Step aside, Picasso. Time to celebrate Francis Picabia, a modernist promiscuous both in style and his personal life... more »
Norman Mailer, who vowed to make a revolution "in the consciousness of our time," lives on less as a novelist than an all-purpose gadfly... more »
Is the human mind truly unique? To find out, gather a bunch of dogs in a laboratory. Animal cognition informs human cognition in weird ways... more »
As a young man, Jack London thrived among the delinquents on the Oakland waterfront. His stint in the cellar of society shaped his worldview... more »
Alexander Pushkin: Talented misfit, ladies' man, hothead, he died in a duel at 31. He's known as Russia's supreme poet. Was he also its greatest writer of prose?... more »
Losing your mind is a strange kind of fetishization. Woolf, Plath, Hemingway, Wallace. How should we think about the relationship between creativity and illness?... more »
Being Cornel West. He delivers righteousness and fiery passion. His rhetoric is more than a little ridiculous. But his politics are genuine... more »
Jane Jacobs -- patron saint of walkability, uber-theorist of contemporary urban living -- never adequately thought through the implications of gentrification... more »
Rauschenberg’s studio cost $10 a month and lacked water and heat. Just the place, perhaps, for radically altering our ideas about art... more »
How we think about who we are -- our feelings, our experiences -- shapes not only how we relate to the world but also our definition of consciousness ... more »
Awe, terror, and tech. Technological progress promises to solve our problems and turn the world into an Edenic garden. To some of us, that is a creepy notion... more »
Do fish feel pain? Is it immoral to swat a mosquito? Is it possible to harm a robot? We’re approaching a big historical divide in ethics, one that may take us beyond humanism... more »
The ideal translator is a person "on whom nothing is lost,” said Henry James. Or maybe it's a machine. But a machine won't stop you from swearing at nuns... more »
To grow up in the Soviet Union was to celebrate suffering. It “justifies our hard and bitter life. For us, pain is an art”... more »
The psychology of chicanery. We are all virtuoso novelists of our own identity, and, at times, confabulators. But how to create good stories?... more »
Photography was still a young technology in 1863, when the image of a whip-scarred slave made clear that a photograph can change minds in a way that words cannot ... more »
How to reconcile our stubbornly held view of Kafka as an unworldly neurotic, an "uncanny man bringing forth uncanny things," with his knack for slapstick and punch lines... more »
His November election was a surprise. His followers had faith -- in him, of course, but also in the institutions they believed would contain him. Then the war started ... more »
"The way that male critics write about women is always a little funny," says Zadie Smith. "It’s part romantic, part corrective, part 'now listen, young lady'"... more »
In 1969, a 13-part documentary made Kenneth Clark high culture’s classiest superstar. In his own mind he was just an aesthete, a mere popularizer... more »
For Norman Mailer, some Salinger stories "seem to have been written for high school girls." It wasn't true, but it was the worst insult he could think of... more »
Step aside, Picasso. Time to celebrate Francis Picabia, a modernist promiscuous both in style and his personal life... more »
As a young man, Jack London thrived among the delinquents on the Oakland waterfront. His stint in the cellar of society shaped his worldview... more »
Being Cornel West. He delivers righteousness and fiery passion. His rhetoric is more than a little ridiculous. But his politics are genuine... more »
How we think about who we are -- our feelings, our experiences -- shapes not only how we relate to the world but also our definition of consciousness ... more »
The ideal translator is a person "on whom nothing is lost,” said Henry James. Or maybe it's a machine. But a machine won't stop you from swearing at nuns... more »
Photography was still a young technology in 1863, when the image of a whip-scarred slave made clear that a photograph can change minds in a way that words cannot ... more »
"The way that male critics write about women is always a little funny," says Zadie Smith. "It’s part romantic, part corrective, part 'now listen, young lady'"... more »
Progress is an unalloyed good thing — the premise might seem self-evident. But the belief is a fairly recent one, and it's always had opponents... more »
When Gorky met Tolstoy. Their friendship -- volatile but real -- was built on mutual awe, respect, and disgust... more »
Female artists have long been pegged as personal — which is to say, their art is not universal. "Greatness is a moving target designed to make women miss"... more »
In the fall of 1969, two psychologists met behind closed doors at Hebrew University. They yelled and laughed and plumbed the inner workings of the human mind... more »
Enough with angst over the future of poetry. It isn't popular, but it isn't endangered. Poetry won't perish. Being a poet, though, is a more complicated matter ... more »
Charles Taylor has studied religion, the self, and the meaning of life. Now he’s turned to a really touchy subject: democracy, “a fiction that we’re trying to realize”... more »
Instead of bending to the dictates of socialist realism, Isaac Babel simply wrote less. He told people he was mastering a new genre: silence... more »
George H. Nash, godfather of conservative intellectual history, famously explained the movement's success. Now he's grappling with its abandonment of critical thought... more »
The literary legacy of the Man in Black. Johnny Cash’s verse speaks more to psalm-singing than to gunslinging, argues Paul Muldoon. We should take note... more »
In 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted began to redesign Central Park. He was supremely qualified — except for a lack of any artistic experience... more »
For all his refined taste and passion for art, Kenneth Clark was emotionally stunted. Adulation made him feel like a fraud. "My feelings are as stiff as an unused limb”... more »
When Robert Conquest wasn't writing about the atrocities of the 20th century, he was writing love poems and dirty limericks. Other poets are taking note... more »
On bibliotherapy. Novels are hardly cures for our life problems. Books drive people to do strange things. They don’t solve problems, they create new ones... more »
Born in Russia and educated in Britain, Nabokov saw himself as an American writer. He was also a critic of American culture, especially its racism... more »
The godfather of crime fiction, Thomas De Quincey inhabited the dark fringe of Romanticism. He even applauded murder as one of the finer “arts” of life... more »
"From a very early age, I had this sense of harshness and the need for endurance.” John Berger at 90, still arguing about how to see art -- and the world ... more »
Buckminster Fuller popularized the geodesic dome and the idea that technology is society’s salve. Was he, as McLuhan had it, the Leonardo of his time?... more »
Hilton Als was 14 when he first read James Baldwin. "I realized you could write in a ... there's no other way to put it, really, except it was a kind of high-faggoty style"... more »
Animal Farm in America. How an unknown democratic socialist rode the acclaim for his "little squib" of a fable to become the leading literary Cold Warrior... more »
Bards thought writing would destroy our memories; scribes loathed the printing press. Now handwriting enthusiasts have taken up this tradition of snobbery... more »
“The most bank-clerky of all bank clerks” is what Aldous Huxley called T.S. Eliot. If only Huxley had known that the poet walked around London with his cheeks powdered and his lips rouged... more »
Thomas Merton's embrace of monasticism revealed his paradoxical character. Here was a "garrulous apostle of silence who thrived among words"... more »
An investigation into the history of books bound in human skin reveals that it was usually a doctor wielding the knife... more »
Norman Mailer, who vowed to make a revolution "in the consciousness of our time," lives on less as a novelist than an all-purpose gadfly... more »
Alexander Pushkin: Talented misfit, ladies' man, hothead, he died in a duel at 31. He's known as Russia's supreme poet. Was he also its greatest writer of prose?... more »
Jane Jacobs -- patron saint of walkability, uber-theorist of contemporary urban living -- never adequately thought through the implications of gentrification... more »
Awe, terror, and tech. Technological progress promises to solve our problems and turn the world into an Edenic garden. To some of us, that is a creepy notion... more »
To grow up in the Soviet Union was to celebrate suffering. It “justifies our hard and bitter life. For us, pain is an art”... more »
How to reconcile our stubbornly held view of Kafka as an unworldly neurotic, an "uncanny man bringing forth uncanny things," with his knack for slapstick and punch lines... more »
In 1969, a 13-part documentary made Kenneth Clark high culture’s classiest superstar. In his own mind he was just an aesthete, a mere popularizer... more »
Herbert Asquith, prime minister of Britain from 1908 to 1916, was a master epistolary flirt, which made him a weird kind of philanderer... more »
Between the world of the university and that of magazines, cultural critics like James Wood, A.O. Scott, and Mark Greif search for their place... more »
The pathological vision of Robert Bresson. The French filmmaker was so repelled by how people behaved in front of the camera that he hardly ever went to the movies... more »
Author photo, tours, readings, lectures, interviews: The modern hustle of the moderately successful writer. Elena Ferrante wanted none of it... more »
What should a left-leaning intellectual do when fascism is on the rise? Frankfurt School theorists of the 1930s lost faith in the power of their ideas... more »
Of myths and little green men. The UFO-spotters, flying-saucer theorists, and aspiring telepaths of the credulous '60s were a mix of true believers and fans of fiction... more »
The tyranny of time travel. The subject has had brilliant thinking from Borges, Stoppard, Sebald, and many scientists and philosophers — but to what end?... more »
A.E. Housman’s poetry spoke to the soul of England but was set in “not exactly a real place.” His was an England purely of the mind... more »
Scholars are searching for antecedents to today’s New Atheists. Did a cultlike “atheist underground” really flourish in the ancient world? Doubtful... more »
What was it like to work for Stanley Kubrick? Sample tasks: Take care of the cats and dogs, hang up on Fellini, deliver an enormous porcelain phallus... more »
Jonathan Swift, remembered as petulant and severe, could be tender — although that tenderness seemed like a "quivering slab of meat into which he longed to plunge a nice sharp fork"... more »
Want to live inside a Jane Austen novel? A word of caution from Caitlin Flanagan: Everyone smelled horrible, the Thames overflowed with feces, and women were relegated to the home... more »
Critics argue that lumping “world literature” together leads to a great flattening, reducing particularities into a global monoculture. But has that been true?... more »
Cézanne, Carlyle, and Turing all suffered from shyness. No wonder: Social anxiety turns us — especially writers and artists — into close readers of the world’s signs and wonders... more »
Narcissism is everywhere, the hallmark of our era, we’re told. This belief merely perpetuates what Narcissus’ own story was — a myth... more »
Try literature that scares the daylights out of you. Reading ghost stories not only helps expand the imagination; it also makes us nicer and more humble... more »
Being an agent in Hollywood isn't a job, it's a lifestyle. Those who make it display greed and genius, clairvoyance and an aptitude for both ass-kissing and obstinacy ... more »
The meanings of snobbery. It's an assumption of social superiority, a moral failing, and it’s expressed in a variety of guises: by food snobs, book snobs, real-estate snobs... more »
Liberal intellectuals have long dismissed both radicals and reactionaries. Now this moral certainty has evaporated into empty, cranky clichés... more »
Socrates set the bar too high. Sage, ascetic, gadfly: His purity of motivation is impossible for philosophers to sustain in modern capitalist society... more »
Dating is like a “precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship," says Moira Weigel. "If you look sharp, you might get a free lunch”... more »
Two pillars of physics – general relativity and quantum mechanics -- have been borne out in countless experiments. But they contradict each other... more »
Is the human mind truly unique? To find out, gather a bunch of dogs in a laboratory. Animal cognition informs human cognition in weird ways... more »
Losing your mind is a strange kind of fetishization. Woolf, Plath, Hemingway, Wallace. How should we think about the relationship between creativity and illness?... more »
Rauschenberg’s studio cost $10 a month and lacked water and heat. Just the place, perhaps, for radically altering our ideas about art... more »
Do fish feel pain? Is it immoral to swat a mosquito? Is it possible to harm a robot? We’re approaching a big historical divide in ethics, one that may take us beyond humanism... more »
The psychology of chicanery. We are all virtuoso novelists of our own identity, and, at times, confabulators. But how to create good stories?... more »
His November election was a surprise. His followers had faith -- in him, of course, but also in the institutions they believed would contain him. Then the war started ... more »
For Norman Mailer, some Salinger stories "seem to have been written for high school girls." It wasn't true, but it was the worst insult he could think of... more »
In romance, waiting has always been the rule. And the rituals of contemporary courtship underscore a related fact: It is always women who wait... more »
There are difficult writers and then there's D.H. Lawrence, for whom callousness was an intellectual catalyst. “You have to have something vicious in you, to be a creative writer”... more »
Jonathan Swift, inveterate joker, rarely laughed late in life. Life was a farce in every sense but the most important one, in that it was tragedy... more »
Bob Dylan was described by one scholar as “the greatest living user of the English language.” But how far do words go in encapsulating his art?... more »
Book reviewing used to be blood sport. But now new titles aren't so much criticized as endorsed, as if every book deserves at least a modest thumbs-up... more »
The world’s visual stimuli overload our senses, and so our beliefs help shape our perceptions. We see what we want to see. Tom Vanderbilt explains... more »
What can Margery Kempe, medieval mystic, teach us about literature today? That our relationship with it can be personal, immediate, physical, emotional, and excessive... more »
In 1940, a French novelist named Léon Werth joined the exodus fleeing the Nazis. He wrote an eyewitness account of his exile. He wrote like a man from the future... more »
Against retranslation. Too many recent academic efforts to update translations treat the texts like museum pieces. Where's the energy and spirit of earlier efforts?... more »
Fabric fails to impress. We shrug at a state-of-the-art raincoat, dress shirt, or pair of tights. But no technology is as powerful as fabric. Virginia Postrel explains... more »
Democracy is flawed: Citizens lack knowledge and judgment. John Stuart Mill proposed giving extra votes to those with university degrees. An idea whose time has come... more »
What is utopianism? For China Miéville, it is neither hope nor optimism, but rather a need for alterity, for “something other than the exhausting social lie”... more »
In the 19th century, the short half-life of scientific truth was new and frightening. What was science for, if not the discovery of eternal ideas?... more »
How to explain Freud's waning influence? We've grown skeptical of grand theories and fond of minimalist forms. It’s our loss... more »
Tocqueville admired, invested in, and wrote brilliantly of America. Yet he never felt at home there intellectually. Not as he did in England... more »
How to write a best seller. Avoid fantasy, science fiction, revolutions, dinner parties, dancing. Focus on work. We're fascinated by other people's jobs... more »
Male qualities are out of step with modern times, or so we're told. But before declaring masculinity in crisis, can we agree on how to define it?... more »
What is the work of an intellectual? More and more, it is to celebrate other intellectuals. For Stuart Hall, what mattered was turning other people into deep thinkers... more »
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