In an 18th-century cannon foundry in Woolwich, a neighborhood in southeast London, 3,000 feet of shelving is where magazines go to survive... more »
Why do people in certain cities — London, New York, Paris — become radicalized, sparking revolutions that expand the limits of what's politically imaginable?... more »
Philosophers haven’t had much to say about middle age, but Schopenhauer is an exception. His view of the futility of desire -- getting what you want can make you unhappy -- illuminates the darkness of midlife... more »
Daniel Bell did not foresee the smartphone, but he glimpsed the appeal of its antecedents. And he understood how a culture can undermine itself... more »
To call out falseness is to risk being accused of condescension. So there are reasons to hold your tongue, some more legitimate than others... more »
Thomas Kuhn has been charged with ambiguity, relativism, and irrationality. But his vision of how science evolves still dominates. Why?... more »
Charles I acquired works by Caravaggio, Bruegel, and Raphael. He learned early on that a prestigious art collection was a prerequisite of dynastic power... more »
“Tell me what you eat," it's been said, "and I shall tell you what you are.” But a person’s diet is just as often the least interesting thing about her... more »
In 1959, Robert Oppenheimer warned of "an alienation between the world of science and the world of public discourse.” Can poetic language bridge the divide?... more »
Obscurity is a common fate for writers. What’s curious about William Melvin Kelley is that, after the early acclaim passed, he kept at it, every day, never doubting himself... more »
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic of Gilgamesh were preserved through oral tradition. What has been gained, and lost, from writing things down?... more »
For most of the 20th century, conventional wisdom was that Cézanne didn’t care about his subjects as individuals. That misses Cézanne’s point. T.J. Clark explains... more »
Maestro sex. As conductors go where their agents point them, they hop from one hotel bed to the next. Mostly the sex is consensual. Sometimes it's not... more »
What was a sensitive Jewish intellectual doing with a brutal Cossack regiment? Isaac Babel would take any risk to experience unexpected situations and strange people... more »
Neoliberalism is the linguistic fad of our times. But the term is applied to disparate phenomena. Neoliberalism has an identity crisis... more »
Pioneering researchers of the fourth dimension: a German physicist perplexed by optical illusions and a charismatic American who swindled the bereaved... more »
Pity John Milton. The 350th anniversary of Paradise Lost passed with hardly a word about the man or the poem. One reason: It's an unabashedly religious work... more »
Ours is a world in which the human and the nonhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. We live, in short, in Philip K. Dick’s future, not Orwell’s or Huxley’s... more »
Babies are like aliens. Parental manuals promise to make that alien less daunting and more manageable. It's a diabolically genius conceit... more »
Is the U.S. president’s spontaneous philosophy in line with key features of conservatism, or peripheral to them?... more »
Gone is the century of the self. Now we inhabit the century of the crowd. What will it do to literature? Early indications are not promising... more »
Only 700 publications existed in 1865. More than 4,400 existed by 1890, letting readers make tangible connections to other lonely readers... more »
Joseph Conrad hated being called a writer of “sea stories.” Yet his experience of travel and displacement is what makes his work resonate today... more »
An angry woman can make people uneasy, while a sad woman tends to summon sympathy. But anger can be a responsibility, says Leslie Jamison. It's about accountability... more »
Until recently, Jordan Peterson was a little-known psychology professor who wrote a book almost no one read. Now he leads a growing flock of die-hard disciples... more »
Denis Johnson was a prodigy, an American Rimbaud. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Heroin, alcohol, and the IRS followed, as did great writing... more »
Is the basis of seemingly disinterested criticism really just willful schadenfreude, with a hidden killjoy locked inside even the noblest critic?... more »
This should be the golden age of free speech. And it is, if you can believe your lying eyes. Zeynep Tufekci explains... more »
“William, you’re very boring.” Empson, in the middle of a poetry reading, ignored the heckler. “William, you are very boring,” she said again. It was his wife... more »
A revolution against boredom, punk music was the 20th century’s last avant-garde movement. What does its demise mean for creative life?... more »
“Literature has only done harm to art,” thought Degas. When looking at a painting, he advised, don’t read the label or the critics. Simply let the art itself speak... more »
The loves of Mary Shelley. Her husband was openly hostile to her. After his death, she was intimate with several women. Her sexual orientation was clear, perhaps even to herself... more »
Fire and Fury shows that the political and moral problem of this president — a "real-life fictional character" — is also a literary problem: How to get below the surface of a man who is all surface... more »
Why did the French publisher Gallimard seek to republish some of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's notoriously anti-Semitic writings? To make a quick buck, of course... more »
Ezra Pound: His name is synonymous with the need to separate the life (fascist-sympathizing anti-Semite) from the work (visionary poet and critic) — and the impossibility of doing so... more »
What to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent? If a work of art speaks, it does so in a way that transcends the limitations and imperfections of the artist... more »
A writer’s private preoccupations emerge in his writing. Take D.H. Lawrence and posteriors. They are “like hillocks of sand.” They are “globes.” They “thrust"... more »
Jews and jokes. The Old Testament isn't funny. Jews, however, produce so much humor. Why? Theories abound, few of them funny... more »
Art and the Awokening. As politics and pop culture converge, we must distinguish between what's engineered to flatter contemporary taste and what says something new... more »
Our perception of color cannot be reduced to physics or to psychology. It’s neither external or internal, but somehow in between... more »
The British writer Ann Quin wrote novels that took aim at aesthetic orthodoxy. They didn’t catch on in the 1960s, but has their time arrived?... more »
We’re awash in life-hacking tips and self-optimization. Do yourself a favor: Put away the self-help guides. Read a novel... more »
Most literature and film is mediocre or worse. Yet reviewers spout effusive praise. Why aren’t critics critical enough? Ben Yagoda has a few thoughts... more »
Why did George Bernard Shaw, in his final decades, cozy up to Stalin and Mussolini? It was part intellectual isolation, part weakness for flattery... more »
With stylish prose and showy erudition, The New Criterion respectably skewered academic jargon and defended high culture. Then came Roger Kimball... more »
Before Locke and Newton was Zera Yacob. The Ethiopian philosopher hid from persecution in a cave, where he created some of the highest ideals of the Enlightenment... more »
A radical turn to the past. While much of feminist thought centers on the future, Audre Lorde made herself “a mouthpiece for history"... more »
We tell ourselves that animals lack thought, emotion, and an understanding of death. Those are frail distinctions — they’re more like us than we think... more »
William James saw himself as a popularizer, not an originator. He was harsh about his own work: “No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book”... more »
A.R. Ammons was one of the great curmudgeons in the history of poetry. He made an aesthetic out of fuddy-duddiness, but he was more than a lovable grouch... more »
When work changes, companies reward new ways of feeling about it. Enter corporate mindfulness. But what about when breathing exercises aren't enough?... more »
People and apes. Their story is one of intimacy, estrangement, betrayal, and attempted reconciliation. It's also about what it means to be a person... more »
Elizabeth Hardwick said real literature should elicit criticism worthy of the achievement in question. That meant, among other things, a stubborn commitment to good, clear prose... more »
The internet divides us; facts can make us dumber; debunking leads only to more bunk. Those are the tenets of our "post-truth" era. Don't believe them... more »
Aharon Appelfeld, who died this week, didn't speak during the Holocaust. His accent would have given him away as a Jew. So he built a language all his own... more »
Mencken once estimated that he had published some 10 to 15 million words, everywhere riddled with verbal obscurities: Blattidae, chandala, chrestomathy... more »
There were 10 to 20 of them, scientists and philosophers. They met on Thursday evenings, calling themselves the Vienna Circle. We're still struggling with the aftermath... more »
W.S. Graham was a poet's poet. Everything he did was as an artist. Confronting his own death, he wrote a poem, finally allowing his frailty to be seen... more »
F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed to have left the Catholic church in 1917. But his commitment to its rituals, as well as the moral urgency of his writing, suggests that he never escaped its influence... more »
Defying the finger-wagging consensus that rational eating means nutrition over pleasure, Henry Finck, a music critic, undertook a new crusade: showing Americans how to savor flavor... more »
Descartes tended to brush aside critics of his ideas. But when in 1643 a young woman wrote to raise some questions, Descartes listened... more »
Biographers: Henry James feared them as predators. James Joyce ridiculed them as “biografiends.” Saul Bellow compared them to coffin-makers... more »
Think of how readily we accept what a female writer is, or should be. Women are best at looking inward; men are truth-tellers. Women feel, men report... more »
In an 18th-century cannon foundry in Woolwich, a neighborhood in southeast London, 3,000 feet of shelving is where magazines go to survive... more »
Daniel Bell did not foresee the smartphone, but he glimpsed the appeal of its antecedents. And he understood how a culture can undermine itself... more »
Charles I acquired works by Caravaggio, Bruegel, and Raphael. He learned early on that a prestigious art collection was a prerequisite of dynastic power... more »
Obscurity is a common fate for writers. What’s curious about William Melvin Kelley is that, after the early acclaim passed, he kept at it, every day, never doubting himself... more »
Maestro sex. As conductors go where their agents point them, they hop from one hotel bed to the next. Mostly the sex is consensual. Sometimes it's not... more »
Pioneering researchers of the fourth dimension: a German physicist perplexed by optical illusions and a charismatic American who swindled the bereaved... more »
Babies are like aliens. Parental manuals promise to make that alien less daunting and more manageable. It's a diabolically genius conceit... more »
Only 700 publications existed in 1865. More than 4,400 existed by 1890, letting readers make tangible connections to other lonely readers... more »
Until recently, Jordan Peterson was a little-known psychology professor who wrote a book almost no one read. Now he leads a growing flock of die-hard disciples... more »
This should be the golden age of free speech. And it is, if you can believe your lying eyes. Zeynep Tufekci explains... more »
“Literature has only done harm to art,” thought Degas. When looking at a painting, he advised, don’t read the label or the critics. Simply let the art itself speak... more »
Why did the French publisher Gallimard seek to republish some of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's notoriously anti-Semitic writings? To make a quick buck, of course... more »
A writer’s private preoccupations emerge in his writing. Take D.H. Lawrence and posteriors. They are “like hillocks of sand.” They are “globes.” They “thrust"... more »
Our perception of color cannot be reduced to physics or to psychology. It’s neither external or internal, but somehow in between... more »
Most literature and film is mediocre or worse. Yet reviewers spout effusive praise. Why aren’t critics critical enough? Ben Yagoda has a few thoughts... more »
Before Locke and Newton was Zera Yacob. The Ethiopian philosopher hid from persecution in a cave, where he created some of the highest ideals of the Enlightenment... more »
William James saw himself as a popularizer, not an originator. He was harsh about his own work: “No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book”... more »
People and apes. Their story is one of intimacy, estrangement, betrayal, and attempted reconciliation. It's also about what it means to be a person... more »
Aharon Appelfeld, who died this week, didn't speak during the Holocaust. His accent would have given him away as a Jew. So he built a language all his own... more »
W.S. Graham was a poet's poet. Everything he did was as an artist. Confronting his own death, he wrote a poem, finally allowing his frailty to be seen... more »
Descartes tended to brush aside critics of his ideas. But when in 1643 a young woman wrote to raise some questions, Descartes listened... more »
The house Lolita built. Walter Minton was introduced to Nabokov's book by an exotic dancer. Other publishers wouldn't touch it. He saw a marketer’s dream... more »
Foucault is best known as a philosopher of power. Yet he did not offer a philosophy of power, refusing to develop an overarching theory. How is this possible?... more »
Cass Sunstein on his time in Washington: "It’s my job to put ideas out there. If that comes with the risk that someone is gonna do something horrible with it, well, that’s life”... more »
Prophecies of paperless offices notwithstanding, business, ideas, and thought still get written down. Humans are, after all, material. You can’t blow your nose into an email... more »
Every scale, spike, and tentacle. Ernst Haeckel’s detailed documentation of marine creatures shaped the way modern science developed — but not always for the best... more »
Consider silent thinking: language amounting to a kind of behavior. But if words are mental objects, what characteristics do they have... more »
You have six hairy legs, five eyes, a tongue, but no taste buds. Red looks like black, and you see in pixels: You are a bee. What does that feel like?... more »
Philosophers, savants, sages, and intellectuals have always been attracted to power. But what are the delusional propensities that led so many to embrace dictators?... more »
Mark Lilla tried to save liberalism from itself. Instead he became a punching bag, the Harry Potter-style, glasses-wearing personification of smug bourgeois centrism... more »
Dickens mania. The author hated being treated like a rock star in America. He couldn’t so much as drink a glass of water without being mobbed... more »
Child prodigies fascinate because they are auguries. What do they reveal? All children flout both our best and our worst intentions... more »
Why was Brigid Hughes, who succeeded George Plimpton as editor of The Paris Review, omitted from the magazine's history?... more »
How culture shapes madness. The dominant mode of psychiatry is one of brains, genes, and drugs. But what if schizophrenia is less hard-wired and more variable than we think?... more »
Philosophy now comes to us in one form: the peer-reviewed article, published (preferably in English) in an academic journal. No wonder philosophy has become so irrelevant... more »
Storytelling is inextricable from power: The act of reading is an act of submission. At best, reading novels is salutary. At worst, it erodes our sense of self... more »
How did a Jewish libertarian from the Bronx, a self-professed anarchist whose life was dedicated to destroying the state, end up on the reading lists of so many would-be fascists?... more »
“I write because I hate,” said William Gass, who died last week. Anger at his bigoted father and alcoholic mother shaped a singular philosophical vision... more »
Read the acknowledgments. Amid the dreary enumeration — librarians, fact-checkers, mothers, therapists, divorce lawyers — truths seep out... more »
When French theorists invaded Baltimore. Drinks flowed, insults were hurled, Derrida triumphed, and Lacan ran up a up a $900 phone bill... more »
Why do people in certain cities — London, New York, Paris — become radicalized, sparking revolutions that expand the limits of what's politically imaginable?... more »
To call out falseness is to risk being accused of condescension. So there are reasons to hold your tongue, some more legitimate than others... more »
“Tell me what you eat," it's been said, "and I shall tell you what you are.” But a person’s diet is just as often the least interesting thing about her... more »
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Epic of Gilgamesh were preserved through oral tradition. What has been gained, and lost, from writing things down?... more »
What was a sensitive Jewish intellectual doing with a brutal Cossack regiment? Isaac Babel would take any risk to experience unexpected situations and strange people... more »
Pity John Milton. The 350th anniversary of Paradise Lost passed with hardly a word about the man or the poem. One reason: It's an unabashedly religious work... more »
Is the U.S. president’s spontaneous philosophy in line with key features of conservatism, or peripheral to them?... more »
Joseph Conrad hated being called a writer of “sea stories.” Yet his experience of travel and displacement is what makes his work resonate today... more »
Denis Johnson was a prodigy, an American Rimbaud. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t. Heroin, alcohol, and the IRS followed, as did great writing... more »
“William, you’re very boring.” Empson, in the middle of a poetry reading, ignored the heckler. “William, you are very boring,” she said again. It was his wife... more »
The loves of Mary Shelley. Her husband was openly hostile to her. After his death, she was intimate with several women. Her sexual orientation was clear, perhaps even to herself... more »
Ezra Pound: His name is synonymous with the need to separate the life (fascist-sympathizing anti-Semite) from the work (visionary poet and critic) — and the impossibility of doing so... more »
Jews and jokes. The Old Testament isn't funny. Jews, however, produce so much humor. Why? Theories abound, few of them funny... more »
The British writer Ann Quin wrote novels that took aim at aesthetic orthodoxy. They didn’t catch on in the 1960s, but has their time arrived?... more »
Why did George Bernard Shaw, in his final decades, cozy up to Stalin and Mussolini? It was part intellectual isolation, part weakness for flattery... more »
A radical turn to the past. While much of feminist thought centers on the future, Audre Lorde made herself “a mouthpiece for history"... more »
A.R. Ammons was one of the great curmudgeons in the history of poetry. He made an aesthetic out of fuddy-duddiness, but he was more than a lovable grouch... more »
Elizabeth Hardwick said real literature should elicit criticism worthy of the achievement in question. That meant, among other things, a stubborn commitment to good, clear prose... more »
Mencken once estimated that he had published some 10 to 15 million words, everywhere riddled with verbal obscurities: Blattidae, chandala, chrestomathy... more »
F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed to have left the Catholic church in 1917. But his commitment to its rituals, as well as the moral urgency of his writing, suggests that he never escaped its influence... more »
Biographers: Henry James feared them as predators. James Joyce ridiculed them as “biografiends.” Saul Bellow compared them to coffin-makers... more »
Reading aloud is slow, but it used to be the norm. The rise of the novel was what shifted reading habits toward private and speedier consumption... more »
Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist, has read hundreds of books about Darwin and his work. Many are not good, but A.N. Wilson's is by far the worst... more »
As old as cave paintings, the umbrella — mundane yet magical — is a reminder of the elements of nature we have still not mastered... more »
Mailer at his height. Consider his Pentagon protest epic, now grievously out of fashion. At the time it was the longest article ever to appear in an American magazine... more »
Ecclesiastical control of universities, the Galileo affair, the Inquisition — what happens when science and religion clash? Dialogue is impossible; conflict, inevitable... more »
The bookishness of Bolsheviks. Their acceptance of apocalyptic violence wasn’t suppressed by the literary fraternity of their upper echelon... more »
By itself, travel does produce epiphanies. But it also makes clear that the language of location is relative — everywhere is to the east of something and to the west of something else... more »
Africa did not live up to Michel Leiris’s expectations. The Nile seemed a “common canal”; the insects were awful. His conclusion? “Writing a travel book is an absurd undertaking”... more »
Christian Wiman has written about the correlation between the quality of a poem and a poet’s capacity for suffering. But does he understand joy?... more »
“To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity.” Marianne Moore’s poems could be funny, tart, and conversational. But they had to have intensity... more »
Desire for booze lubricated the course of history: agriculture, civilization, revolution. What is it about getting drunk that we love so much?... more »
Joseph Conrad fell out of favor long ago. There's the racism, of course, and his obsession with courage and honor. Yet he anticipated our world... more »
For all the claims of paranoia, dislocation, and fragility, Joan Didion offers what none of her critics suspect: solidity. Patricia Lockwood explains... more »
For a time, Edward Garnett was known as the best reader in London. In reality, he was something like a literary mafia boss, nurturing his "cubs" and dispensing with others... more »
The rise of the Instapoets. Often dismissed as “not real poetry” or for “greeting-card verse,” the works of Rupi Kaur and other social-media scribes deserve our attention... more »
Intellectual writing on music is not for everybody. When Mitchell Cohen attends an opera, he sees and hears layer upon layer: politically, socially, and historically... more »
David Bentley Hart is a scholar of old ideas, like those published in the New Testament. But he is a modern writer. The evidence: He is very rude... more »
“Darwin was wrong,” says A.N. Wilson, whose book is quite often wrong, too. Indeed, it's an object lesson in how not to write the history of anything... more »
Philosophers haven’t had much to say about middle age, but Schopenhauer is an exception. His view of the futility of desire -- getting what you want can make you unhappy -- illuminates the darkness of midlife... more »
Thomas Kuhn has been charged with ambiguity, relativism, and irrationality. But his vision of how science evolves still dominates. Why?... more »
In 1959, Robert Oppenheimer warned of "an alienation between the world of science and the world of public discourse.” Can poetic language bridge the divide?... more »
For most of the 20th century, conventional wisdom was that Cézanne didn’t care about his subjects as individuals. That misses Cézanne’s point. T.J. Clark explains... more »
Neoliberalism is the linguistic fad of our times. But the term is applied to disparate phenomena. Neoliberalism has an identity crisis... more »
Ours is a world in which the human and the nonhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. We live, in short, in Philip K. Dick’s future, not Orwell’s or Huxley’s... more »
Gone is the century of the self. Now we inhabit the century of the crowd. What will it do to literature? Early indications are not promising... more »
An angry woman can make people uneasy, while a sad woman tends to summon sympathy. But anger can be a responsibility, says Leslie Jamison. It's about accountability... more »
Is the basis of seemingly disinterested criticism really just willful schadenfreude, with a hidden killjoy locked inside even the noblest critic?... more »
A revolution against boredom, punk music was the 20th century’s last avant-garde movement. What does its demise mean for creative life?... more »
Fire and Fury shows that the political and moral problem of this president — a "real-life fictional character" — is also a literary problem: How to get below the surface of a man who is all surface... more »
What to do with the works of artists whose conduct has been abhorrent? If a work of art speaks, it does so in a way that transcends the limitations and imperfections of the artist... more »
Art and the Awokening. As politics and pop culture converge, we must distinguish between what's engineered to flatter contemporary taste and what says something new... more »
We’re awash in life-hacking tips and self-optimization. Do yourself a favor: Put away the self-help guides. Read a novel... more »
With stylish prose and showy erudition, The New Criterion respectably skewered academic jargon and defended high culture. Then came Roger Kimball... more »
We tell ourselves that animals lack thought, emotion, and an understanding of death. Those are frail distinctions — they’re more like us than we think... more »
When work changes, companies reward new ways of feeling about it. Enter corporate mindfulness. But what about when breathing exercises aren't enough?... more »
The internet divides us; facts can make us dumber; debunking leads only to more bunk. Those are the tenets of our "post-truth" era. Don't believe them... more »
There were 10 to 20 of them, scientists and philosophers. They met on Thursday evenings, calling themselves the Vienna Circle. We're still struggling with the aftermath... more »
Defying the finger-wagging consensus that rational eating means nutrition over pleasure, Henry Finck, a music critic, undertook a new crusade: showing Americans how to savor flavor... more »
Think of how readily we accept what a female writer is, or should be. Women are best at looking inward; men are truth-tellers. Women feel, men report... more »
Liberty Under the Soviets, published in 1928, is a remarkable book. How rare to witness the mind of a man doing his best to ignore that his faith is a lie... more »
We have inherited a lot from Martin Luther, but we misunderstand him. He was not a prophet of modernity but a fear-driven fanatic, a case study in how the reactionary mind-set evolves... more »
Family life wants consistency, repetition, routine, clear things. Eroticism is a different story. Can Esther Perel solve the predicament of contemporary sexuality?... more »
What, exactly, are thought experiments? Glimpses into Plato’s heavenly realm? Simple, ordinary argumentation? They may be something else entirely: mental modeling... more »
“Factuality” in fiction. For Mary McCarthy, novels had to do one thing above all else: communicate the truth, unpopular as it may be... more »
Knausgaard writes about doing housework, making tea, buttering sandwiches, the ordinariness of his daily existence. What makes his writing so compelling?... more »
Romain Gary was a clown prince of French literary life. Little of what he said was true, though he was essentially honest. He personifies the distinction between fabulist and fraud... more »
Derided by the public, attacked by politicians, a scapegoat and strawman for left and right alike, the humanities will nonetheless endure — even if there is no case to defend them... more »
Sexual liberation in fiction. Edith Wharton’s writing on sex was informed by Whitman, Nietzsche, and Wilde, and an affair with a journalist... more »
What does biology teach us about human nature? That there is no such thing as human nature. We have to make it up as we go... more »
A good education provides tools for understanding the world. Indoctrination offers just one lens. On many college campuses, that lens is power and privilege... more »
Even friends of Mary McCarthy could muster only backhanded praise for her work. What put them off? Her perverse honesty, for one thing... more »
The art of conducting. While you can demonstrate stick technique, you cannot teach a budding young conductor how to cultivate a magnetic personality... more »
It does not take long to sense something false in Andrew Wyeth. His art was his artifice, and his compelling images carry the stamp of inauthenticity. James Panero explains... more »
“I am almost sickened by my basic honesty,” wrote Clarice Lispector, who broke with superficial truths to expose deeper ones. She had a complex relationship with veracity... more »
Writers are told to fan out across genres, to expose themselves to everything. Bad advice. Don't read widely. Most work is middling and should be ignored... more »
As we rush to impose moral clarity on human desire, remember: Sex is not a solvable problem. Let's minimize the number of its victims... more »
Jerry Fodor was a skeptic, including in his own ideas about how cognition works. He was treated as a crank — a beloved crank... more »
Pseudoscience, by definition, should not appear in scientific publications. But peer review is a porous gatekeeper, and “predatory publishers” are shameless... more »
Freud’s theories don’t mesh well with modern science. Yet he represents something important for neuroscientists: the possibility that laws govern mental life... more »
Campaigns against "cultural appropriation" are bad for politics and bad for art. To put identity over aesthetics is to render art meaningless... more »
Writing and thinking are intimate activities. Does that suggest brilliant men pay an intellectual price for mistreating women? It's comforting — and certainly false — to think so... more »
“A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution,” wrote Sartre, turning down the Nobel. Thus began the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal... more »
Equality is a modern idea. Its detractors have included Plato and Aristotle; indeed, for most Western thinkers, humanity was marked by chasms of distinction... more »
What is painting? With its increasing complexity, definitions are futile. At heart, though, painting is a means to find transcendence... more »
With Rousseau, it's never quite clear where clever contrarianism ends and brash delusion begins. His intellectual style has found new adherents on the left... more »
The speed of philosophy. Philippa Foot, a “dreadfully slow thinker,” wrote little. The challenge of the field, as she saw it, was to be slow enough... more »
Who was the audience for Mein Kampf? Scribblers and middlemen. Indeed, the disregard of academic readers was essential to Nazism from its inception... more »
To be French is to argue about what it means to be French. At the least, it means a fondness for adversarial politics and abstract notions... more »
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