Can a pure and radical idealism be sustained without eventually curdling into despair or cynicism? The Center for Political Beauty, in Berlin, tests the limits of aggressive optimism... more »
Does a new biography of Jann Wenner mark the last epic tome devoted to the exploits of mercurial, white, male jerks? Probably not... more »
"Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean," says Jonathan Franzen. "But it is one good way"... more »
We talk about books we haven’t read and books we’ve read but forgotten. Maybe one day we’ll discuss books that we’ve imagined... more »
What if the story of civilization — from savagery to hunting/gathering to the invention of writing and leisure and freedom — is wrong?... more »
The job of the critic is changing, says Lionel Shriver. It's not to assess a book’s storytelling, but to castigate writers guilty of any crimes of the imagination... more »
The curious influence of Samuel Moyn. How did the deceptively boyish-looking historian at Yale became a role model to a generation of young political thinkers?... more »
Joseph Conrad was a skeptic who believed that civilization was fueled by illusions. He was suspicious of all schemes of improvement. He is a man for our times... more »
Does the pursuit of knowledge trump the pursuit of ethical behavior? That question fueled Foucault's turn from madness and sexuality to politics... more »
Herman Melville’s son, Stanwix Melville, rode through cemeteries, experienced a shipwreck, and dealt with failing eyesight. He was dead at 34... more »
Mary McCarthy became a novelist almost by default. She had to be coerced into writing by her husband, Edmund Wilson. Nevertheless, her fiction lives on... more »
Kant thought entire civilizations incapable of philosophy. Derrida said China had no philosophy, only thought. Why did Western philosophy turn its back on the world?... more »
Theodore Dreiser tried just about everything to succeed, even working for a publishing house whose motto was “The worse the swill, the more the public will buy”... more »
In the arts, “outsider” means something specific. But what is an outsider writer? And can Virginia Woolf plausibly be considered one?... more »
“Alexander Calder wanted to be clear and unfussy, to get straight to the point. At the same time, he liked to linger over life’s oddities and obscurities”... more »
Where does the human capacity for counting come from? Is our understanding of, say, “18” a biological endowment? Or is it a product of culture? ... more »
Angela Carter found meaning in antagonizing foes, especially Andrea Dworkin. “If I can get up … the Dworkin proboscis,” she said, “then my living has not been in vain”... more »
In the era of the quantified self, does the old-fashioned chronicling of passing thoughts and daily minutiae still serve a purpose? Dear Diary…... more »
Reading books is an excellent thing to do, but there are any number of excellent things that someone, even a writer, might wish to do. Orwell did them.... more »
No sooner had photography been invented than it became inextricably connected with lying. Such deceptions were born from a hope that the camera could transcend death... more »
If Allan Bloom’s surname had been Smith, would The Closing of the American Mind have been written? Probably not, says Jonathan Kay, who reads a lot into Bloom's biography... more »
How to be good at literary parties: Stay away from rich people. Skip networking events. The best way to befriend famous people is to have no idea who they are... more »
Whatever you may think about Arturo Toscanini or his interpretation of a specific work, there is no doubt that he changed the concept of conducting... more »
"Public conversation is overpoliticized and undermoralized,” says David Brooks. "Relationships and mercy and how to be a friend — these are the big subjects of life, and we don’t talk about them enough"... more »
Mark Twain had one goal: Make money. By the age of 50, he was rich. “I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” he said, and he was right to be afraid... more »
The cartoonish anti-Semitism, the affinity for fascists: "Ezra Pound is a litmus test as much as he is a poet." Is his work proof of his insanity?... more »
Peer review is essential. That’s obvious. What isn't obvious is that it should be organized as it is — or even that it should be organized at all... more »
Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading, and essential. We compare because it's necessary, even inevitable... more »
How did a KKK-supporting, neo-Confederate sculptor of modest reputation come to dominate salons in Washington? Inside the tangled history of liberalism... more »
Designed by an expert on Swiss phallic cults, the Rorschach test remains influential among Argentines, Japanese marriage counselors, and American courts... more »
Kirkus, one of the country’s most prolific book reviews, has managed to misapprehend both the nature of reviewing and the nature of books... more »
Luisa Casati lived with albino blackbirds, a cheetah, and a life-size wax replica of herself. What can she teach us about the nature of bohemianism?... more »
John Rawls called it "the best of all games"; Mark Kingwell calls it "the most philosophical of games." What is it about baseball and philosophy?... more »
Edgar Allan Poe was a savage but uncalculating critic. He spent years mocking “The Literati of New York City,” then attempted to work among them... more »
Who could be against empathy? Paul Bloom, or so he says. But is the Yale psychologist serious? Or is he just trying to sell books?... more »
What makes male characters in Jane Austen so sexy? It has something to do with the taming of the masculine principle. William Deresiewicz explains... more »
Under fire with Allied troops during World War II, Jean-Pierre Melville made an oath to himself: If he survived, he'd get back to Paris and build a film studio... more »
The relationship between morality and neurology is complicated. Few people get it, fewer can explain it. Robert Sapolsky, one of those few, is a determinist, but not a simple one... more »
In love, there’s no inoculation against betrayal. So think of affairs as a feature of relationships, not a bug. So says Esther Perel, who charges $1,500 a session for such insights... more »
War is horrible. It's also alarmingly attractive. Philip Caputo had to reconcile those two reactions before he could write about his experience in Vietnam... more »
Thinking about thinking. We think, says Alan Jacobs, because we hope to become “more than we currently are.” Therein lies both the promise and peril of a life lived thoughtfully... more »
“If the rise of humanism was a sunrise, then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse.” Marilynne Robinson on the value and fate of the humanities... more »
“O Niebuhr, Where Art Thou?” He died along with the literate public's interest in theology. Now Christian thought is in a long retreat. It doesn’t have to be that way... more »
Elizabeth Bishop had astonishing control and poetic technique. But below the surface was a gushing emotional register. Was she the loneliest person who ever lived?... more »
"The fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma," says Jonathan Meades. It is a cult of "puritanical, po-faced, censorious nothingness"... more »
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a political writer. But to see life solely in political terms, he believed, is to misunderstand it. The meaning of life lies elsewhere... more »
The past should be studied only to expose its failings. Or so goes liberal logic. How disparaging the past become a mark of intellectual respectability... more »
Poor George Orwell. The bare-knuckled revolutionary has been reduced to a cuddly, bipartisan grandpa. Orwell’s deradicalization has a long and shameless history... more »
A philosophy of being at home. Consider your domestic surroundings along with Gaston Bachelard, and you will have “unlocked a door to daydreaming”... more »
Many of Alexander Calder's greatest works have their genesis in children’s toys. He was an overgrown man-child with a deep affinity for play
... more »
After a decade of hype, the digital humanities has merely confirmed what should have been obvious all along: More information is not more knowledge... more »
Dream King, Swan King, Kitsch King: Ludwig II, Europe's most elusive bachelor, died in 1886. He still qualifies as the world's greatest opera fan... more »
Hitler sought to construct an empire of both military and cultural dominance. So did Mussolini. Their method: attract artists who were not themselves fascists... more »
Whether in a scholar’s attempt to live like a badger or in recent nature writing, one question stands out: What is looking back at us through other species’ eyes?... more »
“The key to writing biography is the capacity to be empathetic,” says James Atlas, who failed in that regard when writing his book on Saul Bellow... more »
The midlife crisis, first described by psychologists in 1965, is a first-world problem, but it's a problem nonetheless. The first rule of crisis prevention: avoid self-absorption... more »
In an age when truth is dismissed as fiction, the novel matters more because we all live by fictions. It’s how we get to the truth... more »
Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are more readable than Henry Green. But Green is more rereadable — his opaque works reward our repeated attention... more »
Giorgio Vasari was a second-rate artist and a first-rate gossip. Behold his catalog of piquant trivia about Renaissance Italy ... more »
"The infatuation with portents — with the supposed relevance of voices from the past — is neither bread nor circus. It’s an obsession with history that can also be a form of amnesia"... more »
When music wielded imperial might. The Chinese Music Bureau, founded around 120 BC, was led by someone whose primary career experience was training hunting dogs... more »
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was not just a historian but an "action-intellectual," driven by his commitments and a belief that politics is more a war of will than of ideas... more »
The nonstop crescendo of Allan Bloom's assault on the modern university made it easy for liberals to dismiss him — too easy. Todd Gitlin explains... more »
Can a pure and radical idealism be sustained without eventually curdling into despair or cynicism? The Center for Political Beauty, in Berlin, tests the limits of aggressive optimism... more »
We talk about books we haven’t read and books we’ve read but forgotten. Maybe one day we’ll discuss books that we’ve imagined... more »
The curious influence of Samuel Moyn. How did the deceptively boyish-looking historian at Yale became a role model to a generation of young political thinkers?... more »
Herman Melville’s son, Stanwix Melville, rode through cemeteries, experienced a shipwreck, and dealt with failing eyesight. He was dead at 34... more »
Theodore Dreiser tried just about everything to succeed, even working for a publishing house whose motto was “The worse the swill, the more the public will buy”... more »
Where does the human capacity for counting come from? Is our understanding of, say, “18” a biological endowment? Or is it a product of culture? ... more »
Reading books is an excellent thing to do, but there are any number of excellent things that someone, even a writer, might wish to do. Orwell did them.... more »
How to be good at literary parties: Stay away from rich people. Skip networking events. The best way to befriend famous people is to have no idea who they are... more »
Mark Twain had one goal: Make money. By the age of 50, he was rich. “I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” he said, and he was right to be afraid... more »
Historical analogies are simplistic, misleading, and essential. We compare because it's necessary, even inevitable... more »
Kirkus, one of the country’s most prolific book reviews, has managed to misapprehend both the nature of reviewing and the nature of books... more »
Edgar Allan Poe was a savage but uncalculating critic. He spent years mocking “The Literati of New York City,” then attempted to work among them... more »
Under fire with Allied troops during World War II, Jean-Pierre Melville made an oath to himself: If he survived, he'd get back to Paris and build a film studio... more »
War is horrible. It's also alarmingly attractive. Philip Caputo had to reconcile those two reactions before he could write about his experience in Vietnam... more »
“O Niebuhr, Where Art Thou?” He died along with the literate public's interest in theology. Now Christian thought is in a long retreat. It doesn’t have to be that way... more »
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a political writer. But to see life solely in political terms, he believed, is to misunderstand it. The meaning of life lies elsewhere... more »
A philosophy of being at home. Consider your domestic surroundings along with Gaston Bachelard, and you will have “unlocked a door to daydreaming”... more »
Dream King, Swan King, Kitsch King: Ludwig II, Europe's most elusive bachelor, died in 1886. He still qualifies as the world's greatest opera fan... more »
“The key to writing biography is the capacity to be empathetic,” says James Atlas, who failed in that regard when writing his book on Saul Bellow... more »
Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene are more readable than Henry Green. But Green is more rereadable — his opaque works reward our repeated attention... more »
When music wielded imperial might. The Chinese Music Bureau, founded around 120 BC, was led by someone whose primary career experience was training hunting dogs... more »
In its belief that what matters is information rather than insight, society has become what Wittgenstein feared. That could explain his unpopularity... more »
Orwell has become less flesh and blood than a set of moral positions. But deep in his letters and diaries and remembrances, one can glimpse the man... more »
Oxford's Very Short Introductions series taps into a very old human desire to know everything. Eight million copies have been sold to readers who yearn for mastery... more »
Some are excited, others scared. Some are cautious, others jubilant. Some are utopian, others pessimistic. Futurists: a taxonomy... more »
The eccentric life of Ignatius Donnelly. An unsuccessful land speculator and politician, he put his apocalyptic views to use by writing the story of Atlantis... more »
Philosophers have criticized luxury for a long time. But the consensus has always had its critics: the philosophers who like stuff... more »
Jeremy Bentham's head "smells like vinegar and feet and bad jerky and damp dust." Might that help to explain the roots of utilitarian desires?... more »
Max Eastman frolicked nude, thought his wife “an unslakable monster of selfishness,” and abandoned his son. Does any of this matter to his intellectual legacy?... more »
"To gaze at the world, as if you had never seen the world and have no idea what it is, and just describe it — then maybe you could see it"... more »
Bruce Chatwin was many things — traveler, art expert, connoisseur of the extraordinary. But not someone who favored intimate revelation. “I don’t believe in becoming clean"... more »
Hugh Hefner's genius was to commodify the heterosexual male gaze. "Desire became inseparable from decoration, carnality from consumerism"... more »
In John McPhee’s cosmology, all the earth’s facts touch one another. How to connect disparate things like atoms, bears, and whiskey? You just need the right structure... more »
What bound the artists Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon? A love of gambling and drinking, an interest in horses, and their belligerence and cruelty... more »
In 1930, Alexander Calder became a married man. In 1931, he became an abstract artist. These were the foundations on which he would build for the rest of his life... more »
The Italian artist Carol Rama saw the psychiatric ward as a place of vibrancy and liberty. “Madness is close to everybody,” she said... more »
In the beginning was the pissing boy. Since then, painters and sculptors have depicted the act of urination. "A river of piss runs through art history"... more »
Secrets of the stacks. The New York Public Library’s archives contain dentures, roller skates, and, as David Grann discovered, evidence of a systematic campaign of murder... more »
“The era of world literature is at hand,” proclaimed Goethe in 1827. His colleagues disagreed, and gave him a turban for his birthday. Thankfully, the debate has evolved... more »
Hemingway in LA. He was there to raise money but “came like a whirlwind,” wrote Fitzgerald, and ended up throwing a wineglass into Dorothy Parker’s fireplace... more »
Does a new biography of Jann Wenner mark the last epic tome devoted to the exploits of mercurial, white, male jerks? Probably not... more »
What if the story of civilization — from savagery to hunting/gathering to the invention of writing and leisure and freedom — is wrong?... more »
Joseph Conrad was a skeptic who believed that civilization was fueled by illusions. He was suspicious of all schemes of improvement. He is a man for our times... more »
Mary McCarthy became a novelist almost by default. She had to be coerced into writing by her husband, Edmund Wilson. Nevertheless, her fiction lives on... more »
In the arts, “outsider” means something specific. But what is an outsider writer? And can Virginia Woolf plausibly be considered one?... more »
Angela Carter found meaning in antagonizing foes, especially Andrea Dworkin. “If I can get up … the Dworkin proboscis,” she said, “then my living has not been in vain”... more »
No sooner had photography been invented than it became inextricably connected with lying. Such deceptions were born from a hope that the camera could transcend death... more »
Whatever you may think about Arturo Toscanini or his interpretation of a specific work, there is no doubt that he changed the concept of conducting... more »
The cartoonish anti-Semitism, the affinity for fascists: "Ezra Pound is a litmus test as much as he is a poet." Is his work proof of his insanity?... more »
How did a KKK-supporting, neo-Confederate sculptor of modest reputation come to dominate salons in Washington? Inside the tangled history of liberalism... more »
Luisa Casati lived with albino blackbirds, a cheetah, and a life-size wax replica of herself. What can she teach us about the nature of bohemianism?... more »
Who could be against empathy? Paul Bloom, or so he says. But is the Yale psychologist serious? Or is he just trying to sell books?... more »
The relationship between morality and neurology is complicated. Few people get it, fewer can explain it. Robert Sapolsky, one of those few, is a determinist, but not a simple one... more »
Thinking about thinking. We think, says Alan Jacobs, because we hope to become “more than we currently are.” Therein lies both the promise and peril of a life lived thoughtfully... more »
Elizabeth Bishop had astonishing control and poetic technique. But below the surface was a gushing emotional register. Was she the loneliest person who ever lived?... more »
The past should be studied only to expose its failings. Or so goes liberal logic. How disparaging the past become a mark of intellectual respectability... more »
Many of Alexander Calder's greatest works have their genesis in children’s toys. He was an overgrown man-child with a deep affinity for play
... more »
Hitler sought to construct an empire of both military and cultural dominance. So did Mussolini. Their method: attract artists who were not themselves fascists... more »
The midlife crisis, first described by psychologists in 1965, is a first-world problem, but it's a problem nonetheless. The first rule of crisis prevention: avoid self-absorption... more »
Giorgio Vasari was a second-rate artist and a first-rate gossip. Behold his catalog of piquant trivia about Renaissance Italy ... more »
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was not just a historian but an "action-intellectual," driven by his commitments and a belief that politics is more a war of will than of ideas... more »
E. O. Wilson suggests that evolution can “make sense” of art. But the relationship between biology and creativity is more complicated — and less determinative — than that... more »
Did F. Scott Fitzgerald fancy himself a social critic, a foe of market capitalism? Well, he wouldn't be the first such critic to relish capitalism's fruits... more »
How to interpret experiences that resist interpretation? What's the point of sowing terror if the terrorized can't understand you? Translating in concentration camps... more »
In the early 1930s, Nazi jurists debated how best to create a racist regime. They found inspiration in American law... more »
Sylvia Plath at Smith. “I’m so happy here I could cry!” she wrote to her mother. In her journals, she struck a different note: “God, who am I? ... I’m lost.”... more »
James C. Scott faults civilization for destroying the freedom and equality of our ancestors. But civilization is why we value such ideals in the first place... more »
“As a child,” wrote Roland Barthes, “I was bored often ... and it has continued my whole life.” His boredom was powerful: the intensity of a lack of intensity... more »
The novelist as journalist is a rich tradition but an uneven one. In the case of Martin Amis, the problem isn't so much his performance as his subjects’ worth... more »
Here is the story of a privileged young adult. He suffers neither intellectual disappointment nor spiritual disillusion nor emotional setbacks. He is Adam Gopnik... more »
Isaac Newton is remembered for his work on gravity, cosmology, mathematics, and the color spectrum. But his writings on Christianity are among the most daring works of the early modern period... more »
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essays have become major events. Is he a literary aberration, a Baldwin acolyte, or something else entirely?... more »
To see “how difference operates inside people’s heads,” said Stuart Hall, “you have to go to art, you have to go to culture — to where people imagine, where they fantasize, where they symbolize”... more »
Alain de Botton wants to teach you how love really works. So he wrote a novel full of insights too trite to be even superficial... more »
T. S. Eliot thought poets should be scholarly and offer justification for their work. Poets who followed this vision would embrace “the glamour of overwork”... more »
The “eerie, queery, sometimes weary” Edward Lear. A gay man in Victorian times, he lived a life full of sadness. Nonsense helped fill the void... more »
Montaigne was a politician, soldier, bureaucrat, and courtier before he became a philosopher. His work stands as a reminder of the permanent necessity of judgment... more »
Consider the couch. From the supine symposia of ancient Greece to Freud’s psychoanalytic sessions, horizontality has been associated with deep thinking -- why?... more »
Modernity brought speed, stress, and sensory bombardment. In Austria, this “nervous age” drove the ideas of psychiatrists and architects together... more »
"Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean," says Jonathan Franzen. "But it is one good way"... more »
The job of the critic is changing, says Lionel Shriver. It's not to assess a book’s storytelling, but to castigate writers guilty of any crimes of the imagination... more »
Does the pursuit of knowledge trump the pursuit of ethical behavior? That question fueled Foucault's turn from madness and sexuality to politics... more »
Kant thought entire civilizations incapable of philosophy. Derrida said China had no philosophy, only thought. Why did Western philosophy turn its back on the world?... more »
“Alexander Calder wanted to be clear and unfussy, to get straight to the point. At the same time, he liked to linger over life’s oddities and obscurities”... more »
In the era of the quantified self, does the old-fashioned chronicling of passing thoughts and daily minutiae still serve a purpose? Dear Diary…... more »
If Allan Bloom’s surname had been Smith, would The Closing of the American Mind have been written? Probably not, says Jonathan Kay, who reads a lot into Bloom's biography... more »
"Public conversation is overpoliticized and undermoralized,” says David Brooks. "Relationships and mercy and how to be a friend — these are the big subjects of life, and we don’t talk about them enough"... more »
Peer review is essential. That’s obvious. What isn't obvious is that it should be organized as it is — or even that it should be organized at all... more »
Designed by an expert on Swiss phallic cults, the Rorschach test remains influential among Argentines, Japanese marriage counselors, and American courts... more »
John Rawls called it "the best of all games"; Mark Kingwell calls it "the most philosophical of games." What is it about baseball and philosophy?... more »
What makes male characters in Jane Austen so sexy? It has something to do with the taming of the masculine principle. William Deresiewicz explains... more »
In love, there’s no inoculation against betrayal. So think of affairs as a feature of relationships, not a bug. So says Esther Perel, who charges $1,500 a session for such insights... more »
“If the rise of humanism was a sunrise, then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse.” Marilynne Robinson on the value and fate of the humanities... more »
"The fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma," says Jonathan Meades. It is a cult of "puritanical, po-faced, censorious nothingness"... more »
Poor George Orwell. The bare-knuckled revolutionary has been reduced to a cuddly, bipartisan grandpa. Orwell’s deradicalization has a long and shameless history... more »
After a decade of hype, the digital humanities has merely confirmed what should have been obvious all along: More information is not more knowledge... more »
Whether in a scholar’s attempt to live like a badger or in recent nature writing, one question stands out: What is looking back at us through other species’ eyes?... more »
In an age when truth is dismissed as fiction, the novel matters more because we all live by fictions. It’s how we get to the truth... more »
"The infatuation with portents — with the supposed relevance of voices from the past — is neither bread nor circus. It’s an obsession with history that can also be a form of amnesia"... more »
The nonstop crescendo of Allan Bloom's assault on the modern university made it easy for liberals to dismiss him — too easy. Todd Gitlin explains... more »
Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. We’ve long celebrated male literary friendships while labeling female authors isolated eccentrics. Time to correct the record... more »
“What are these pines & these birds about?” wondered Thoreau. “I must know a little more.” So he embarked on his masterpiece — not Walden, but his journal... more »
Dinged as a sex-obsessed, money-hungry charlatan, Anthony Burgess earned a reputation that merits a different distinction: His work was a late triumph of modernism... more »
Henry James transformed the novel form into something new. Turn to chapter 27 of The Portrait of a Lady to see the birth of the psychological novel... more »
The Instagram poet Rupi Kaur outsells Homer 10 to 1. Her secret? Human experience, aestheticized and monetized, rendered inspirational and relatable... more »
Few women were associated with Partisan Review, and even fewer had identities as something more than literary wives. Consider Elizabeth Hardwick... more »
Leaves of Grass did not come to Walt Whitman gradually. It flowed from an epiphany. The evidence: a dozen pages he stuffed into a silly novel... more »
How wonderful to hear Beethoven’s Fifth at its 1808 premiere: 50 mediocre musicians playing on weak instruments in an unheated concert hall conducted by a deaf man after one rehearsal... more »
Do literary scholars align with the powerful against the powerless? Imagine what A People’s History of Literary Studies would look like... more »
Virginia Woolf declared the death of the personal essay in 1905. And the obituaries have kept rolling in. But the personal essay isn’t dead; it’s just no longer white... more »
Who was Elie Wiesel? He personified what it was to visit hell and come back. He did the work of grief for us, and we were grateful. But there were two Wiesels... more »
We experience art in collaboration with computers. Our cultural horizon is shaped by news feeds, inboxes, and search results. What will become of critical judgment?... more »
“It is as if Chekhov had written Lolita.” That’s Philip Roth describing Richard Stern’s novel Other Men’s Daughters. But the similarities don’t mean much... more »
"I thought, if I give Foucault LSD, I’m sure he will realize that he is premature in obliterating our humanity and the mind as we know it"... more »
Democracy can be an unsightly spectacle. Much of the demos is ignorant or has just enough knowledge to screw things up. Is "epistocracy" the answer?... more »
Why has the concept of truth become so problematic? It's a consequence of the opening of a distinction between truth-as-meaning and truth-as-fact... more »
Why is Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, largely unknown today? For starters, little was recorded of his personality -- except his virulent racism... more »
The latest neuro-nonsense, “empathetics” is the scientific (and corporate) attempt to map empathy biologically. How did this neo-phrenology come about?... more »
Evelyn Waugh's prose, known for its lethality, is seen by some as inconsistent with his Catholicism. But he couldn't have been a great satirist were he not a Catholic... 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 »
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