Welcome to Roswell, New Mexico, the convergence of America's weakness for the strange, penchant for conspiratorial thinking, and knack for turning a buck... more »
The value of not understanding. For Grace Paley, “write what you know” was a guarantee of dullness. Art comes from exploring the unknown... more »
What attracted a gregarious psychiatrist to a reclusive professor? Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze bonded over a mutual distrust of identity... more »
From her harsh theater reviews to her novel My Ántonia, Willa Cather demonstrated an intensity of observation. Jane Smiley explains... more »
The Jewishness of Jewish comedy shows itself in only obscure ways, because the comedians didn't want to identify themselves as Jewish... more »
Who is more to blame for the crisis of liberalism over the past four decades: Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler — or Lawrence Summers?... more »
In 1905 the poet George Sterling established an artists' colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. Then things got dark: murders and suicide pacts... more »
Do animals possess language, culture, morality, a soul? “It would be less interesting to know what animals are, if it were not a means to know what we are”... more »
October 18, 1973: Sotheby's auctioned works by Twombley, Johns, and Rauschenberg. It was called the day the art world collapsed. Well, no, but it was the beginning of the end... more »
At Cornell's legendary Food and Brand Lab, research is conducted in an unusual way: Collect data first, form hypotheses later. “This is not science, it is storytelling"... more »
Wanted on charges of homosexual activity, Oscar Wilde was given time to flee to France. Even his mother urged him to go. Yet he would not... more »
The incarnations of Bruno Latour. A devoted Catholic disdainful of universal truths, critic of science turned climate-science promoter, playwright, military collaborator... more »
Debussy’s idiotic ballet about a tennis match remained an avant-garde favorite 40 years later. In music, revolutionary styles and popularity are wedded... more »
In the 1920s, John W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer and fly fisherman, set the literary world on fire with an idea: Dreams can predict the future... more »
According to Will Self, novels are a jungle gym for the mind. So choose challenging texts: “No one ever got smart by reading … Dan Brown”... more »
By the time a new dictionary is complete, it’s out of date. Still, the quest to capture the meaning of everything remains a noble one... more »
Isaac Newton’s views included Arianism, alchemy, Egyptian theology, and the Noachian faith. Why was such a seemingly modern thinker so obsessed with ancient ideas?... more »
A taxonomy of unfinished novels. Common causes include writer’s block and death. Then there are those works whose unfinishability is an aesthetic virtue... more »
The dean of the Harlem Renaissance was not Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston, but the editor and impresario Alain Locke. Such obscurity is undeserved... more »
The East German writer Christa Wolf grew up under state surveillance. Later, in her diaries, she continued a sort of spying on herself... more »
The history of anti-literature: Whether Plato's denouncing literary fantasy or Oscar Wilde's labeling art useless, they are unintentional tributes... more »
Edward Abbey was a bus driver, park ranger, anarchist, and philosopher of the desert. He sought solitude but secretly craved the approval of the New York literati... more »
The persistence of fairy tales. From Angela Carter onward, authors have retold, revised, and remixed classic stories. Today the genre is delightfully chaotic... more »
A well-intentioned culture of positivity has pervaded contemporary book reviewing. The result? Advertisement-style frippery. Bring back the hatchet job... more »
Animal-voiced poems tend to be quirky and quaint, like T.S. Eliot’s on cats. Enter Don Marquis, a fatalistic newspaperman who wrote cockroach-based poetry... more »
Zadie Smith’s talent is writing dialogue — an intellectual, imaginary impersonation. In this way she contains multitudes. Her point is that we all do... more »
The awfulness of pop culture. It promises to deliver pleasure — then fails. It suggests aesthetic freedom — but is only a mirage. Or so thought Adorno... more »
The anti-Habermas. Peter Sloterdijk made his career sparring with the Frankfurt School and predicting the demise of liberal democracy. The times have caught up to him... more »
The historian Yuval Harari champions “Dataism”; thinks emotions are simply algorithms; and says people will become like gods in the future. He is wrong, says David Berlinski... more »
Marcuse for the new millennium. The philosopher’s insights into automation are key to understanding our work-obsessed age: Busyness makes us bad thinkers... more »
Picasso’s erotic year. In 1932 the artist, 50, had a torrid affair with his 22-year-old model. Even his banal subjects — a fruit platter, a shadow — turned phallic... more »
As a young writer, Philip Roth would begin each morning by shouting “Attack! Attack!” at himself in the mirror. Why would such a man cease writing?... more »
In Egypt, Flaubert grew ““ignobly plump,” took in striptease shows, and was dazzled by the country's colors. The color eau de Nil stems from such Egyptomania... more »
The comprehensive John Stuart Mill. He was out to combine Bentham with poetry, the Enlightenment with Romanticism, and to span the entire philosophy of his time... more »
David Jones — engraver, soldier, painter, poet— overcame war, a nervous breakdown, and episodes of erotic frustration. He was the greatest modernist Britain ever produced... more »
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer, Carver, Lish: the literary sections of magazines like Esquire and GQ were, for decades, a cult of maleness. Are they still?... more »
A robot Rembrandt? Artificial intelligence cannot yet make fine art. When it can, the results will be both painfully boring and beyond our wildest imagination... more »
King Arthur was actually a Roman centurion named Artorius — or so holds an intriguing if implausible theory. Dipping into Celtic history is dangerous for writers’ reputations... more »
“Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator," wrote Barthes. That is especially true, Leslie Jamison explains, at Croatia’s Museum of Broken Relationships... more »
In praise of bibliomancy. The idea that literature could predict the future captivated 17th-century royals. Today it reminds us that books possess a rare magic... more »
The historian Reinhart Koselleck proposed that world history be divided into three epochs: pre-horse, horse, and post-horse. Now horses are “ghosts of modernity”... more »
Lunch at the White House, parties with celebrities, hangouts with plutocrats in Aspen. Will Ta-Nehisi Coates’s proximity to power distort his perspective?... more »
Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon: he was poor, uneducated, and smitten; she was rich, pious, and uninterested. On their first date, they went to a Dickens reading... more »
Jack Kerouac: mindless hedonist and word-vomiting miscreant. Or the humblest, most devoted American religious writer of the 20th century?... more »
Steven Pinker may be the most optimistic man in America. But his optimism curdles into despair at the way science is treated on many campuses... more »
The case of the libelous letters. In 1920s Britain, a neighborhood dispute engrossed the nation. Why? The written word was a new and exhilarating weapon... more »
Tina Brown has fame, fortune, and little respect. Even her successes are seen less as the result of her editorial vision than of her willingness to spend money... more »
Louis-Ferdinand Céline became famous suddenly and infamous soon after. Can we distinguish “good” Céline, the novelist, from “bad” Céline, the anti-Semitic pamphleteer?... more »
In search of a sacred combe, a place of retreat and artistic genesis. It's not a real place, except when it is. Thoreau found Walden Pond; Yeats found the Isle of Innisfree... more »
We may not always know why we kiss, but we do it all the time, which is kind of disturbing, and absurd when you think about it. Kristen Roupenian explains... more »
Publishing is an upper-class industry that attracts upper-class writers. This social and cultural sliver has a profound impact on whose stories get told... more »
To say freedom of conscience had a difficult birth would understate the matter, writes Marilynne Robinson. So she's surprised to find it disappearing before her eyes... more »
Owls are the most human of birds, fixtures of mythology and literature. They're remarkable, but can they really cure certain medical conditions?... more »
Why do art collectors collect? To establish political legitimacy, to claim aristocratic roots, for tax write-offs — the reasons are as varied as the collectors... more »
How Shakespeare wrote. He leaned heavily on George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth. The clue: “trundle-tail”... more »
For Rob Rieman, there's nothing wrong with Europe that its own best traditions can’t cure. Specifically, a rekindled nobility of spirit -- whatever that means... more »
Zadie Smith has been ordained a public intellectual, adopted the attendant seriousness, and learned a lesson: Middle age is no fun... more »
An unconfessional poet. While Lowell, Plath, and Rich plumbed personal experience, W.S. Merwin embraced formalism and erudition... more »
Martin Amis said he was done insulting people in print, but he merely turned his ire on older writers. Is there glory in dissecting the frailties of one’s elders?... more »
Depravity makes for bad art, but not always. It's a mistake to apply norms of social respectability to artistic expression. That way leads to moralistic kitsch... more »
Feted and then forgotten. Charles Sprawson, the bard of swimming, was hailed for his literary debut. Now he wanders a hospital ward looking for a pool... more »
Self-help has become the optimization industry. The advice remains interesting rather than useful, and the gurus are still muscular middle-aged men with shaven heads... more »
Ready-mades before Duchamp, Cy Twombly-esque scribblings 40 years before his heyday. The work of mentally ill artists reveals their bold originality... more »
Welcome to Roswell, New Mexico, the convergence of America's weakness for the strange, penchant for conspiratorial thinking, and knack for turning a buck... more »
From her harsh theater reviews to her novel My Ántonia, Willa Cather demonstrated an intensity of observation. Jane Smiley explains... more »
In 1905 the poet George Sterling established an artists' colony at Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif. Then things got dark: murders and suicide pacts... more »
At Cornell's legendary Food and Brand Lab, research is conducted in an unusual way: Collect data first, form hypotheses later. “This is not science, it is storytelling"... more »
Debussy’s idiotic ballet about a tennis match remained an avant-garde favorite 40 years later. In music, revolutionary styles and popularity are wedded... more »
By the time a new dictionary is complete, it’s out of date. Still, the quest to capture the meaning of everything remains a noble one... more »
The dean of the Harlem Renaissance was not Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston, but the editor and impresario Alain Locke. Such obscurity is undeserved... more »
Edward Abbey was a bus driver, park ranger, anarchist, and philosopher of the desert. He sought solitude but secretly craved the approval of the New York literati... more »
Animal-voiced poems tend to be quirky and quaint, like T.S. Eliot’s on cats. Enter Don Marquis, a fatalistic newspaperman who wrote cockroach-based poetry... more »
The anti-Habermas. Peter Sloterdijk made his career sparring with the Frankfurt School and predicting the demise of liberal democracy. The times have caught up to him... more »
Picasso’s erotic year. In 1932 the artist, 50, had a torrid affair with his 22-year-old model. Even his banal subjects — a fruit platter, a shadow — turned phallic... more »
The comprehensive John Stuart Mill. He was out to combine Bentham with poetry, the Enlightenment with Romanticism, and to span the entire philosophy of his time... more »
A robot Rembrandt? Artificial intelligence cannot yet make fine art. When it can, the results will be both painfully boring and beyond our wildest imagination... more »
In praise of bibliomancy. The idea that literature could predict the future captivated 17th-century royals. Today it reminds us that books possess a rare magic... more »
Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon: he was poor, uneducated, and smitten; she was rich, pious, and uninterested. On their first date, they went to a Dickens reading... more »
The case of the libelous letters. In 1920s Britain, a neighborhood dispute engrossed the nation. Why? The written word was a new and exhilarating weapon... more »
In search of a sacred combe, a place of retreat and artistic genesis. It's not a real place, except when it is. Thoreau found Walden Pond; Yeats found the Isle of Innisfree... more »
To say freedom of conscience had a difficult birth would understate the matter, writes Marilynne Robinson. So she's surprised to find it disappearing before her eyes... more »
How Shakespeare wrote. He leaned heavily on George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth. The clue: “trundle-tail”... more »
An unconfessional poet. While Lowell, Plath, and Rich plumbed personal experience, W.S. Merwin embraced formalism and erudition... more »
Feted and then forgotten. Charles Sprawson, the bard of swimming, was hailed for his literary debut. Now he wanders a hospital ward looking for a pool... more »
Jacques Barzun was all elegance and quiet authority. Lionel Trilling was melancholic and disaffected. Their improbable friendship shaped literary scholarship... more »
The history of Smell-O-Vision. The 1960 film Scent of Mystery used a renowned osmologist to revolutionize cinema. The result smelled like cheap cologne... more »
A “mouth breather with a silver spoon,” Henry Green was the greatest listener in the history of British letters, and an unlikely one at that... more »
Unlike French, English has no academy to protect it. The fate of the language is left to market forces, a battle between Berks and Wankers... more »
He was the greatest choreographer of the 20th century. But his treatment of female dancers looks a lot like sexual predation. What will become of George Balanchine's reputation?... more »
She swears magnificently, is the author of The Good Working Mother’s Guide, and wants a pink streak in her hair. She is also the world’s most famous classicist... more »
Irrelevance is the fate of most political magazines. Yet there are times when they change the course of history. Now might be one of those moments... more »
Cuttlefish were “hyacinth red and chestnut brown,” sea slugs “primrose yellow,” soft coral “light auricular purple”: Darwin, one admirer noted, was “a first-rate landscape painter with the pen”... 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 »
The value of not understanding. For Grace Paley, “write what you know” was a guarantee of dullness. Art comes from exploring the unknown... more »
The Jewishness of Jewish comedy shows itself in only obscure ways, because the comedians didn't want to identify themselves as Jewish... more »
Do animals possess language, culture, morality, a soul? “It would be less interesting to know what animals are, if it were not a means to know what we are”... more »
Wanted on charges of homosexual activity, Oscar Wilde was given time to flee to France. Even his mother urged him to go. Yet he would not... more »
In the 1920s, John W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer and fly fisherman, set the literary world on fire with an idea: Dreams can predict the future... more »
Isaac Newton’s views included Arianism, alchemy, Egyptian theology, and the Noachian faith. Why was such a seemingly modern thinker so obsessed with ancient ideas?... more »
The East German writer Christa Wolf grew up under state surveillance. Later, in her diaries, she continued a sort of spying on herself... more »
The persistence of fairy tales. From Angela Carter onward, authors have retold, revised, and remixed classic stories. Today the genre is delightfully chaotic... more »
Zadie Smith’s talent is writing dialogue — an intellectual, imaginary impersonation. In this way she contains multitudes. Her point is that we all do... more »
The historian Yuval Harari champions “Dataism”; thinks emotions are simply algorithms; and says people will become like gods in the future. He is wrong, says David Berlinski... more »
As a young writer, Philip Roth would begin each morning by shouting “Attack! Attack!” at himself in the mirror. Why would such a man cease writing?... more »
David Jones — engraver, soldier, painter, poet— overcame war, a nervous breakdown, and episodes of erotic frustration. He was the greatest modernist Britain ever produced... more »
King Arthur was actually a Roman centurion named Artorius — or so holds an intriguing if implausible theory. Dipping into Celtic history is dangerous for writers’ reputations... more »
The historian Reinhart Koselleck proposed that world history be divided into three epochs: pre-horse, horse, and post-horse. Now horses are “ghosts of modernity”... more »
Jack Kerouac: mindless hedonist and word-vomiting miscreant. Or the humblest, most devoted American religious writer of the 20th century?... more »
Tina Brown has fame, fortune, and little respect. Even her successes are seen less as the result of her editorial vision than of her willingness to spend money... more »
We may not always know why we kiss, but we do it all the time, which is kind of disturbing, and absurd when you think about it. Kristen Roupenian explains... more »
Owls are the most human of birds, fixtures of mythology and literature. They're remarkable, but can they really cure certain medical conditions?... more »
For Rob Rieman, there's nothing wrong with Europe that its own best traditions can’t cure. Specifically, a rekindled nobility of spirit -- whatever that means... more »
Martin Amis said he was done insulting people in print, but he merely turned his ire on older writers. Is there glory in dissecting the frailties of one’s elders?... more »
Self-help has become the optimization industry. The advice remains interesting rather than useful, and the gurus are still muscular middle-aged men with shaven heads... more »
Bibliophiles dream of discovering Byron’s memoir or Plath’s missing novel. Lost books tantalize because they represent holes in the intellectual firmament... more »
Leon Kass is a scold — about higher education, liberal intellectuals, dating, sports, and especially modern science. Yet he somehow produces a bracing argument for what makes a life worth living... more »
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was the first major history of Nazi Germany and remains the most-read book on the subject. Time for a corrective... more »
Darwinism is loaded with cultural and aesthetic baggage rarely found in science. Has evolutionary theory become a religion?... more »
The fascinating, if now largely forgotten, life of John Selden: known as “England’s chief rabbi,” expert in Arabic chronicles, imprisoned in the Tower of London... more »
Martin Amis's nonfiction includes a fair share of chestnuts. He is most alive when engaged in the scrupulous celebration of other writers' prose... more »
It may feel as though we read less now than we did before smartphones and social media. But statistics do not bear that out. So why is the feeling so prevalent?... more »
Joni Mitchell's authenticity is quintessential. But authenticity in art is, of course, also an aesthetic effect. And her art was a product of artifice as much as honesty... 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 »
What attracted a gregarious psychiatrist to a reclusive professor? Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze bonded over a mutual distrust of identity... more »
Who is more to blame for the crisis of liberalism over the past four decades: Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler — or Lawrence Summers?... more »
October 18, 1973: Sotheby's auctioned works by Twombley, Johns, and Rauschenberg. It was called the day the art world collapsed. Well, no, but it was the beginning of the end... more »
The incarnations of Bruno Latour. A devoted Catholic disdainful of universal truths, critic of science turned climate-science promoter, playwright, military collaborator... more »
According to Will Self, novels are a jungle gym for the mind. So choose challenging texts: “No one ever got smart by reading … Dan Brown”... more »
A taxonomy of unfinished novels. Common causes include writer’s block and death. Then there are those works whose unfinishability is an aesthetic virtue... more »
The history of anti-literature: Whether Plato's denouncing literary fantasy or Oscar Wilde's labeling art useless, they are unintentional tributes... more »
A well-intentioned culture of positivity has pervaded contemporary book reviewing. The result? Advertisement-style frippery. Bring back the hatchet job... more »
The awfulness of pop culture. It promises to deliver pleasure — then fails. It suggests aesthetic freedom — but is only a mirage. Or so thought Adorno... more »
Marcuse for the new millennium. The philosopher’s insights into automation are key to understanding our work-obsessed age: Busyness makes us bad thinkers... more »
In Egypt, Flaubert grew ““ignobly plump,” took in striptease shows, and was dazzled by the country's colors. The color eau de Nil stems from such Egyptomania... more »
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer, Carver, Lish: the literary sections of magazines like Esquire and GQ were, for decades, a cult of maleness. Are they still?... more »
“Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator," wrote Barthes. That is especially true, Leslie Jamison explains, at Croatia’s Museum of Broken Relationships... more »
Lunch at the White House, parties with celebrities, hangouts with plutocrats in Aspen. Will Ta-Nehisi Coates’s proximity to power distort his perspective?... more »
Steven Pinker may be the most optimistic man in America. But his optimism curdles into despair at the way science is treated on many campuses... more »
Louis-Ferdinand Céline became famous suddenly and infamous soon after. Can we distinguish “good” Céline, the novelist, from “bad” Céline, the anti-Semitic pamphleteer?... more »
Publishing is an upper-class industry that attracts upper-class writers. This social and cultural sliver has a profound impact on whose stories get told... more »
Why do art collectors collect? To establish political legitimacy, to claim aristocratic roots, for tax write-offs — the reasons are as varied as the collectors... more »
Zadie Smith has been ordained a public intellectual, adopted the attendant seriousness, and learned a lesson: Middle age is no fun... more »
Depravity makes for bad art, but not always. It's a mistake to apply norms of social respectability to artistic expression. That way leads to moralistic kitsch... more »
Ready-mades before Duchamp, Cy Twombly-esque scribblings 40 years before his heyday. The work of mentally ill artists reveals their bold originality... more »
The strangely contested legacy of Antonio Gramsci. His thought is championed in the pages of Marxism Today and by pundits on the far right — why?... more »
For years, women only whispered about sexual harassment, for fear of reprisal from men. Now they fear other women. Katie Roiphe on the chilling effect of the new feminist orthodoxy... more »
Renata Adler, Lorin Stein, and Ann Coulter were there. Steve Bannon was not. Wine, whiskey, water, but no one drank much. Michael Wolff's book party... more »
Innocence and guilt are legal standards. When we talk about Woody Allen, we deal with murkier issues. A.O. Scott on what most troubles him... more »
Fear that democracy in the West is in terminal decline is understandable. But the argument that democracies die when they become too democratic is not. Sheri Berman explains... more »
The human brain is a kind of machine, but don’t expect machine learning to understand language anytime soon. For example: Google Translate... more »
Paul Robeson was a deeply political figure; his endorsement of Stalin is the tragedy of his life. But it's a mistake to twist every action into a political statement... more »
Rongorongo is the only script native to the Pacific. It resembles no other writing system on earth. In fact, it was not written but carved. And no one has been able to decipher it... 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 »
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