Do hallucinogenic fungi have a significant place in art history? If the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald are any guide, yes indeed... more »
A poem is a machine, "one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression,” says Matthew Zapruder. How should that machine function?... more »
James Burnham, Trotskyist turned CIA operative, wasn't an unscrupulous shape-shifter. He was a committed activist who never tired of hawking himself... more »
Amis at 70. Once young and belligerent, now a domesticated elder statesman hoping that his daughter won't opt for college in California... more »
Books by Charles Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin number 7,500, with 160 more titles each year. Is there anything new to say on the subject? Yes... more »
Pankaj Mishra: “Longing for the ancien régime increasingly defines the Atlantic seaboard’s pundits as much as it does the fine people defending the honour of Robert E. Lee”... more »
The International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science doesn't sound romantic. But it's where Hilary Putnam met his future wife, Ruth Anna. Pragmatism would never be the same... more »
A.E. Housman's work is suffused with the pain of life, and the beauty of that pain. Yet his emotional armor was heavy. How to explain the gulf between poet and poetry?... more »
The idea of "white people" has a history, but it’s a short one. It was invented on October 19, 1613, the brainchild of the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton... more »
“It is difficult to live in Brooklyn without becoming a deep thinker,” wrote Clifton Fadiman, littérateur to the masses. Was he more than a middlebrow salesman?... more »
"The essay is subject to laws that are not less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable,” says Brian Dillon, who attempts the thankless task of defining those laws... more »
HBO, TED, podcasts, documentaries: Those cultural totems of the educated elite are entirely consistent with the lazy nature of elite intellectual activity... more »
NASA’s leaders had an early revelation: Discovery means little if the public can't see it. The agency has commissioned outer-space art ever since... more »
Five and a half years. That's how long Otis Redding's career lasted. Given where he came from, it's astonishing that his career happened at all... more »
French was “the pinnacle of logic”; Flemish was the true first language. Behold the folly of early linguistics, a field full of crackpots... more »
Frederick Wiseman's documentaries — which lack voice-over narration, soundtrack, titles, and interviews — add up to a comprehensive exploration of the American condition... more »
John McPhee is the maestro of 40,000-word nonfiction articles. He spent weeks staring at the sky thinking about how to begin. Can anyone still afford to write like that?... more »
Paris’s Bureau of Found Objects includes a wedding dress and a human skull. People who come to claim a lost possession often lose another in the process... more »
Freud has been debunked, yet the apparatus that defends him persists. Why do his ideas endure? Because we want to believe them... more »
The Enlightenment emerged from a 150-year “staccato burst” of European philosophy. Why did these thinkers — Hobbes, Descarte, Voltaire, Rousseau — write as they did? ... more »
Every generation discovers its own Edgar Allan Poe. Now gig-economy writers have a kindred spirit: Poe, too, was a broke-ass freelancer... more »
Ira Lightman ferrets out poets who pilfer lines, and then he shames them. Does that make him a hero or a bully?... more »
Over three years, Mozart composed eight piano concertos, three symphonies, and The Marriage of Figaro. He also bought a pet starling. Coincidence?... more »
For a time, the personal essay colonized the internet. Now the boom is over. Sadly, nobody told Joyce Maynard... more »
“What the hell have I taken on?” That was Ian Buruma's second reaction to being named editor of the NYRB. His first reaction: "a sense of euphoria"... more »
What happened to the public intellectual? She became a partisan. Hannah Arendt warned about translating philosophical insight into political commitment ... more »
Poet-critics long ago traded the patronage of aristocrats for that of the government, foundation, or university administrator. That system is now partially in ruins... more »
Silicon Valley's latest "body hack": microdosing LSD. It's supposed to make you more creative. The real allure: It makes you more productive... more »
Does what you eat reveal the content of your character? "While extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable"... more »
He couldn’t sing and didn’t know anything about the music, yet James Baldwin called himself a blues singer. What does it mean for a writer to be a blues singer?... more »
Has the Voynich manuscript been deciphered at last? According to a new theory, it’s a health manual for well-to-do women. Experts are dubious.... more »
If we were to take a lesson from the Iliad, it would be to resist the seductions of rage. But beware of authors touting lessons from ancient Greeks... more »
Philip Levine was the poet of the left wing of the left wing of the past, the bard of workaday exhaustion and routine. Paul Berman has come to praise him... more »
John Ashbery, for whom writing was an immersive experience, like taking a bath in words, is dead at 90... Christian Lorentzen... Evan Kindley... Larissa MacFarquhar... Rae Armantrout... Ben Lerner... Tania Ketenjian... Paul Muldoon... David Orr... Katy Waldman... Alex Ross... Eileen Myles... Kimberly Quiogue Andrews... The Guardian... The TLS... AP... Poetry Foundation...... more »
The Quran is an allusive text. Precisely that difficult and poetic style, says Sari Nusseibeh, is what makes it a "progenitor of reason"... more »
"The term 'resilience' was coined in the 1970s," says Edgar Jones. Before that, "everyone was assumed to be tough, so there wasn’t really a word for it"... more »
Salman Rushdie is either disinclined or unable to disguise his status-consciousness. Hard to say if that’s due to a surfeit of self-awareness or its opposite... more »
There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to diminish Darwin by insisting that his ideas are not original. A.N. Wilson is no more successful than his predecessors... more »
Meet Henry George — economist, pamphleteer, journalist. Once famous, now dead and forgotten, he's the guru whom Silicon Valley doesn't know it needs... more »
Descartes found imagination “more of a hindrance than a help”; Hume considered it “faint and languid.” Why do philosophers fear imagination?... more »
Jane Carlyle was the greatest letter writer of her time. A correspondent of Mill, Darwin, Forster, she is remembered as a genius. But a genius of what?... more »
"All that is solid melts into air," wrote Marx in the 19th century. He was premature. Postmodernity, which aspires to melt solids, arrived a century later. A pre-history of post-truth... more »
Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Los Alamos — there are reasons to fear the power of labs. Is David Reich's ancient genetics lab at Harvard a threat to humanity?... more »
Chester B. Himes disdained literary conventions. In prison, he reimagined himself as a new kind of "black literary realist." He was largely forgotten, until now... more »
Vivian Maier was a street photographer with hoarding tendencies who produced startling and memorable images. Most else about her life is a cloud of unknowns... more »
In the early ‘80s, E.B. White was an octogenarian widower. He'd want the company of a fan, right? "There’s one of me, at most, and there are ten thousand of you. Please don’t come"... more »
What makes popular-science books popular? The opportunity to measure your comprehension against the best minds. Falling behind is part of the thrill... more »
Few have played as central a role in the long, slow destruction of literary study as Stephen Greenblatt. And few have profited from it as much, professionally and financially... more »
Nabokov insisted on written interviews. Why? “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child”... more »
During the Gilded Age, some rich people dabbled in séances and breakfasted with corpses. Consider the portrait subjects of John Singer Sargent... more »
When Norman Mailer heard that Elizabeth Hardwick was reviewing him in Partisan Review, he pre-emptively bought an ad defending himself. She got the last word, of course... more »
The avant-gardists Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy were happily married — until he disappeared. Did he fake his death to become a counterfeiter of Oscar Wilde manuscripts?... more »
An octopus is a soft-bodied mollusc with three hearts that beat blue-green blood. It is also remarkably clever... more »
Nobody played Schubert like Sviatoslav Richter. His secret: tempo. Slow, even glacial, or making no sense at all, but all mesmerizing... more »
Napoleon was allergic to leather, Queen Victoria’s wedding cake weighed 200 pounds, and other unusual facts from Christie's... more »
Randall Jarrell thought that Richard Wilbur's poetry didn't go far enough — that he settled for good but not great work. Now 96, has Wilbur put that critique to rest?... more »
How did religious freedom come to the West? Spinoza and Locke are often invoked, but in reality, persecution simply became too expensive... more »
Derrida dressed like a rakish ski instructor; Foucault was fond of leather jackets. Caring about clothes isn’t mere vanity — it can signal intellectual commitment... more »
Economic equality seems like a very good thing. Too bad it tends to occur only under the most barbaric of conditions... more »
The author of a novel is not always well placed to interpret it. Ask Orhan Pamuk, who has spent a decade reflecting on the pitfalls of teaching his own books... more »
Their history is a catalog of lust, sex, theft, betrayal, and degradation. Characters are dangerous and damaged. Pulp novels? No, libraries... more »
Why do Americans think as they do about sex? Early Christian attitudes toward sin and shame play a role. But religion is only part of the answer ... more »
Emotions are seen as something to be tamed by cool reason. This seductive view of intelligence reflects a bogus view of the brain... more »
Do hallucinogenic fungi have a significant place in art history? If the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald are any guide, yes indeed... more »
Amis at 70. Once young and belligerent, now a domesticated elder statesman hoping that his daughter won't opt for college in California... more »
The International Congress on Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science doesn't sound romantic. But it's where Hilary Putnam met his future wife, Ruth Anna. Pragmatism would never be the same... more »
“It is difficult to live in Brooklyn without becoming a deep thinker,” wrote Clifton Fadiman, littérateur to the masses. Was he more than a middlebrow salesman?... more »
NASA’s leaders had an early revelation: Discovery means little if the public can't see it. The agency has commissioned outer-space art ever since... more »
Frederick Wiseman's documentaries — which lack voice-over narration, soundtrack, titles, and interviews — add up to a comprehensive exploration of the American condition... more »
Freud has been debunked, yet the apparatus that defends him persists. Why do his ideas endure? Because we want to believe them... more »
Ira Lightman ferrets out poets who pilfer lines, and then he shames them. Does that make him a hero or a bully?... more »
“What the hell have I taken on?” That was Ian Buruma's second reaction to being named editor of the NYRB. His first reaction: "a sense of euphoria"... more »
Silicon Valley's latest "body hack": microdosing LSD. It's supposed to make you more creative. The real allure: It makes you more productive... more »
Has the Voynich manuscript been deciphered at last? According to a new theory, it’s a health manual for well-to-do women. Experts are dubious.... more »
John Ashbery, for whom writing was an immersive experience, like taking a bath in words, is dead at 90... Christian Lorentzen... Evan Kindley... Larissa MacFarquhar... Rae Armantrout... Ben Lerner... Tania Ketenjian... Paul Muldoon... David Orr... Katy Waldman... Alex Ross... Eileen Myles... Kimberly Quiogue Andrews... The Guardian... The TLS... AP... Poetry Foundation...... more »
Salman Rushdie is either disinclined or unable to disguise his status-consciousness. Hard to say if that’s due to a surfeit of self-awareness or its opposite... more »
Descartes found imagination “more of a hindrance than a help”; Hume considered it “faint and languid.” Why do philosophers fear imagination?... more »
Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Los Alamos — there are reasons to fear the power of labs. Is David Reich's ancient genetics lab at Harvard a threat to humanity?... more »
In the early ‘80s, E.B. White was an octogenarian widower. He'd want the company of a fan, right? "There’s one of me, at most, and there are ten thousand of you. Please don’t come"... more »
Nabokov insisted on written interviews. Why? “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child”... more »
The avant-gardists Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy were happily married — until he disappeared. Did he fake his death to become a counterfeiter of Oscar Wilde manuscripts?... more »
Napoleon was allergic to leather, Queen Victoria’s wedding cake weighed 200 pounds, and other unusual facts from Christie's... more »
Derrida dressed like a rakish ski instructor; Foucault was fond of leather jackets. Caring about clothes isn’t mere vanity — it can signal intellectual commitment... more »
Their history is a catalog of lust, sex, theft, betrayal, and degradation. Characters are dangerous and damaged. Pulp novels? No, libraries... more »
A few years after the death of Degas, his renown was at its peak. Then a former model revealed his violence, anti-Semitism, and artistic impotence... more »
The average museum visitor spends only a moment — about seven seconds — in front of an artwork. Why do so many people spend those seconds on selfies? ... more »
Orwell and Churchill were, on the surface, quite different. But they shared a commitment to observing accurately the world around them... more »
America endures another racial reckoning. Will this one lead to social disintegration, political breakup, or collective nervous breakdown?... more »
Leopold Bloom’s behavior may bewilder, but that’s no reason to put down Ulysses. Confronting the enigmatic in literature helps us understand others and ourselves... more »
David Hume reveled in controversy. His friend Adam Smith was more restrained. Both were unlikely and indispensable avatars of the rise of liberal thought... more »
Friedrich Hayek, an obscure young Viennese technocrat, was called “Mr, Fluctooations” behind his back. How did neoliberalism, his big idea, gain sway?... more »
Train stations were Tony Judt's cathedrals; timetables were his Bible. The two trains he cared about most took him to places where he could avoid history... more »
How writers write. For Kingsley Amis, it was simply about applying the seat of his pants to the seat of his chair... more »
Michiko Kakutani– feared, respected, mercurial – is stepping away from her role at The Times. Is this the dawn of a new age of book reviewing?... more »
He was reckless and inept, bilked his rich and hopeless clients, slept with his sister-in-law, molested his younger sister. Was this the real Sigmund Freud?... more »
Americans like to think of their colleges as venues for the free exchange of ideas. But campuses have never consistently welcomed unorthodox views... more »
The 19th-century Faithist community of Shalam had bold plans for expansion. But a problem loomed: amateur metaphysicians had little aptitude for physical labor... more »
Dmitry Bykov’s work has baffled non-Russian-speaking critics. But understanding the author of “How Putin Became President of the USA,” among other fairy tales, is worth the effort... more »
In the mid-1970s, Marcel Ophuls began work on a documentary about how people look away from or justify or deny what is done in their name. The film disappeared, until now... more »
Previously unknown drawings, letters, and poems by Sylvia Plath have been discovered. Where's the novel she was working on when she died?... more »
Robert Louis Stevenson spent his last five years in Samoa, where the locals couldn't comprehend how he earned his living as a writer... more »
E.H. Carr is best known for being consistently and egregiously wrong. But his treatment of historical change endures as a bulwark against despair... more »
When a tuberculosis epidemic resulted in a glut of X-rays, it became an opportunity to subvert Soviet censorship of music... more »
A poem is a machine, "one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression,” says Matthew Zapruder. How should that machine function?... more »
Books by Charles Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin number 7,500, with 160 more titles each year. Is there anything new to say on the subject? Yes... more »
A.E. Housman's work is suffused with the pain of life, and the beauty of that pain. Yet his emotional armor was heavy. How to explain the gulf between poet and poetry?... more »
"The essay is subject to laws that are not less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable,” says Brian Dillon, who attempts the thankless task of defining those laws... more »
Five and a half years. That's how long Otis Redding's career lasted. Given where he came from, it's astonishing that his career happened at all... more »
John McPhee is the maestro of 40,000-word nonfiction articles. He spent weeks staring at the sky thinking about how to begin. Can anyone still afford to write like that?... more »
The Enlightenment emerged from a 150-year “staccato burst” of European philosophy. Why did these thinkers — Hobbes, Descarte, Voltaire, Rousseau — write as they did? ... more »
Over three years, Mozart composed eight piano concertos, three symphonies, and The Marriage of Figaro. He also bought a pet starling. Coincidence?... more »
What happened to the public intellectual? She became a partisan. Hannah Arendt warned about translating philosophical insight into political commitment ... more »
Does what you eat reveal the content of your character? "While extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable"... more »
If we were to take a lesson from the Iliad, it would be to resist the seductions of rage. But beware of authors touting lessons from ancient Greeks... more »
The Quran is an allusive text. Precisely that difficult and poetic style, says Sari Nusseibeh, is what makes it a "progenitor of reason"... more »
There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to diminish Darwin by insisting that his ideas are not original. A.N. Wilson is no more successful than his predecessors... more »
Jane Carlyle was the greatest letter writer of her time. A correspondent of Mill, Darwin, Forster, she is remembered as a genius. But a genius of what?... more »
Chester B. Himes disdained literary conventions. In prison, he reimagined himself as a new kind of "black literary realist." He was largely forgotten, until now... more »
What makes popular-science books popular? The opportunity to measure your comprehension against the best minds. Falling behind is part of the thrill... more »
During the Gilded Age, some rich people dabbled in séances and breakfasted with corpses. Consider the portrait subjects of John Singer Sargent... more »
An octopus is a soft-bodied mollusc with three hearts that beat blue-green blood. It is also remarkably clever... more »
Randall Jarrell thought that Richard Wilbur's poetry didn't go far enough — that he settled for good but not great work. Now 96, has Wilbur put that critique to rest?... more »
Economic equality seems like a very good thing. Too bad it tends to occur only under the most barbaric of conditions... more »
Why do Americans think as they do about sex? Early Christian attitudes toward sin and shame play a role. But religion is only part of the answer ... more »
How books are read is as important as what’s in them. Reading out loud, for instance, was seen as a defense against the "seductive, enervating dangers" of sentimental novels... more »
The personal essay has become an introspective exercise full of pretty phrases that mean nothing. Another type of personal essay is possible... more »
Barthes was killed by a van; Althusser strangled his wife. Could those events be connected? In a new novel, they are... more »
You can judge critics by the intensity of their feelings. Exhibit A: Michael Robbins, who swoons for Taylor Swift and tosses Molotovs at Charles Simic... more »
Her husband tried to commit suicide on their honeymoon, her brother disowned her, and at a ball, no one asked her to dance. George Eliot’s humiliations enriched her writing... more »
Though "post-truth" was coined in 1992, the malady is not new. And postmodernism isn't to blame. The problem isn't about epistemology; it's about identity... more »
Sartre compared human freedom to skiing, but he really meant surfing. The action of imposing our will on the world is like riding a wave... more »
Why do we act the way we do? Go into the weeds of human behavior and you'll arrive at a definitive conclusion: It's complicated... more »
Did Jane Austen weave clues into her novels of her secret, radical politics? No, but her wit and wisdom were radical in and of themselves... more »
Toscanini's quasi-religious consecration to music fueled an obsessive and often miserable struggle to realize his vision of artistic perfection... more »
Secular thought arrived via not just luminaries but also everyday atheists: a cartoonist, a rogue traveling preacher, a teetotaler who ran afoul of obscenity laws ... more »
The words “boring” and “interesting” didn't exist in English until the 1800s. Now we're inundated with Big Think on the topic. What's behind the "boredom boom"?... more »
How did a young woman from Pennsylvania become a world expert on sexual mores? Exploring Margaret Mead's sexual awakening... more »
“‘Hardness’ has not been in our century a quality much admired in women," wrote Joan Didion. Yet she was among a cadre of women renowned for the unemotional clarity of her writing... more »
In 1931, a concrete structure was erected on the banks of the Moscow River. To roam its halls is to confront the horror, strangeness, and pathos of the Russian Revolution... more »
The birth of the modern museum allowed Victorian painters to imitate their forebears. Yet art didn’t descend into pastiche and appropriation... more »
Why do people who advocate the selfless communal life create such emotional havoc around themselves? The question consumed Sonya Tolstoy... more »
Toscanini's resolute anti-fascism endeared him to fair-minded people. But it's a mistake to connect his political integrity to his music-making... more »
James Burnham, Trotskyist turned CIA operative, wasn't an unscrupulous shape-shifter. He was a committed activist who never tired of hawking himself... more »
Pankaj Mishra: “Longing for the ancien régime increasingly defines the Atlantic seaboard’s pundits as much as it does the fine people defending the honour of Robert E. Lee”... more »
The idea of "white people" has a history, but it’s a short one. It was invented on October 19, 1613, the brainchild of the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton... more »
HBO, TED, podcasts, documentaries: Those cultural totems of the educated elite are entirely consistent with the lazy nature of elite intellectual activity... more »
French was “the pinnacle of logic”; Flemish was the true first language. Behold the folly of early linguistics, a field full of crackpots... more »
Paris’s Bureau of Found Objects includes a wedding dress and a human skull. People who come to claim a lost possession often lose another in the process... more »
Every generation discovers its own Edgar Allan Poe. Now gig-economy writers have a kindred spirit: Poe, too, was a broke-ass freelancer... more »
For a time, the personal essay colonized the internet. Now the boom is over. Sadly, nobody told Joyce Maynard... more »
Poet-critics long ago traded the patronage of aristocrats for that of the government, foundation, or university administrator. That system is now partially in ruins... more »
He couldn’t sing and didn’t know anything about the music, yet James Baldwin called himself a blues singer. What does it mean for a writer to be a blues singer?... more »
Philip Levine was the poet of the left wing of the left wing of the past, the bard of workaday exhaustion and routine. Paul Berman has come to praise him... more »
"The term 'resilience' was coined in the 1970s," says Edgar Jones. Before that, "everyone was assumed to be tough, so there wasn’t really a word for it"... more »
Meet Henry George — economist, pamphleteer, journalist. Once famous, now dead and forgotten, he's the guru whom Silicon Valley doesn't know it needs... more »
"All that is solid melts into air," wrote Marx in the 19th century. He was premature. Postmodernity, which aspires to melt solids, arrived a century later. A pre-history of post-truth... more »
Vivian Maier was a street photographer with hoarding tendencies who produced startling and memorable images. Most else about her life is a cloud of unknowns... more »
Few have played as central a role in the long, slow destruction of literary study as Stephen Greenblatt. And few have profited from it as much, professionally and financially... more »
When Norman Mailer heard that Elizabeth Hardwick was reviewing him in Partisan Review, he pre-emptively bought an ad defending himself. She got the last word, of course... more »
Nobody played Schubert like Sviatoslav Richter. His secret: tempo. Slow, even glacial, or making no sense at all, but all mesmerizing... more »
How did religious freedom come to the West? Spinoza and Locke are often invoked, but in reality, persecution simply became too expensive... more »
The author of a novel is not always well placed to interpret it. Ask Orhan Pamuk, who has spent a decade reflecting on the pitfalls of teaching his own books... more »
Emotions are seen as something to be tamed by cool reason. This seductive view of intelligence reflects a bogus view of the brain... more »
The e-book of The Godfather amounts to a million bytes. A picture of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone: 35,000 bytes. We know this thanks to Claude Shannon... more »
If the pleasures of reading are not too far removed from the pleasures of life, becoming a good reader is akin to learning to live well... more »
An accent in “élite,” a diaeresis in “reëmerge.” The New Yorker style, arbitrary and peculiar, somehow overshadows the substance of the writing ... more »
Sex is nice but fleeting. The joys of syntax, on the other hand, are everlasting. For a good time, diagram a sentence or dive into Coleridge’s poetics... more »
Delmore Schwartz worried that he would be remembered as nasty, gauche, awkward — an overeager clown. The weight of his concerns, and his loneliness, hangs over his biographer... more »
The politics of identity is nothing new, especially on the right. Now the obsession with identity is strangling liberalism, and campus politics bears much of the blame... more »
Thoreau was a critic of triviality, gossip, and distraction. He preferred communing with dead authors to chatting with his neighbors. What would he have made of Twitter?... more »
Mr. Electrico, a magician, shouted “Live forever!” and electrified 12-year-old Ray Bradbury. The sci-fi writer is gone, but his work will last... more »
Intellectuals are unreliable students of populism, finding it too prone to ignorance and demagogy. Beware anyone who claims to speak for "the people," but listen... more »
A dream of Utopia, an Eden of innocence, and then the Fall: The Summer of Love was about the pursuit of pleasure. But there was a puritan streak, too... more »
Communists are unlikely entrepreneurs. But beginning in the 1930s, they set up bookstores across America. Turns out that even anticapitalists can't ignore the bottom line... more »
Art enriches life and helps engage us with mortality. And so Robert McCrum, after a stroke and a fall, began to catalog his inventory of dissolution... more »
Liberal democracy was meant to depoliticize society, to turn issues of public morality into private concerns. By that measure, it's been a failure ... more »
Freud the philosopher. Before psychoanalysis, he was primarily concerned with destroying what was then an intellectual orthodoxy: mind-body dualism... more »
The conventional story of philosophy treats Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, and Islamic thought as isolated from the Western tradition. Time for an integrated approach... more »
Journalism may never have been as public-spirited as some ink-stained nostalgics like to think. But the myth mattered, and now it's in tatters... more »
“There are no facts, only art,” wrote David Shields in 2010. It's a prescient description of our myopic and self-absorbed journalistic era... more »
Wherever there is anger and agony, there is Guernica. What is it about Picasso's mural that answers our need for an epitome of death – and for life in the face of it?... more »
Meet the New Optimists. This stubbornly cheerful lot rejects doom-mongering. But is the world really getting better?... more »
When did disagreeing with someone become akin to oppression? When we conflated our opinions and our identities... more »
Diogenes wanted his body, upon his death, to be thrown over a wall for the dogs — a rational and ecological approach. Why has no society followed suit?... more »
First the yuppie, then the hipster, now the “aspirational class.” These people consume conscientiously — and have no intention of relinquishing their status... more »
The ancient Greeks had color words for “pansy-like” and “wine-like,” but never sea or sky blue. Can we understand their descriptions if we can’t see as they did?... more »
Two centuries is a long time to be contemporary. Do we read Jane Austen to escape our own times, or to see it clearly? Why would we need to do either?... more »
Academic writing is obscure. More problematic, it's vague. Why? The vaguer you are, the less you can be held accountable for anything you say. See: Slavoj Zizek... more »
Nazism and the supernatural. Of all the Third Reich’s bizarre experiments with the occult, none was embraced as effusively as World Ice Theory. Hitler thought it would replace Christianity... more »
It happened gradually. The surges, surprising transitions, turns of phrases came less often. Then hardly at all. For Sven Birkerts, writing became a lot more difficult... more »
The life and death of John Keats. His talent drew attention, as did his penchant for fighting. When death neared, he longed for it with frightening urgency... more »
What do we get from poems and songs? The effects are probably as much a product of what you bring as what you take... more »
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