With a click, you can watch John Berryman down beers in Dublin or Marianne Moore throw out a first pitch. Is YouTube changing how we “read” poetry?... more »
How have the Mitford sisters so captivated writers? Start with their wealth, wayward magnetism, antic charm, rivalry, loyalty, and political folly... more »
The virtue of analogies, said Wittgenstein, consists in "changing our way of seeing." But most offer just temporary distraction, not illumination ... more »
Can an insidious artifact of Hitler be neutralized by a phalanx of footnotes and annotations? Here comes a new critical edition of Mein Kampf... more »
Literary biography meets the anecdote-proof life. Wallace Stevens loved long walks, gifts from Ceylon, and persimmons. Does knowing that help us understand his poetry?... more »
Philip Larkin's photographs. He picked up a camera as a child, and the images — striking, sensitive, emotion-filled — send us back to the poems with new eyes... more »
Shirley Jackson found people competitive, self-serving, and not to be trusted. She came by such views honestly, then turned them into horror... more »
Clive James, bingewatcher. He's an incisive and discerning critic. But it's his affection for the abysmal that distinguishes his taste in television... more »
Secular national movements of the 20th century assumed that "decline was the destiny of all religions,” as Michael Walzer puts it. They were wrong. So is Walzer... more »
Why do you read what you read? Because the literary market chose it for you. That's why refusing to read is not a badge of shame. It's the way of the future... more »
The struggles of August Wilhelm Schlegel. He defined Romanticism, pioneered Indology, and translated Shakespeare into German. He also managed to alienate almost everyone along the way ... more »
Against art history. It’s obsessed with obscure formalist twists, micromovements, and jargon-laden intellectualism. Real art is bigger than all that... more »
Linguistic theories are, in part, explanations of human nature. For more than 50 years, Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar has been dominant. Now it's coming undone... more »
A world without cats. They're cute, but don't be fooled: They're a menace to animal society. Is it morally acceptable to sacrifice one species over another?... more »
“Your mind is a country I find very agreeable.” wrote Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau. But is it really possible to enter the well-guarded secrecy of another life?... more »
In Latin America, birthplace of the cultural Cold War, artists and writers were courted by superpowers. Which revealed the political impotence of intellectuals... more »
Born "ordinary, hillbilly, and poor," Helen Gurley Brown made her life a monument to artifice and the belief that any problem could be redeemed by humor and an upbeat ending.... more »
The Frankfurt School, today. Adorno and Horkheimer didn’t live to see social media, but they would recognize its corruption of human personality... more »
What can be gleaned about the nature of intelligence from tracking 5,000 child prodigies over 45 years? That the 10,000-hour rule is bunk... more »
The forces of reaction, on the right and the left, have shadowed European thought for centuries. Mark Lilla explores a cast of mind... more »
American novels were once concerned with serious social problems and collective injustice. Now they focus on the individual, the lone genius, Twitter... more »
With a click, you can watch John Berryman down beers in Dublin or Marianne Moore throw out a first pitch. Is YouTube changing how we “read” poetry?... more »
Can an insidious artifact of Hitler be neutralized by a phalanx of footnotes and annotations? Here comes a new critical edition of Mein Kampf... more »
Shirley Jackson found people competitive, self-serving, and not to be trusted. She came by such views honestly, then turned them into horror... more »
Why do you read what you read? Because the literary market chose it for you. That's why refusing to read is not a badge of shame. It's the way of the future... more »
Linguistic theories are, in part, explanations of human nature. For more than 50 years, Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar has been dominant. Now it's coming undone... more »
In Latin America, birthplace of the cultural Cold War, artists and writers were courted by superpowers. Which revealed the political impotence of intellectuals... more »
What can be gleaned about the nature of intelligence from tracking 5,000 child prodigies over 45 years? That the 10,000-hour rule is bunk... more »
On the left, "the worker" is sacred. So is a belief in solidarity and equality. But amid rapid economic fragmentation, does the left have a future?... more »
Open plans, glass walls, communal table-desks, exposed brick: The carefully curated aesthetic of the modern office and the grim fate of the "knowledge worker"... more »
Estimates of executions under Lenin and Stalin suggest an average of more than 10,000 per week. We've never come to terms with the cause and consequence of those killings... more »
Does terrorism work? Almost certainly not. But failure does not diminish the ardor of those for whom killing is an end in itself ... more »
The age of rock'n'roll began in May 1964, when Louis Armstrong's "Hello, Dolly!" fell from the top of the pop chart. Now it's over. Only nostalgia remains... more »
In the past year, 30 billion photographs were uploaded to Instagram — a tidal wave of images indebted to Renaissance portraiture, Dutch still lifes, modernism... more »
To grasp a society's deepest tensions, look to its big, popular art form. In the West, it used to be the novel. In India now, it's Bollywood... more »
The replication crisis in psychology is rooted in bad incentives: skepticism isn't rewarded, unexpected findings are. But coverage of the crisis is susceptible to its own bad incentives... more »
Modernity is the feeling that we are profoundly different from the people who lived before us. It is a disorientation that began in the 16th century and is still with us... more »
Ian McEwan woke from a daydream with a thought: Write a novel with a fetus as the narrator. "The idea struck me as so silly that I just couldn’t resist it.”... more »
Auden gradually renounced the public stage for a private, meditative life. "When the ship catches fire," he advised, "sit still and pray”... more »
What to do when an opinionated historian is also a brilliant linguist? A certain white-suited literary legend takes on “the Chomsky problem”... more »
True crimes of a Roman emperor. Was Nero a matricidal villain or the victim of a propaganda campaign? The answer may lie in art... more »
The battle between gravity and human anatomy goes on. Attempts to settle it — the stools of ancient Egypt, the chaise longue — reveal much about culture... more »
Can art help find “the real you”? Identity is under more scrutiny than ever. Cue questions of pretension, authenticity,
coolness... more »
A mood, a tint, a taint, danger, virility, possibility, royalty, beauty: parsing the many meanings of blue, that most popular of colors ... more »
An ellipsis indicates an absence, making it the language’s most unusual punctuation mark. Where did it come from, and how did it get so weird?... more »
Is there perfection in art? Sam Anderson conducts an aesthetic investigation in Florence, home of Michelangelo’s “David" and Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot... more »
You might think that the past seven decades of scientific accomplishment are the result of researchers' following their curiosity. You would be wrong... more »
We live in a golden age of profanity. But the vocabulary is small, and we're diminishing it from overuse. Time to invent new obscenities... more »
Female thinkers have rarely been cinematic subjects. But recent films about Hannah Arendt have raised the question: How should a woman in philosophy be portrayed?... more »
Pierre Bayle was renowned as an advocate of intellectual modesty and the questioning of authority. Now he's a forgotten hero of the Enlightenment... more »
Lolita is romantic and funny and perverted, but Pale Fire is the great gay comic novel — a catalogue of homosexual desire through the ages... more »
How have the Mitford sisters so captivated writers? Start with their wealth, wayward magnetism, antic charm, rivalry, loyalty, and political folly... more »
Literary biography meets the anecdote-proof life. Wallace Stevens loved long walks, gifts from Ceylon, and persimmons. Does knowing that help us understand his poetry?... more »
Clive James, bingewatcher. He's an incisive and discerning critic. But it's his affection for the abysmal that distinguishes his taste in television... more »
The struggles of August Wilhelm Schlegel. He defined Romanticism, pioneered Indology, and translated Shakespeare into German. He also managed to alienate almost everyone along the way ... more »
A world without cats. They're cute, but don't be fooled: They're a menace to animal society. Is it morally acceptable to sacrifice one species over another?... more »
Born "ordinary, hillbilly, and poor," Helen Gurley Brown made her life a monument to artifice and the belief that any problem could be redeemed by humor and an upbeat ending.... more »
The forces of reaction, on the right and the left, have shadowed European thought for centuries. Mark Lilla explores a cast of mind... more »
Campaign season: a quadrennial procession of academics advancing obtuse theories on the electorate. Here comes a Berkeley sociologist dripping condescension... more »
The desire to conclude with a clear moral can lead writers to try to bring closure. This awkwardness rarely pays off, especially when the topic is marital angst... more »
"The Grande Decoration," Monet's multipart installation project, preoccupied the last decade of his life. It was a period of vacillation, self-doubt, and selfishness... more »
Black-shag tobacco, horse dung, camphor, boiled cabbage, dishwater, body odor: What to make of George Orwell's olfactory obsessions?... more »
The founding tenets of modernity – liberalism, democracy, personal autonomy – are giving way to a new religion: Dataism. Its adherents believe in the triumph of information... more »
Tom Wolfe has long been deft at skewering the pompous, the status-seeking, the class-conscious. His new target: Darwin. Wolfe comes armed not with evidence, but with sarcasm... more »
The vanishing Christian intellectual. Auden, Eliot, Lewis, Niebuhr once dominated public discourse and dotted the covers of Time. Where are their descendants?... more »
Benjamin vs. Brecht. Their chess matches pitted the mercurial self-confidence of Brecht against the quiet focus of Benjamin. Brecht usually won... more »
There is a vast literature on Wagner: his politics, philosophical ambition, and anti-Semitism. Is it any longer possible to really hear the music?... more »
Rousseau, Nietzsche, Isaiah Berlin, Leo Strauss — the history of modernism is full of pessimists. But modernity is about more than great books... more »
Forgiveness, stuck in the past, is not all it’s said to be. Martha Nussbaum ponders some alternatives... more »
A 14th-century Egyptian bureaucrat’s compilation of human knowledge includes the price of chickens, an encounter with a lion, and formulae for enlarging the penis... more »
Jacob Neusner published more than 1,000 books. Being the most published person in history became his trademark. That and falling out with everyone he knew... more »
Felix Weil was the heir to a great grain fortune. He could have asked his father for anything. He asked for a Marxist academic institute. Thus the Frankfurt School... more »
“Free at last, with no money troubles, and able to love, to sing, and to die,” Paul Gauguin wrote about Polynesia, as a member of the "exote school of art"... more »
The wittiest British writer? Saki, aka Hector Hugh Munro. His writing is full of lunatic clarity: cows could be murderers; ferrets, gods... more »
Was the Holocaust a single event or a post-hoc label for disparate events? The reality seems to be a strange mixture of intent and improvisation... more »
The flâneur: urban idler, dawdler, roaming thinker. But for women, the relationship between thinking and walking is vexed. A history of the flâneuse... more »
What is forgiveness? A victim can't separate the wrong from the wrongdoer. And the wrongdoer can't remake himself. At most, we can hope for generosity... more »
“Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows..." Gertrude Stein wrote a children's book... more »
Eulogies are not a genre noted for honesty — the origin of the word, after all, is “to speak well.” What are the benefits of truth when speaking of the dead?... more »
Boas, bugs, and backscratchers, cockroaches and condors, the evil eye and the history of toast. In praise of the erudite eclecticism of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica... more »
The virtue of analogies, said Wittgenstein, consists in "changing our way of seeing." But most offer just temporary distraction, not illumination ... more »
Philip Larkin's photographs. He picked up a camera as a child, and the images — striking, sensitive, emotion-filled — send us back to the poems with new eyes... more »
Secular national movements of the 20th century assumed that "decline was the destiny of all religions,” as Michael Walzer puts it. They were wrong. So is Walzer... more »
Against art history. It’s obsessed with obscure formalist twists, micromovements, and jargon-laden intellectualism. Real art is bigger than all that... more »
“Your mind is a country I find very agreeable.” wrote Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau. But is it really possible to enter the well-guarded secrecy of another life?... more »
The Frankfurt School, today. Adorno and Horkheimer didn’t live to see social media, but they would recognize its corruption of human personality... more »
American novels were once concerned with serious social problems and collective injustice. Now they focus on the individual, the lone genius, Twitter... more »
William Empson had nothing more than a serious amateur's interest in Eastern art, but this was a man undeterred by lack of expertise. Thus The Face of the Buddha... more »
The metamorphosis of Adrienne Rich. Patronizingly praised by Auden for poems that “speak quietly,” she developed a voice of towering rage... more »
Imagine a government chosen by those with knowledge of politics, economics, and policy. No more rule by the dismayingly ignorant. The appeal is clear — and fatal... more »
Emily Bronte's coffin. The sister most transfixing and impossible to know has long been the victim of yarn-spinning. Was her coffin really only 16 inches wide?... more »
Philip K. Dick made skepticism an art form. His inability to separate reality from fiction, and his certainty that everyone was out to get him, was the wellspring of his work... more »
Sex and socialism. Women formed the bedrock of the Engels-Marx alliance. For Eleanor Marx, Muriel Lester, and others, the revolution was personal... more »
The boy who bullied Byron. John Charles Wallop loved blood, hangings, and funerals. He was considered insane. But what’s insanity to an English aristocrat?... more »
In the dim light of his prison cell, Oscar Wilde was no longer trying to amuse readers or mock his betters. His writing became stranger and more beautiful... more »
What stands between you and the act of writing? The insidious Imps of Inertia: Disenchanted Imp, Jaded Imp, Loneliness Imp, and Sloth Imp. Mark Edmundson explains... more »
Klaus Mann, dead at 42, wrote seven novels, six plays, four biographies, three autobiographies, hundreds of stories, essays, and reviews. None of it impressed his father, Thomas... more »
A dominant scientific dogma has arrived: dataism. The result? Humanism faces an existential challenge, and the idea of free will is under threat... more »
Unthinkable events, like the horrors of WWII, cannot be expressed in art. Does that mean such attempts are necessarily failures?... more »
The Greek Attalids purchased an entire island just to steal its art. J. Paul Getty spent lavishly on art he would never see. What motivates collectors?... more »
Russians tend to live within ideas, to believe that books teach you how to live, that they create ideals for you to uphold. Svetlana Alexievich explains... more »
Great political figures tend to be inspired not by wealth or comfort but by honor and recognition. Few tempted by ambition are about to resist it... more »
No one is born a writer. The vocation, emerging from a delusional desire, is honed by the discipline of "locking yourself away in a crucible of secret frustration"... more »
S.Y. Agnon, the only Nobel laureate among Hebrew-language writers, may well be the only modern writer to name himself after one of his stories... more »
We live in a time of rampant narcissism. We are told this is exceptional. It matters less whether that's true than whether we believe it's true... more »
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