The glory of the Hollywood memoir. Idiosyncratic, biased, boastful, unctuous, and vain, it nevertheless gives us a revealing glimpse into the past... more »
Kafka abandoned on a balcony; Kafka at an air show. We're intrigued by anecdotes about his life, but what do they tell us?... more »
What laughter means. In medieval times it was a great leveler, inclusive and communal. For modern satirists it is a way of standing apart... more »
Hemingway vs. Eastman. The literary “battle of the ages” involved evaluations of chest hair, a blow to the face (with a book, of course), slaps, and wrestling moves... more »
Just a contemplative philosopher? Montaigne’s life was full of misadventure: He fled mobs, was kidnapped by bandits, was exiled from the city where he was mayor... more »
Catching up with the Beats. Kerouac and Ginsberg are gone, but their writerly friends carry the torch. In their 80s and 90s, they haven’t exactly mellowed with age... more »
E.M. Forster called him a “mixture of insolence and nervousness.” Hemingway said he had “the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist.” What made Wyndham Lewis so unlikable?... more »
He fell into a vat of boiling water for scalding pigs; then he contracted polio. Does Harry Crews’s childhood explain his affinity for the grotesque?... more »
Is it possible to convey one’s moral vision to another generation? Henry Adams, who wrote a 500-page autobiography without mentioning his wife’s suicide, was skeptical... more »
How was scientific publishing transformed from profit-shunning to for-profit oligopoly? It was all thanks to a man named Robert Maxwell... more »
Susan Sontag’s greatest work of criticism was the one she applied to herself. Her journals were not just a record of her life; they were an alternative to it... more »
Yes, power corrupts. It also makes us stupid by undermining the same capacities we need to gain it in the first place... more »
Feed the cats, water the plants, mail the lesbian literary magazine to subscribers named Starflower, Athena, Kali: What it was like to be Adrienne Rich’s assistant... more »
Just because you're a man who reads Julia Kristeva doesn’t mean you're not sexist. In the arts, sexism is more often a failure of empathy than of understanding... more »
Hemingway in his day exemplified American macho. Now scholars are giving him a gender-fluid remake: A little less Papa, a little more Mama ... more »
The Brontë brother, Branwell, was known for vices — opiates, alcohol, married women, setting his bed on fire — but he had literary virtues as well... more »
Asked about his transformation from Oxford don to thought leader, Niall Ferguson was blunt: “I did it all for the money.” He's not alone... more »
Is free speech under threat in the United States? Not exactly, or at least not in the ways you might think. A Commentary symposium... more »
Golden age of the short story: the 1890s? 1980s? 2010s? We’ve been celebrating the “revival” of the form since Chekhov. Some perspective, please ... more »
Cockroaches, crummy days, and lousy lakes. For Grace Paley, every part of life was worthy of literary attention. There was beauty in banality... more »
The life of a ghostwriter. Don't argue with clients, however repulsive. And remember, you'll probably receive no recognition — which may be a good thing... more »
Is a tome three feet wide by two feet high a book? What about one with an embedded digital clock? Or a suitcase filled with lithographs?... more »
The essay, that most elegant and slippery of forms, resists being pinned down. Its strength derives from a “combination of exactitude and evasion”... more »
The search for ecstasy. In 1960 an estimated 20 percent of Americans said they'd had a mystical experience. Now it's 50 percent... more »
Bernard-Henri Lévy can barely read Hebrew and hasn't devoted much time or energy to studying Judaism. That hasn't stopped him from writing a book of pronouncements on the topic... more »
The brief rise of "prince poo." How the Enlightenment's sensory awakening reached its apex (or nadir) during a French craze for garments the color of baby poop... more »
If economists aren't questioning the effectiveness of economic theory, they should be. Simply put: Their claim to scientific expertise is no longer tenable... more »
A passion for the mundane. A scuffed old bread knife, a glass vase, a coffee table — ordinary objects delighted, inspired, and confounded Matisse... more »
Even Bach, musical savant and master of counterpoint, did not escape critique. For one journalist, his work contained “too much art”... more »
Fraud, lies, and the importance of the group. Via attachment theory, Arendt, and Milgram, a former cult member considers the psychology of brainwashing... more »
Politics run through Shakespeare’s plays, but we know little of his own political opinions. His characters speak, they do not lecture. Yet certain themes recur... more »
After decades of literary labor, Bulgakov had published little: some short stories, part of a novel. The problem? His failure to understand what was wanted from his work... more »
Orchestras of the Third Reich. Austro-German musicians’ admiration for Hitler strains any belief that high art is ennobling to the spirit... more »
Float nude in saltwater, pee in a gold toilet, lounge in a field of phalluses. Participatory art preys on our narcissism. Is that a bad thing?... more »
Mickey Mouse, Jack the Ripper, Proust, mutton chops, ghost stories, comics: Joachim Kalka can write interestingly about almost anything... more »
Whose bohemia? Ida Nettleship married the painter Augustus John, had five children, competed with his 21-year-old muse, and went unmentioned in his memoir... more »
Jonathan Haidt is famous for explaining how liberals and conservatives think. Now he's wagering that social psychology can calm the campus culture war... more »
What's the meaning of red? It's the first color. It has the most powerful poetic and aesthetic associations. It warns, prohibits, condemns... more »
A.E. Housman was a classicist-poet and voice of England. He was gaunt, gray, fond of isolation. For fun he wrote caustic takedowns of other scholars... more »
You probably know of Charles and Ray Eames for their furniture design. But they also made more than 125 films. Why? “To get across an idea”... more »
For Terry Eagleton, culture is “the opium of the intelligentsia.” To understand this, along with his other epigrams, consider his anti-philosophical stance... more »
Literature enriches the public sphere but speaks most powerfully in private. Andrew O’Hagan asks: What future does literature have in an age drenched in social media?... more »
As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “The intellect is a muscle; it must be exercised.” But that exercise varies. Consider the reading habits of book critics... more »
At least since Orwell, bad writing has been linked with bad politics. But is good writing really a panacea for social, economic, legal, and political ills?... more »
Neuroscientists working on the “hard problem” of consciousness may be doomed to fail. But there is meaning — even pleasure — in the Sisyphean task... more »
It’s one thing to preserve a painting, quite another to preserve art made from bologna or bubble gum. Should art be made to last?... more »
Why we act as we do: neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, teachers, peers, and society. Yet every “cause” of our behavior is linked to dozens of other variables... more »
In 1965 a young New Yorker writer’s story ideas were rejected, one after another by the editor. Finally he said, “Oranges.” “That’s very good,” replied William Shawn... more »
Newark, N.J., has figured in half of Philip Roth's novels. It is an unusually expansive literary portrait of an American city, a chronicle of urban decline... more »
“Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed,” wrote Stuart Hall, founder of cultural studies. Do his reflections on his identity help us understand our own?... more »
Virginia Woolf's diary includes her thoughts on other people’s diaries. She read lots of them, seeing them as a valuable literary genre... more »
Why keep a diary? Benjamin Franklin sought to log 13 virtues a day, Samuel Johnson “to methodise” his life. For Susan Sontag, private writing was a source of strength... more »
Inside Wagner's head. The composer's essence was self-dramatization wrapped in contradiction. He was, himself, an all-embracing work of art... more »
Eric Hobsbawm became, perhaps, the world’s most-read historian. Still, he was puzzled over: How did a scholar so perceptive fail the test of anticommunism?... more »
James Baldwin's FBI file runs 1,884 pages. It's full of marginalia, including this, in 1964, from J. Edgar Hoover: “Isn’t Baldwin a Well-Known Pervert?”... more »
After decades of research and dozens of excellent books, is there anything new to say about Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick? Yes, quite a lot... more »
Futurists dismiss religion but anoint “evangelists” of technology and “oracles” of artificial intelligence. Are futurists really as atheistic as they think?... more »
Fifty years after the Congress for Cultural Freedom was outed as a CIA front, it stands as a reminder that state power can go only so far in setting the intellectual agenda... more »
"Having won California, self-esteem conquered the world. So here we are, living with the first generation raised entirely on the intoxicating mantra of its own excellence"... more »
Austro-Hungarian modernists like Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Joseph Roth were anti-utopian and anti-ideological. What were they for? Irony... more »
What's the relationship among genes, race, and IQ? The near-impossibility of a definitive answer has let assertion substitute for evidence... more »
In an 1888 diary entry, Thomas Hardy reflected on a church service. His stream-of-consciousness style was a harbinger of modernist techniques to come. We are Hardy's heirs... more »
Philosophical writing is pedantically precise. It's not much fun and doesn't much influence people. The problems are hard to settle. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it... more »
The glory of the Hollywood memoir. Idiosyncratic, biased, boastful, unctuous, and vain, it nevertheless gives us a revealing glimpse into the past... more »
Hemingway vs. Eastman. The literary “battle of the ages” involved evaluations of chest hair, a blow to the face (with a book, of course), slaps, and wrestling moves... more »
E.M. Forster called him a “mixture of insolence and nervousness.” Hemingway said he had “the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist.” What made Wyndham Lewis so unlikable?... more »
How was scientific publishing transformed from profit-shunning to for-profit oligopoly? It was all thanks to a man named Robert Maxwell... more »
Feed the cats, water the plants, mail the lesbian literary magazine to subscribers named Starflower, Athena, Kali: What it was like to be Adrienne Rich’s assistant... more »
The Brontë brother, Branwell, was known for vices — opiates, alcohol, married women, setting his bed on fire — but he had literary virtues as well... more »
Golden age of the short story: the 1890s? 1980s? 2010s? We’ve been celebrating the “revival” of the form since Chekhov. Some perspective, please ... more »
Is a tome three feet wide by two feet high a book? What about one with an embedded digital clock? Or a suitcase filled with lithographs?... more »
Bernard-Henri Lévy can barely read Hebrew and hasn't devoted much time or energy to studying Judaism. That hasn't stopped him from writing a book of pronouncements on the topic... more »
A passion for the mundane. A scuffed old bread knife, a glass vase, a coffee table — ordinary objects delighted, inspired, and confounded Matisse... more »
Politics run through Shakespeare’s plays, but we know little of his own political opinions. His characters speak, they do not lecture. Yet certain themes recur... more »
Float nude in saltwater, pee in a gold toilet, lounge in a field of phalluses. Participatory art preys on our narcissism. Is that a bad thing?... more »
Jonathan Haidt is famous for explaining how liberals and conservatives think. Now he's wagering that social psychology can calm the campus culture war... more »
You probably know of Charles and Ray Eames for their furniture design. But they also made more than 125 films. Why? “To get across an idea”... more »
As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote, “The intellect is a muscle; it must be exercised.” But that exercise varies. Consider the reading habits of book critics... more »
It’s one thing to preserve a painting, quite another to preserve art made from bologna or bubble gum. Should art be made to last?... more »
Newark, N.J., has figured in half of Philip Roth's novels. It is an unusually expansive literary portrait of an American city, a chronicle of urban decline... more »
Why keep a diary? Benjamin Franklin sought to log 13 virtues a day, Samuel Johnson “to methodise” his life. For Susan Sontag, private writing was a source of strength... more »
James Baldwin's FBI file runs 1,884 pages. It's full of marginalia, including this, in 1964, from J. Edgar Hoover: “Isn’t Baldwin a Well-Known Pervert?”... more »
Fifty years after the Congress for Cultural Freedom was outed as a CIA front, it stands as a reminder that state power can go only so far in setting the intellectual agenda... more »
What's the relationship among genes, race, and IQ? The near-impossibility of a definitive answer has let assertion substitute for evidence... more »
Many of the statues, reliefs, and sarcophagi of the ancient world were colorfully painted. And yet the association of beauty with pristine whiteness continues. Why?... more »
Cyril Connolly was obsessed with his own worst traits: laziness, nostalgia, gluttony, hypochondria, frivolity. His fetish for failure was, oddly, a source of inspiration.... more »
Newton getting bonked by an apple, Archimedes problem-solving in the bath: What eureka moments say — and don’t say — about the scientific process... more »
How beauty happens. The purpose of a peacock's tail feathers is less utilitarian than aesthetic. Or so goes a new theory of sexual selection... more »
The Dreyfus affair gave us the word “intellectual.” It also redefined truth, justice, and art. Look at the impact on Proust, Joyce, Kafka ... more »
Film as an art form is routinely dismissed in comparison to books. The attitude is so taken for granted that people assume even Martin Scorsese subscribes to it. He doesn't... more »
Technological change can make even recent “contemporary” fiction feel dated. So writers of literary works are increasingly setting them in the future... more »
The friendship of Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt ended over questions of good, evil, and historical responsibility. Their argument continues to be relevant... more »
Schools of thought in philosophy and cultural theory are transient. They coalesce, evolve, break apart. So how has the Frankfurt School endured for three generations?... more »
When Shirley Jackson arrived at the hospital and was asked her occupation, she said “writer.” The nurse responded, “I’ll just put down housewife"... more »
It's where Confucius and Lao Tzu went to think, where Li Bai and Du Fu went to find words, where Mao demonstrated his authority. In China, everything starts with a river... more »
Shakespeare and the brain. Stephen Booth is a literary critic with a penetrating view of poetic language. He's transformed our understanding not only of Shakespeare but also of how we think... more »
At 32 Nietzsche left Basel to recuperate in Sorrento. There he separated himself from Wagner, which was odd — Wagner was also in Sorrento... more »
How can we be? The fMRI can't identify the source of consciousness, but it can bring the problem into sharper relief... more »
Pound and Eliot. Lish and Carver. Brod and Kafka. Fiction editors sit uncomfortably at the intersection of art and commerce. The role is ripe for recrimination... more »
It used to be simple: dark suit, white shirt, discreet tie, black oxfords. Then came "casual Fridays" — and all we lost by dressing down... more »
Is intersectionality solving social ills? Or does it make us stupid? The academic theory, once obscure, is now everywhere... more »
In 2011, Daryl Bem, a social psychologist, published a paper in a top journal suggesting that ESP is real. That touched off a crisis of confidence in science. Should he be thanked or blamed?... more »
Travel writing is not all Kerouac and Chatwin. In fact, it doesn’t have to involve traveling farther than around a room... more »
Kafka abandoned on a balcony; Kafka at an air show. We're intrigued by anecdotes about his life, but what do they tell us?... more »
Just a contemplative philosopher? Montaigne’s life was full of misadventure: He fled mobs, was kidnapped by bandits, was exiled from the city where he was mayor... more »
He fell into a vat of boiling water for scalding pigs; then he contracted polio. Does Harry Crews’s childhood explain his affinity for the grotesque?... more »
Susan Sontag’s greatest work of criticism was the one she applied to herself. Her journals were not just a record of her life; they were an alternative to it... more »
Just because you're a man who reads Julia Kristeva doesn’t mean you're not sexist. In the arts, sexism is more often a failure of empathy than of understanding... more »
Asked about his transformation from Oxford don to thought leader, Niall Ferguson was blunt: “I did it all for the money.” He's not alone... more »
Cockroaches, crummy days, and lousy lakes. For Grace Paley, every part of life was worthy of literary attention. There was beauty in banality... more »
The essay, that most elegant and slippery of forms, resists being pinned down. Its strength derives from a “combination of exactitude and evasion”... more »
The brief rise of "prince poo." How the Enlightenment's sensory awakening reached its apex (or nadir) during a French craze for garments the color of baby poop... more »
Even Bach, musical savant and master of counterpoint, did not escape critique. For one journalist, his work contained “too much art”... more »
After decades of literary labor, Bulgakov had published little: some short stories, part of a novel. The problem? His failure to understand what was wanted from his work... more »
Mickey Mouse, Jack the Ripper, Proust, mutton chops, ghost stories, comics: Joachim Kalka can write interestingly about almost anything... more »
What's the meaning of red? It's the first color. It has the most powerful poetic and aesthetic associations. It warns, prohibits, condemns... more »
For Terry Eagleton, culture is “the opium of the intelligentsia.” To understand this, along with his other epigrams, consider his anti-philosophical stance... more »
At least since Orwell, bad writing has been linked with bad politics. But is good writing really a panacea for social, economic, legal, and political ills?... more »
Why we act as we do: neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, teachers, peers, and society. Yet every “cause” of our behavior is linked to dozens of other variables... more »
“Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed,” wrote Stuart Hall, founder of cultural studies. Do his reflections on his identity help us understand our own?... more »
Inside Wagner's head. The composer's essence was self-dramatization wrapped in contradiction. He was, himself, an all-embracing work of art... more »
After decades of research and dozens of excellent books, is there anything new to say about Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick? Yes, quite a lot... more »
"Having won California, self-esteem conquered the world. So here we are, living with the first generation raised entirely on the intoxicating mantra of its own excellence"... more »
In an 1888 diary entry, Thomas Hardy reflected on a church service. His stream-of-consciousness style was a harbinger of modernist techniques to come. We are Hardy's heirs... more »
What it’s like to be known as the man defeated by a machine: Garry Kasparov, an early enthusiast of chess-playing computers, rethinks Deep Blue... more »
Those mean-spirited New York Intellectuals. “Everyone around Partisan Review,” wrote Diana Trilling, “had his licensed malice.” But she could be as vicious as any of them... more »
Why is world literature dismissed as deracinated and dull, representing what’s wrong with the culture industry? Adam Kirsch defends a maligned genre... more »
The boredom boom. New books defend silence and solitude, pushing back against society’s endless demands to be entertained. Has the study of boredom become boring?... more »
The flip side to Goethe's self-confidence was melancholy. Writing was an exercise — often unsuccessful — in cheering himself up... more »
Social media is a boon to social protest. Marches grow, solidarity spreads, and movements scale quickly — too quickly to enact significant political change... more »
Exophonic writers, who write in a language other than their native one, are an odd bunch — perhaps none more so than the Surrealist, spectral Leonora Carrington... more »
“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was 23... more »
Philosophers agonize over AI but largely ignore nonhuman intelligence in front of us. Consider the stupendous mental abilities of honey badgers and elephants... more »
Armed conflict could go the way of slavery. But war won't become a rarity if we think of it in biological terms or treat it as a disease... more »
When sports meets philosophy. Want to test ideas about mutualism and self-interest? Try succeeding inside a cycling peloton... more »
In 1940, Czeslaw Milosz had to choose between Nazi and Soviet occupation. Nazism threatened the body, while Communism threatened the soul. For Milosz, the latter was the greater sacrifice ... more »
The Midwest wasn't always written about as a second-class culture of yokels and rednecks who lack intellect. Blame Mencken and The New Yorker... more »
How the Nazis pursued a new aesthetics for a new political order — and showed how swiftly liberal principles can be hollowed out... more »
Evelyn Waugh has been viewed as chiefly a comic writer. And he was funny, in his dark and malicious way. That's not to say he was amusing... more »
Margaret Wise Brown avoided witches, trolls, glass slippers, and sleeping beauties. Instead she revolutionized picture books, even prompting Gertrude Stein to write one... more »
Diana Trilling was key to her husband's literary success. But did it come at the expense of her own? “People will celebrate one member of a household but not two”... more »
In the mid-'60s, Edmund Wilson was living alone in the house he inherited from his mother. He was in decline. Meanwhile, Vladimir Nabokov was flush with Lolita royalties. Did envy cause their feud?... more »
What laughter means. In medieval times it was a great leveler, inclusive and communal. For modern satirists it is a way of standing apart... more »
Catching up with the Beats. Kerouac and Ginsberg are gone, but their writerly friends carry the torch. In their 80s and 90s, they haven’t exactly mellowed with age... more »
Is it possible to convey one’s moral vision to another generation? Henry Adams, who wrote a 500-page autobiography without mentioning his wife’s suicide, was skeptical... more »
Yes, power corrupts. It also makes us stupid by undermining the same capacities we need to gain it in the first place... more »
Hemingway in his day exemplified American macho. Now scholars are giving him a gender-fluid remake: A little less Papa, a little more Mama ... more »
Is free speech under threat in the United States? Not exactly, or at least not in the ways you might think. A Commentary symposium... more »
The life of a ghostwriter. Don't argue with clients, however repulsive. And remember, you'll probably receive no recognition — which may be a good thing... more »
The search for ecstasy. In 1960 an estimated 20 percent of Americans said they'd had a mystical experience. Now it's 50 percent... more »
If economists aren't questioning the effectiveness of economic theory, they should be. Simply put: Their claim to scientific expertise is no longer tenable... more »
Fraud, lies, and the importance of the group. Via attachment theory, Arendt, and Milgram, a former cult member considers the psychology of brainwashing... more »
Orchestras of the Third Reich. Austro-German musicians’ admiration for Hitler strains any belief that high art is ennobling to the spirit... more »
Whose bohemia? Ida Nettleship married the painter Augustus John, had five children, competed with his 21-year-old muse, and went unmentioned in his memoir... more »
A.E. Housman was a classicist-poet and voice of England. He was gaunt, gray, fond of isolation. For fun he wrote caustic takedowns of other scholars... more »
Literature enriches the public sphere but speaks most powerfully in private. Andrew O’Hagan asks: What future does literature have in an age drenched in social media?... more »
Neuroscientists working on the “hard problem” of consciousness may be doomed to fail. But there is meaning — even pleasure — in the Sisyphean task... more »
In 1965 a young New Yorker writer’s story ideas were rejected, one after another by the editor. Finally he said, “Oranges.” “That’s very good,” replied William Shawn... more »
Virginia Woolf's diary includes her thoughts on other people’s diaries. She read lots of them, seeing them as a valuable literary genre... more »
Eric Hobsbawm became, perhaps, the world’s most-read historian. Still, he was puzzled over: How did a scholar so perceptive fail the test of anticommunism?... more »
Futurists dismiss religion but anoint “evangelists” of technology and “oracles” of artificial intelligence. Are futurists really as atheistic as they think?... more »
Austro-Hungarian modernists like Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Joseph Roth were anti-utopian and anti-ideological. What were they for? Irony... more »
Philosophical writing is pedantically precise. It's not much fun and doesn't much influence people. The problems are hard to settle. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it... more »
Quick: Think of a novel devoted to climate change. Tough, right? What explains this failure of imagination involving the fate of the world?... more »
In the end, it's been said, authors write for professors. But the scholarly fate of Thoreau is uncertain; the 7,000 pages of his journal still await full study. It is the great untold secret of American letters... more »
Published 50 years ago, One Hundred Years of Solitude has become a trendy text. Frederic Jameson considers its cultural, political, and aesthetic ascendance... more »
Where tarot cards come from. Not ancient Egypt, but a place almost as mysterious: Paris, in 1781, with its occult-obsessed secret societies and private clubs... more »
The personalized internet curates our social-media feeds and individualizes our search results. It's a marvel. It's also caused an explosion of intellectual arrogance... more »
Churchill and Orwell, different in so many ways, shared a determination to confront unpleasant realities. They also had a tragic understanding that their views were unlikely to prevail... more »
W.G. Sebald is famous for his Holocaust writing, depiction of vacant landscapes, and sense of drifting melancholy. But comedy was key to his brilliance... more »
"One can be taught—and one needs to be taught—how to look," says Philippe de Montebello. "This is why I am so impatient with those who want to position their museum as a form of entertainment"... more »
Why we need Thoreau. His critics note that his moral vision was linked to self-righteousness. But who hasn’t felt self-righteous? His frustrations are ours as well... more »
After the “Midcentury Misogynists,” male American writers tended to avoid writing about sex, lest they be seen, like Updike, as “a penis with a thesaurus”... more »
Of all the biographers who have written about Hemingway, not one was a woman. Now comes Mary Dearborn, immune to the writer's hairy-chested legend... more »
What is a library? If you think it's just a place where society stores books, then you have a dangerously impoverished view of what knowledge can be... more »
Einstein hated beets. Hitchcock wouldn't eat eggs. Colson Whitehead can't stand ice cream. We are what we eat, but what's the significance of what we don't eat?... more »
Fifty years after her genteel verse graced the Yale Younger Poets series, Adrienne Rich had become a dissident. She hadn’t exactly chosen poetry in the first place... more »
Martin Luther, unfiltered. He lived in a bachelor’s chaos and hated Jews, papists, and Calvinists, among others. Then he married a runaway nun who brewed excellent beer... more »
There will be cats. Murakami novels feature felines, detective heroes, and creepy sex. Readers are so hooked on the formula that the variations hardly matter... more »
For modern interpreters, Greek tragedy boils down to lessons of power — how to get and keep it. And sexual politics, of course... more »
Imagination, idealism, an urge for self-transcendence: Why prominent intellectuals have been so willing to support terrible regimes ... more »
Graduate school is unkind to mind and body. To retain some health, go on dates. Have sex. Come to think of it, the world of online dating is a lot like to the academic job market... more »
The Passion of Michel Foucault. He was a surrealist, masochist, militant, Maoist, reformist, structuralist, comrade, and lover. He was also suicide-obsessed and hard to ignore... more »
Veronica Forrest-Thomson wrote one volume of criticism before dying at 27. Her ideas are so central that we’ve lost sight of her... more »
Laura Kipnis goes in search of that rare thing, a memoir of midlife with no epiphanies and no life lessons. Nothing’s figured out and nothing gets better ... more »
Though seen as titans of the literary left, Jameson, Eagleton, and Raymond Williams were more concerned with scholarship than with social intervention. Do they belong to the right?... more »
Anger is a popular emotion. It is seen as an engine of progress, a check on injustice. But it also pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law, says Martha Nussbaum... 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 »
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