While his archrival eluded the KGB to cruise boy bars, Emil Gilels, foremost pianist of the Soviet era, fell in line. In the end, it didn’t matter... more »
Is pop music poetry? Adam Bradley has a compelling answer: “Pop is a poetry whose success lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all”... more »
How cool is cool itself? Not very. It's been the preoccupation of less-than-first-rate writers, shoddy thinkers, and poseurs in general... more »
Christophe Guilluy, who calls himself a geographer, studies gentrification in France. Ideologically and intellectually, he is difficult to place. He's becoming impossible to ignore... more »
In 1927 the Mississippi River flooded, spreading 80 miles wide at points. One byproduct of the catastrophe: the beginning of the literary careers of Faulkner and Richard Wright... more »
Since Hegel, philosophers have declared the end of art, meaning that no further progress is possible. In that sense, it’s a good thing: Art is now free to be anything... more »
Pointed hats, broomsticks, caldrons, cats. Why do we assume witches look a certain way? Blame the rise of the mass-produced woodcut... more »
Addicted to opium and always in debt, Thomas De Quincey fled his own child’s wake to escape a creditor. And yet he maintained a curious optimism... more »
Why do Japanese audiences adore Woody Allen films? Because Jewish humor has become a marker of elite sophistication... more »
You’re in your early 20s, your first book is a big success, you're called a genius. How would you react? If you're Dostoevsky, you'd become an insufferable jerk... more »
For 50 years, William F. Buckley Jr. policed the boundaries of conservatism, casting out extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites, and racists. Or so he thought... more »
Writers once sought silence, exile, and cunning. Today they seek dialogue, community, and workshopping. What's lost when writers are afraid to stand alone?... more »
Poor Nietzsche. Not only is he blamed for World War I and Nazism, but he's maligned as the godfather of postmodern relativism. Nonsense. He was a champion of the Enlightenment... more »
How Martin Luther King Jr., who married a black sound — a rhythm, a style — to flawless Standard English, helped make "black talk" America's lingua franca ... more »
Canons are formed through critical consensus. Yet consider this: None of the five most profitable films are canonical. You've probably seen them, but don't feel guilty... more »
Shakespeare receives a disproportionate amount of attention. He's unavoidable. But his dominance serves a purpose: It keeps the literary ecosystem functioning... more »
With the exception of Jesus Christ, more books have been written about Martin Luther than about any other person. What can a new biography add? Quite a lot, actually... more »
Satan's emissary, cunning fox, cold-blooded destroyer: That's the conventional view of Machiavelli. But was his advice in The Prince really meant to be followed?... more »
Ezra and Papa. They partied in Paris, promoted each other's work, and took up boxing. Then Hemingway moved to Key West, and Pound took an interest in Italian politics... more »
Walt Whitman, lifestyle guru. To cultivate "manly health,” he advised: Get up early, wash with cold water, climb trees, grow beards... more »
Edgar Allan Poe is known for his supernatural horror and detective stories. But in his final major work, Eureka, he turned to cosmology — and was uncannily prescient... more »
Fake Modiglianis began to emerge in the 1920s, soon after his death. Now he is one of the world's most faked artists. There are even fake fakes... more »
Flaubert lived in revolutionary times. It left him with scorn for political movements and the chronic delusions that enable them ... more »
Art is rooted in emotions. So what happens when algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Mozart, Picasso, or Shakespeare? ... more »
Sex letters. James Joyce sent them. So did Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Proust sent one to his grandfather. In the age of Tinder, does the sex letter have staying power?... more »
Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil: Critics saw them as "pitiless," "icy," "clinical." They pursued heartlessness as an intellectual style... more »
Nostalgia used to be considered a disease; causes, symptoms, and cures were debated by doctors. Now it's a cultural condition, but no less dangerous... more »
Welcome to Scrutopia, the English countryside enclave of farmers and philosophers, Wagner and wine, animals and Aristotle. Roger Scruton calls it home... more »
Conventional, proper, unthreatening: That's the Jane Austen we think we know. But modern readers misunderstand her. She was a radical, and not a secret one... more »
"As a writer, my principal observation about why other writers fail is that they are in too much of a hurry," says Malcolm Gladwell. "I don’t think you can write a good book in two years."... more »
Robert Nozick was fed up with trying to win people over to his views. So he limited himself to explaining systems of thought, and forever altered analytic philosophy... more »
In September 1939, the first days of World War II, Londoners slaughtered 400,000 of their own pets. A curious moral logic was at work... more »
That $1,200 margarita? Blame late capitalism. A $400 internet-connected juicer? Also late capitalism. Fancy lettuces? You guessed it. It's the buzzword that explains everything — or nothing... more »
He conducted without a baton, his hair flopping on his large face. Leonard Bernstein was a star, and that made him suspect... more »
Ever get the feeling that tech companies took your solitude and monetized it? They have. We've forgotten the value of being alone... more »
Science succeeds because it's evidence-based, which has built public trust. That's now at risk, for reasons technical and cultural... more »
From 1500 to 1700, the way humans read was transformed. They did it in private, at their own pace, rereading and thinking about reading. They deepened a new set of cognitive skills... more »
Hemingway, the spartan minimalist, and Dos Passos, the cinematic maximalist, became friends in 1923. They parted as enemies at a train station in 1937... more »
George Steiner grew up trilingual, soaked in high culture. Few critics or scholars have been as wide-ranging or provocative. He is the last of the great elitists... more »
For centuries the peat bogs of Northern Europe have yielded remarkably well-preserved ancient cadavers. At least we know how they died... more »
We think we know more than our ancestors, but as individuals we know less. We comfort ourselves with an illusion of knowledge... more »
In 1973, Jerry Saltz was 22, full of himself and making art obsessively. He battled self-doubt and lost. But he learned how to be a critic... more »
The seeker. Rod Dreher is a spiritually and intellectually restless writer: He's confessional, sincere, and sometimes overwrought. Can he ignite a turn toward modern monasticism?... more »
Why did Les Misérables, a 500,000-word novel composed over 16 years, conquer the world? Because Victor Hugo, who believed in progress, told a story of irrepressible optimism... more »
The idea that free speech is contrary to social inclusiveness represents a pernicious shift in Western culture. Stifling hate speech does not safeguard the oppressed. It empowers the oppressors... more »
Virginia and Leonard Woolf started Hogarth Press to escape the limitations of publishers. Soon, however, those limitations became their own... more »
Stalin once thought that under Communism alcohol could be abolished because people would be so happy they wouldn’t want it. Moonshine flourished in the USSR... more »
"To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible," says Jill Lepore... more »
If you're in Reykjavik and want to say “heavy snowfall with large flakes occurring in calm wind,” there's a word for that: Hundslappadrifa. Can it survive AI?... more »
Arthur Krystal isn't so much literary critic with theories to peddle as an enthusiast with pleasures to share and enemies to fend off... more »
In 2010, Google said it would scan all 129,864,880 books in the world, building the greatest library that's ever existed. It failed, sort of ... more »
Scholars are painstakingly reproducing all of Emily Dickinson's faintly penciled jottings. The undertaking is necessary and laudable. It's also misguided ... more »
Czeslaw Milosz, who witnessed Stalinist repression firsthand, is remembered as a political writer. Yet he always chafed against the label... more »
Nabokov was self-involved, even callous. His fiction isn't praised for its compassion. But was he so uncaring as to leave a wounded man to die?... more »
The defiant conformists of Bloomsbury. “Only in Great Britain did the modern intelligentsia conform to the ruling class rather than rebel against it”... more »
Snobs: we hate them, but can we live without them? Insolence, ostentation, and the cultivation of arbitrary superiority help make us all who we are... more »
Why are we still interested in the story of the Benson family? Sure, it includes eccentrics, Victorian patriarchs, and repressed sexuality. But also: That clan couldn’t stop writing... more »
Long skeptical of the value of philosophy, Silicon Valley may be coming around. “When bullshit can no longer be tolerated,” they turn to a sort-of Chief Philosophy Officer... more »
More than Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford, it was Norman Bel Geddes, a theater designer turned industrial designer, who invented 20th-century America... more »
We suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” and the accompanying pretenses of citified life. Take a cue from Hobbes, Rousseau, Einstein, Dickens, and Hazlitt: Take a hike... more »
The sculptor Camille Claudel spent 30 years in an asylum. Some blame her breakdown on a failed relationship with Rodin — but it was she who broke his heart... more »
Merriam-Webster's offices aren't velvet-curtained or oak-trimmed. They're less refined: drug deals in the parking lot, bullet holes in the safety glass ... more »
Once upon a time, a bar-brawling but talented malcontent could make a career as a professor. Consider the improbable 30-year employment of Harry Crews... more »
While his archrival eluded the KGB to cruise boy bars, Emil Gilels, foremost pianist of the Soviet era, fell in line. In the end, it didn’t matter... more »
Christophe Guilluy, who calls himself a geographer, studies gentrification in France. Ideologically and intellectually, he is difficult to place. He's becoming impossible to ignore... more »
Pointed hats, broomsticks, caldrons, cats. Why do we assume witches look a certain way? Blame the rise of the mass-produced woodcut... more »
You’re in your early 20s, your first book is a big success, you're called a genius. How would you react? If you're Dostoevsky, you'd become an insufferable jerk... more »
Poor Nietzsche. Not only is he blamed for World War I and Nazism, but he's maligned as the godfather of postmodern relativism. Nonsense. He was a champion of the Enlightenment... more »
Shakespeare receives a disproportionate amount of attention. He's unavoidable. But his dominance serves a purpose: It keeps the literary ecosystem functioning... more »
Ezra and Papa. They partied in Paris, promoted each other's work, and took up boxing. Then Hemingway moved to Key West, and Pound took an interest in Italian politics... more »
Fake Modiglianis began to emerge in the 1920s, soon after his death. Now he is one of the world's most faked artists. There are even fake fakes... more »
Sex letters. James Joyce sent them. So did Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Proust sent one to his grandfather. In the age of Tinder, does the sex letter have staying power?... more »
Welcome to Scrutopia, the English countryside enclave of farmers and philosophers, Wagner and wine, animals and Aristotle. Roger Scruton calls it home... more »
Robert Nozick was fed up with trying to win people over to his views. So he limited himself to explaining systems of thought, and forever altered analytic philosophy... more »
He conducted without a baton, his hair flopping on his large face. Leonard Bernstein was a star, and that made him suspect... more »
From 1500 to 1700, the way humans read was transformed. They did it in private, at their own pace, rereading and thinking about reading. They deepened a new set of cognitive skills... more »
For centuries the peat bogs of Northern Europe have yielded remarkably well-preserved ancient cadavers. At least we know how they died... more »
The seeker. Rod Dreher is a spiritually and intellectually restless writer: He's confessional, sincere, and sometimes overwrought. Can he ignite a turn toward modern monasticism?... more »
Virginia and Leonard Woolf started Hogarth Press to escape the limitations of publishers. Soon, however, those limitations became their own... more »
If you're in Reykjavik and want to say “heavy snowfall with large flakes occurring in calm wind,” there's a word for that: Hundslappadrifa. Can it survive AI?... more »
Scholars are painstakingly reproducing all of Emily Dickinson's faintly penciled jottings. The undertaking is necessary and laudable. It's also misguided ... more »
The defiant conformists of Bloomsbury. “Only in Great Britain did the modern intelligentsia conform to the ruling class rather than rebel against it”... more »
Long skeptical of the value of philosophy, Silicon Valley may be coming around. “When bullshit can no longer be tolerated,” they turn to a sort-of Chief Philosophy Officer... more »
The sculptor Camille Claudel spent 30 years in an asylum. Some blame her breakdown on a failed relationship with Rodin — but it was she who broke his heart... more »
The legend of Zelda Fitzgerald. She was ahead of her time, a proto-feminist, a victim of the patriarchy and of her husband. Or something like that... more »
Should public art be affirmative? Kara Walker makes provocative, monumental works that challenge the idea... more »
In 1961, a B-list Hollywood figure sought out J.D. Salinger to secure film rights to Catcher in the Rye. Their encounter reads like a "one-act play bound for the theater of the absurd"... more »
Conrad Aiken’s poetry is often dismissed as literary “navel-gazing.” But consider his sense of grandeur: His tombstone read “Cosmos Mariner — Destination Unknown”... more »
During World War I, the grim task of ferrying the wounded from the front to the hospital often fell to volunteers — an experience that altered literary history... more »
Arthur Balfour was not a great prime minister of Britain, but he was a serious philosopher. Intellectual politicians, once common, now are nonexistent... more »
The art of dream interpretation was long dominated by religious approaches. Then came the rationalists, philosophers, poets, and psychologists... more »
“Artists are always being lectured on their moral duty,” says Margaret Atwood, but don’t count on their fortitude. “The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect”... more »
Expertise is everywhere under attack, a reality that's stirred moral panic. Why? Because the flip side of faith in expertise is a belief that the public is incompetent... more »
In Robert Lowell’s day, men didn’t talk about their feelings much. People in general didn’t talk about mental illness. He talked about both... more »
The market value and reputation of the art world's enfant terrible Damien Hirst have sunk. A new work, involving a shipwreck, will try to raise them... more »
From Soviet verse to spontaneous hoedowns. Clad in Cossack garb, Yevgeny Yevtushenko developed a passion for cowboy poetry in Oklahoma... more »
In some cultures, shyness is a virtue, a sign of refinement. But it befuddled Darwin, who didn't see any benefit to our species... more »
Think of a big, popular history book written by a woman other than Mary Beard. How to explain this persistent gender disparity? A few theories... more »
The story of behavioral science making the world a better place one nudge at a time is ubiquitous. But the same techniques can be used for deception and manipulation... more »
Derek Parfit was born brilliant. But he took unusual care to scrub his life of anything that could distract from his work ... more »
Why should there be only one reality? The question drove Julio Cortázar to think of accepting the normalcy of everyday life as a painful bit of stupidity... more »
Need someone to frame a house, glaze a window, build a fence, plow a field, butcher a hen, call a square dance, explain your soul? Daniel Dennett is your man... more »
We live in an age of offense. Never has outrage enjoyed more legitimacy or been more a marker of moral status ... more »
Is pop music poetry? Adam Bradley has a compelling answer: “Pop is a poetry whose success lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all”... more »
In 1927 the Mississippi River flooded, spreading 80 miles wide at points. One byproduct of the catastrophe: the beginning of the literary careers of Faulkner and Richard Wright... more »
Addicted to opium and always in debt, Thomas De Quincey fled his own child’s wake to escape a creditor. And yet he maintained a curious optimism... more »
For 50 years, William F. Buckley Jr. policed the boundaries of conservatism, casting out extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites, and racists. Or so he thought... more »
How Martin Luther King Jr., who married a black sound — a rhythm, a style — to flawless Standard English, helped make "black talk" America's lingua franca ... more »
With the exception of Jesus Christ, more books have been written about Martin Luther than about any other person. What can a new biography add? Quite a lot, actually... more »
Walt Whitman, lifestyle guru. To cultivate "manly health,” he advised: Get up early, wash with cold water, climb trees, grow beards... more »
Flaubert lived in revolutionary times. It left him with scorn for political movements and the chronic delusions that enable them ... more »
Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil: Critics saw them as "pitiless," "icy," "clinical." They pursued heartlessness as an intellectual style... more »
Conventional, proper, unthreatening: That's the Jane Austen we think we know. But modern readers misunderstand her. She was a radical, and not a secret one... more »
In September 1939, the first days of World War II, Londoners slaughtered 400,000 of their own pets. A curious moral logic was at work... more »
Ever get the feeling that tech companies took your solitude and monetized it? They have. We've forgotten the value of being alone... more »
Hemingway, the spartan minimalist, and Dos Passos, the cinematic maximalist, became friends in 1923. They parted as enemies at a train station in 1937... more »
We think we know more than our ancestors, but as individuals we know less. We comfort ourselves with an illusion of knowledge... more »
Why did Les Misérables, a 500,000-word novel composed over 16 years, conquer the world? Because Victor Hugo, who believed in progress, told a story of irrepressible optimism... more »
Stalin once thought that under Communism alcohol could be abolished because people would be so happy they wouldn’t want it. Moonshine flourished in the USSR... more »
Arthur Krystal isn't so much literary critic with theories to peddle as an enthusiast with pleasures to share and enemies to fend off... more »
Czeslaw Milosz, who witnessed Stalinist repression firsthand, is remembered as a political writer. Yet he always chafed against the label... more »
Snobs: we hate them, but can we live without them? Insolence, ostentation, and the cultivation of arbitrary superiority help make us all who we are... more »
More than Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford, it was Norman Bel Geddes, a theater designer turned industrial designer, who invented 20th-century America... more »
Merriam-Webster's offices aren't velvet-curtained or oak-trimmed. They're less refined: drug deals in the parking lot, bullet holes in the safety glass ... more »
Behold the Thought Leader, a thinker so deft and deluded he can flatter great wealth even as he pretends to challenge it... more »
Good monsters, like good art, replace conventional ideas with something weird, troubling, and potentially heroic... more »
In Making It, Norman Podhoretz, consumed as much by the qualities of failure as by his own success, came to realize what he was against: "losers"... more »
How biography works. It isn't merely a mode of historical inquiry, “but an act of imaginative faith,” says Richard Holmes, who has spent his life pursuing subjects through the past... more »
Jürgen Habermas has devoted his career to the study of democracy. But is his version of it premised on naïve, idealized, unrealistic notions?... more »
The barfly turned graphomaniac, the hoarder turned diarist. “When an ordinary person writes exhaustively about her own life, it can be something of a nightmare”... more »
Charles Ives envisioned an eclectic gathering of diverse sounds. A century later, it's come to pass: rock, gamelan, hip hop, salsa, jazz, classical, klezmer: It's all one playlist... more »
When critics look in the mirror. Memoirs from Lee Siegel and Daphne Merkin show that book reviewers, too, can suffer from debt and depression... more »
"Universities are now terrible places to find political heterogeneity," writes Jennifer Senior. "Campus discourse has become the equivalent of the supermarket banana. Only one genetic variety remains"... more »
Particle physics helps explain astronomy; botany shapes archaeology; the moon landing informs paleontology. Does all science converge?... more »
According to A.C. Grayling, philosophy made the transition from medieval to modern in the 17th century. But does assigning a historical period actually mean anything?... more »
Darwin’s work set off an intellectual earthquake in America. It transformed Thoreau from a poet into a geologist, altered abolitionism, and spurred a generation of literary naturalists... more »
Rarely has so much catastrophe been crammed into one biography. Czeslaw Milosz, who died at 93, came to see life as an honorable defeat... more »
In the humanities, it’s not contemplation but speed that seems to matter now. Fast and efficient should not be how we look at art... more »
The poet and painter David Jones never got over his experience on the Western Front during World War I. "My mind can't be rid of it," he said late in a life spent mostly indoors ... more »
William Empson detested the “horrible Frenchmen” of Deconstruction. Yet Empson himself, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, anticipated many of their ideas... more »
The Holocaust bisected Isaac Deutscher's life. But he remained an optimist, confident that humanity would emerge better off. Was this admirable, or foolish, or both?... more »
Louis Kahn wanted buildings to speak an ancestral spatial language. A brick arch wasn’t just a brick arch — it was a way to connect across cultures and history... more »
How cool is cool itself? Not very. It's been the preoccupation of less-than-first-rate writers, shoddy thinkers, and poseurs in general... more »
Since Hegel, philosophers have declared the end of art, meaning that no further progress is possible. In that sense, it’s a good thing: Art is now free to be anything... more »
Why do Japanese audiences adore Woody Allen films? Because Jewish humor has become a marker of elite sophistication... more »
Writers once sought silence, exile, and cunning. Today they seek dialogue, community, and workshopping. What's lost when writers are afraid to stand alone?... more »
Canons are formed through critical consensus. Yet consider this: None of the five most profitable films are canonical. You've probably seen them, but don't feel guilty... more »
Satan's emissary, cunning fox, cold-blooded destroyer: That's the conventional view of Machiavelli. But was his advice in The Prince really meant to be followed?... more »
Edgar Allan Poe is known for his supernatural horror and detective stories. But in his final major work, Eureka, he turned to cosmology — and was uncannily prescient... more »
Art is rooted in emotions. So what happens when algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Mozart, Picasso, or Shakespeare? ... more »
Nostalgia used to be considered a disease; causes, symptoms, and cures were debated by doctors. Now it's a cultural condition, but no less dangerous... more »
"As a writer, my principal observation about why other writers fail is that they are in too much of a hurry," says Malcolm Gladwell. "I don’t think you can write a good book in two years."... more »
That $1,200 margarita? Blame late capitalism. A $400 internet-connected juicer? Also late capitalism. Fancy lettuces? You guessed it. It's the buzzword that explains everything — or nothing... more »
Science succeeds because it's evidence-based, which has built public trust. That's now at risk, for reasons technical and cultural... more »
George Steiner grew up trilingual, soaked in high culture. Few critics or scholars have been as wide-ranging or provocative. He is the last of the great elitists... more »
In 1973, Jerry Saltz was 22, full of himself and making art obsessively. He battled self-doubt and lost. But he learned how to be a critic... more »
The idea that free speech is contrary to social inclusiveness represents a pernicious shift in Western culture. Stifling hate speech does not safeguard the oppressed. It empowers the oppressors... more »
"To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible," says Jill Lepore... more »
In 2010, Google said it would scan all 129,864,880 books in the world, building the greatest library that's ever existed. It failed, sort of ... more »
Nabokov was self-involved, even callous. His fiction isn't praised for its compassion. But was he so uncaring as to leave a wounded man to die?... more »
Why are we still interested in the story of the Benson family? Sure, it includes eccentrics, Victorian patriarchs, and repressed sexuality. But also: That clan couldn’t stop writing... more »
We suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” and the accompanying pretenses of citified life. Take a cue from Hobbes, Rousseau, Einstein, Dickens, and Hazlitt: Take a hike... more »
Once upon a time, a bar-brawling but talented malcontent could make a career as a professor. Consider the improbable 30-year employment of Harry Crews... more »
Transhumanists tend to see religion as a threat. But the movement's appeal is fundamentally religious, a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology... more »
A dyspeptic crank? The music critic Virgil Thomson slept through performances, dismissed beloved works, and reviewed his own compositions. Yet he changed classical music for the better... more »
When Empson went East. The literary critic, booted from Cambridge after condoms were discovered in his room, left for Japan and China. It was a professional calamity that proved fortunate ... more »
Against celebrity profiles. They’re manufactured, devoid of connection between subject and writer, and fail to reveal the self-delusions and rationalizations that make people interesting... more »
What makes a critical judgment true? It's a question that preoccupied T.S. Eliot, whose case for the proper function of criticism is brilliant, angry, and unsatisfying... more »
"We’re in a culture with very few real friends, and an enormous number of unctuous sales people who will adopt the language of friendship, care and help.” Mark Greif on our dishonest times... more »
The marketplace of ideas is now the Ideas Industry. This has empowered "Thought Leaders" and undermined public intellectuals... more »
“Dead of the world, unite!” urged the Russian school of cosmism in the 1920’s. How dissimilar is today’s refrain from Silicon Valley: “Immortality now!”?... more »
In 1961, a Vienesse bibliophile purchased a mysterious text for $24,500. The Voynich Manuscript remains an enigma. It isn't a modern forgery, but it may be a medieval hoax... more »
Long ago the ideas of equality and a common humanity were unthinkable; today they are the default position of almost all of us. How did that happen?... more »
Is style ancillary to an artist’s genius or fundamental to it? Consider Georgia O’Keeffe’s silk dresses, blouses, shoes, along with her self-crafted persona... more »
The writing of John Berger can seem kitschy, deluded, masculinist, creepy. But in his strangeness were kindness and sincerity. He sought above all to help us see more clearly... more »
How to think like a philosopher: Consider contrary cases, test grandiose claims with extreme examples, accept that it’s rare to prove anything conclusively... more »
Freud envisioned civilization’s advances bringing not happiness but unassuaged guilt. That's one explanation for the prestige of victims in the contemporary world... more »
Granta asks, Is travel writing dead? Silly question, says Geoff Dyer. Dickens, Dickinson, and Dillard can all be placed in the genre. What writing isn’t travel writing?... more »
Darwin worked a few hours a day. Trollope wrote only between 5 to 8 a.m. — and published 47 novels. They weren't accomplished despite their leisurely schedules; they were accomplished because of them... more »
Picture your ideal cultural critics. Can they weigh in on poetry, film, literature? Speak multiple languages? Write with wit and a political edge? Didn’t think so... more »
Pick a topic, say traveling while being frugal and worshipful. There's a podcast about that; it's called "Hobo for Christ." Podcasts tend to be specialized. That's the problem... more »
Long before he encountered Marx, Lenin was radicalized by literature. He read Shakespeare, Goethe, and Pushkin aloud. He was hostile to the avant-garde... more »
Writers have long been envious of the visual language of painters. Yet “We don’t read Maupassant for the colors, or Zola for the lighting,” says Julian Barnes... more »
The End of History is among the best known and least understood books of the past 25 years. Far from disproven, Francis Fukuyama deserves credit for his clairvoyance... more »
The difficulty of Cy Twombly’s literariness. His work is about sentiment, not ideas -- and yet Romantic poetry and classical texts often populate his work... more »
"The desire to cleanse the campus of dissident voices has become something of a mission," says Robert Boyers. Shaming, scapegoating, and periodic ritual exorcisms are prime features of academic life... more »
"Paying attention is the only thing that guarantees insight. It is the only real weapon we have against power, too." Michelle Dean on why paying attention is a moral obligation... more »
A libertine, but so much more. Casanova was an actor, an outcast, a priest, a gambler, and a common man passing as (and sleeping with) the aristocracy... more »
Deconstruction: a detective story. A new play about Paul de Man shows how something monstrous can begin as a cavalier disregard for truth ... more »
Where do novelists go when reality overtakes their absurdist visions? They escape into the past, into mythology. But the past can't adequately account for the present... more »
When Barthes’s mother died, he fixated on a photo of her as a young girl. Why are mundane objects — a photo, a grocery list — so often central to grief?... more »
Unlike some name-brand atheists, Nietzsche didn’t waste time on easy targets like miracles or relics. He laughed at God. And nothing restores a sense of proportion like a sense of humor... more »
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