of Monets. That's what's at stake in a family art feud. “It’s Agatha Christie meets Homer”... more »
In the early 1960s, Eric Hobsbawm traveled to Cuba and translated for Che Guevara. Thus began a more than 40-year fascination with Latin America... more »
We are all meritocrats now. But the meritocratic elite — multiracial, gender-neutral, but still hereditary — has hardened into a new aristocracy... more »
The plight of the precursor. It's better than not being remembered at all, but the word damns with faint praise. Consider Theodore Rousseau, precursor to Monet and Cezanne ... more »
Shock, camp, comedic juxtapositions: What was Robert Mapplethorpe trying to achieve? Fame and wealth, sure. But also a carefully cultivated sense of estrangement... more »
Half of current jobs are in danger of being replaced by robots. What's imperiled is not only the ability to make a living but also the viability of democracy... more »
The agonies of H.T. Tsiang: literary rejection, an imagined feud with Pearl S. Buck, a deportation order. His life was stranger than his fiction... more »
In his youth, Voltaire, spendthrift and gambler, met writers who were "penniless and held in contempt.” He would avoid that fate. So he gamed the lottery... more »
Helen DeWitt went to Oxford to study Euripides and discovered she’d rather be Euripides. Now she rages against the publishing industry: “Plato did not have an editor”... more »
Sleep was once about the spiritual, the Greek gods, the Sandman. Now it’s about physiology, medicalization, insomnia. Philosophical consequences abound... more »
Catullus’ corpus of 116 poems teems with rage and obscenity. He was Rome’s most erotic poet, but we know almost nothing of him. Cue the dark arts of speculative historical reconstruction... more »
11 Picassos, six van Goghs, five Cézannes and a rare pair of Monets. That's what's at stake in a family art feud. “It’s Agatha Christie meets Homer”... more »
The plight of the precursor. It's better than not being remembered at all, but the word damns with faint praise. Consider Theodore Rousseau, precursor to Monet and Cezanne ... more »
Schooled in both Aquinas and Marx, Terry Eagleton remains the best advertisement for articulate argument and trenchant literary judgment... more »
Authors and editors. The relationship is symbiotic, fruitful, and fraught. The possibilities for bruised feelings are, of course, endless... more »
What was it like to be edited by William Shawn? I'm appending “a few questions,” he told a writer of a New Yorker profile. There were 178... more »
Igor Stravinsky thought standard arrangements of the "Star-Spangled Banner" were amateurish. In 1941 he wrote a new version. Then the police intervened... more »
The Nabokovs were "Zelig-like figures of twentieth-century catastrophe." They were wanderers, by necessity and maybe inclination. Memory was what rooted them ... more »
The average English film subtitle is a bar of thin sans-serif text of around 40 characters. A model of economy, it's an art form worthy of critical scrutiny... more »
Edna O'Brien has written often about love and beauty. In her new novel - maybe her last - she turns her attention toward evil ... more »
Anxieties about democracy — the electorate is an ignorant and fickle mob — are as old as democracy itself. Mary Beard on the problem with people power... more »
Picasso created more than 13,000 paintings and drawings. Defoe wrote 500 published works. When it comes to creativity, how much is too much?... more »
Twelve years after Buchenwald, Elie Wiesel went to Disneyland. “The person who created this land, this universe, must be a genius, a rare genius”... more »
Goethe had an uneasy relationship with money, yet he anticipated the economics of the mid-20th century. Where markets are concerned, he realized, information is power... more »
Karl von Frisch, Jewish researcher of bees, was spared by the Nazis when a bee disease struck. He was known as “the neutral scholar.” But was he?... more »
Cynthia Ozick used to think it was wrong to live only for literature, to approach it with idolatry. “At this point, I don’t think it’s wrong”... more »
Onanism and its discontents. Condemnation has given way to acceptance. But talk of self-pleasure is still likely to produce giggles... more »
The triumph of Judith Butler. Today teenagers throw around terms like “heteronormativity” and “performative.” At 60, she’s still fighting for the right not to be called a "lady"... more »
For several weeks, Luke Mogelson visited a bridge every day hoping to find a murder victim. The moral queasiness of on-the-ground reportage... more »
Thirty-six percent of internet content is pornography. One in four internet searches is about porn. Cause for concern? Probably not... more »
The era of shoddy science. "Excellence" is no longer practical; now "impact" is what matters. Rigor has been displaced by jockeying for status... more »
How Borges made ends meet. His once-wealthy family lost it all, so he catalogued library books and wrote ads for yogurt. Only then did he really begin to write... more »
Over the past two centuries, the average person has been enriched by as much as 9,900 percent. This resulted from ideas, not the accumulation of capital.... more »
Yes, the humanities are embattled and the sciences are deemed useful. But if science is a way of life and not just a body of knowledge, it needs liberal education... more »
The follies of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Lawrence Durrell was too erotic, Robert Frost too old. Enter Patrick Modiano, an artist of forgetting... more »
Nina Simone was fierce, apocalyptic, "the patron saint of rebellion." That tyrannical will helped forge her art but ruined her life... more »
We know Goethe for The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, and his other literary work. But he thought most highly of his scientific studies. Was he right?... more »
American utopianism was not as popular with intellectuals as it might have been. As Thoreau put it, "I'd rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven"... more »
By all accounts, including his own, Evelyn Waugh had an aptitude for unpleasantness, beholden as he was to his personal trinity: religion, rudeness, and drink... more »
To be 50 is to feel like an old coin: "worn – worn down and worn out.” Or so memoirists of a certain age tell us. When did midlife become a problem to be solved?... more »
What distinguishes a human being from a chestnut tree? It's the sort of question that preoccupied the apricot-cocktail-swilling set at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse... more »
In the early 1960s, Eric Hobsbawm traveled to Cuba and translated for Che Guevara. Thus began a more than 40-year fascination with Latin America... more »
Shock, camp, comedic juxtapositions: What was Robert Mapplethorpe trying to achieve? Fame and wealth, sure. But also a carefully cultivated sense of estrangement... more »
Jonah Lehrer is back from exile. Chastened, but ready to return to the rarefied bubble of pop-science gurudom. His bid for redemption: a book about love that has no heart... more »
A virgin bikes into Transylvania; a Good Food Guide for vampires. Inside the more-Jacobean-than-Shakespearian mind of Angela Carter... more »
Evelyn Waugh: He dabbled at painting and homosexuality, excelled at snobbish bigotry, wrote 16 novels, had seven children and a nervous breakdown... more »
What color were Kafka's eyes? Four accounts offer four different answers: dark, gray, blue, and brown. He was a man who preferred to go unnoticed... more »
Benedict Anderson was a man of the left. He dressed in the style of Indonesian peasants. But he was nostalgic for classical education's broadness and lack of professional utility... more »
Why ugliness matters. Our capacity for appreciating the revolting, disgusting, horrific, and abject is among our deepest shared responses to the world... more »
Books aren't for diversion, distraction, or even mere reading. They are for marking up. As a 16th-century writer put it: “Using a book, not reading it, makes us wise”... more »
Charlotte Brontë was no lonely spinster. She had suitors. "You do not know me," she told one of them. "I am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you suppose"... more »
The unlikely William Empson. A socialist who revered the British monarchy, a bisexual bohemian banished from academe, a genius... more »
Beauty tips, stock tips, a defense of anorexia, a breast augmentation at 73. Helen Gurley Brown wasn't exactly an intellectual, but she was a philosopher... more »
Herman Melville, known in his day as a sexual adventurer, had an attractive, literary neighbor, Sarah Morewood. Was she the muse of Moby-Dick? ... more »
The republic of letters has never been hospitable. The natives are irascible, hungry, and thirsty. The chronicle of dissolution begins in 1918... more »
We want to believe in the idea of limitless potential, with success more a matter of willpower than of talent. But believing doesn't make it true... more »
When poets are parents. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an exemplary father; Robert Lowell, not so much. How does becoming a dad change how one writes?... more »
A strange blend of Thoreau, Edison, and Ford, Buckminster Fuller was a consummate visionary. He was also a failure and a fraud... more »
A progressive with a dim view of humanity, Ray Bradbury understood that tyranny is at its most potent when it seems most benevolent... more »
The first history of Nazi concentration camps appeared in 1946. Tens of thousands of studies have followed. Is it possible to say anything new? Yes... more »
Jenny Diski's spectacular originality relied on her ability to empathize even with those whom she failed to understand... more »
For nearly 40 years, Arthur Conan Doyle contributed countless stories to The Strand. No relationship between writer and magazine was more fruitful... more »
We need our hands to do something, to keep busy. Cultures are transformed when we change what we do with our hands. Here's how it happens... more »
The gene isn't an eternal thing that awaited elucidation by humans. It's a living idea with ancestors, development, and maturation — and maybe death... more »
Portrait of Nietzsche as a young philosopher. He was brilliant, pretentious, seemingly uninterested in sex, and suffered occasional bouts of humility... more »
The problem with “public intellectual.” The term has lost meaning as conditions have changed. It’s time to re-examine the relationship between thought and action... more »
Tired? Don't blame the supposedly novel demands of modern life. Exhaustion is a timeless experience, as is theorizing about exhaustion... more »
To be a wife is not to engage in “wifing.” To be a friend is not to engage in “friending.” Yet parents talk about "parenting." That verb is a big mistake ... more »
Wagner's The Ring Cycle is not the answer to life in a post-religious world, says Roger Scruton. But it asks real questions, and it shows us one way of confronting them... more »
Sure, the glossy magazines are leaking prestige, power, page counts, and glamour. But the allure remains, and James Wolcott can't get too many tales from the editors' desks... more »
We are all meritocrats now. But the meritocratic elite — multiracial, gender-neutral, but still hereditary — has hardened into a new aristocracy... more »
Half of current jobs are in danger of being replaced by robots. What's imperiled is not only the ability to make a living but also the viability of democracy... more »
When governments throw books on the bonfire, it's censorship. When writers burn their own words, it’s … what, exactly? An act of catharsis? Of sadism?... more »
We know little about Dante Alighieri, just his published works and a few letters. But this much is clear: His literary ambition was tied to his anxiety about social status... more »
Do you talk about "devouring" books? The metaphor is common but hardly benign. Consider the long, turbulent relationship between reading and eating... more »
Majoring in English, we're now told, is good for your soul. Self-transformation has given way to self-help. Read Rilke, win friends, influence people. A little desperate, no?... more »
We are only now coming to terms with what happens to the idea of art when images can be endlessly circulated, reproduced, and manipulated... more »
Music: the sound of freedom and brotherhood, a force for redemption. Or is it the sound of violence, a weapon to debilitate enemies and disperse crowds?... more »
For centuries, moral intuition and ethics were the domain of philosophers. Now evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists think they have better moral arguments. They're wrong... more »
Anti-vaxxing, flat-Earthism, climate-change skepticism — the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. You can try to kill zombie ideas, but they just won’t die... more »
A humanistic discipline should range across all of human experience. So why is philosophy so homogeneous, provincial, and white... more »
The brainy segments of society fetishize smarts, glorify intelligence, and embrace the idea that giftedness is the primary yardstick of human worth. It's not... more »
Politics without imagination is a politics without solidarity or moral understanding. It is a narrow politics of grievance, and it is prone to authoritarianism... more »
In the increasingly rigid confines of the undergraduate mind, disagreement is regarded as a discomfort to avoid, rather than a value to embrace... more »
Obsessions with Truth and Beauty get in the way of art. Poetry isn’t just about Shakespeare in the park and seminars on modernism — it’s about politics... more »
"Write write write till your fingers break!” And Anton Chekhov did: 700 novellas, short stories, plays, even autopsy reports, all crammed into 23 years ... more »
“Wife of Oscar Wilde.” Those words appear on three tombstones in two countries. You’d have thought “poor, dear Constance" Wilde had suffered enough... more »
A “masterpiece” once meant a singular work by a master. Nowadays, the word is used to praise collectively created work. We've lost sight of what makes a master masterly... more »
Wallace Stevens, having failed at journalism and law, began a long career in insurance. He didn't publish his poems until he was 35. His life is not crying out to be told. And yet ... more »
The Shelleys, Byron, and friends in Switzerland one cold and rainy summer were like a writer’s colony from hell: love triangles, sharp tempers, and the birth of Frankenstein... more »
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