“In poetry, words rhyme; in puns, ideas rhyme,” says James Geary. “This is the ultimate test of wittiness, keeping your balance even when you’re of two minds.” So why do puns have a bad reputation?... more »
Maryanne Wolf was worried. She wasn't reading as she used to. She conducted an experiment on herself, which confirmed that she'd lost "cognitive patience." Have you?... more »
Hemingway described Little Women as full of “sweetness and light.” Other critics characterize the book as treacly. True enough, in some ways. But it's also an angry book... more »
Sixty-six million years ago, three-quarters of the earth’s species went extinct. Why? Enter one of the longest and most rancorous controversies in science... more »
Anne Hathaway’s rough ride. She's been exploited and slandered in the dim hope that her shadowy life will tell us something essential about her husband, Shakespeare. It doesn't... more »
Given our collective mania for attention, and the boundless opportunities we now have to seek it, we might ask: What did people believe they lost when they lost their privacy?... more »
More than 10 million antiquities have disappeared from China, some of them ending up in museums around the world. Why are so many being stolen?... more »
Weegee specialized in photographing crime scenes. Murder was his business, he said. Art critics loved his style. Then he slipped into obscurity... more »
For all his renown, Hume remains a philosopher’s philosopher. Why? He's not a tragic or romantic figure, and did not offer an easily distilled message... more »
The years leading up to World War I were a time of radical artistic experimentation — vorticism, cubism, futurism, "anti-art." These new movements turned out to be further casualties of the war... more »
In 1837, Darwin sketched a tree of life: a common ancestor at the trunk, ever-dividing branches leading to new species. Turns out those branches aren't as separate as we thought... more »
"A curious situation has arisen." That's how Leonard Bernstein began an unusual pre-concert address to an audience. He went on to disavow the performance he was about to conduct... more »
For Roland Barthes, understanding society required understanding how meaning is produced and consumed. It led him to a social psychology of human alienation... more »
More than 800 pre-Gutenberg editions of The Divine Comedy are known to exist. The history of translations and interpretations is long and fractious... more »
Kant believed that beautiful art “must always show a certain dignity in itself.” Alfred Brendel disagrees. He believes in musical jokes ... more »
V.S. Naipaul was a grumpy reactionary whose sense of humor bordered on cruelty. His irascibility sharpened his vision... more »
The architecture critic Owen Hatherley has announced his last “walking around and looking at things” book. We look forward to his stopping... more »
“Relevant” is one of the great nonsense words in art, says Jay Nordlinger. The best art doesn't speak to our time. It speaks for all time... more »
The physicist Leo Szilard was integral to the creation of nuclear weapons. His literary legacy, including a cabal of messianic dolphins, is less well known... more »
Pentecostal churches were hellfire preaching, general pandemonium — and music. They were where Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and James Brown learned to move a crowd... more »
Among the Leonardo loonies. How a strange subculture of da Vinci obsessives creates elaborate, unsubstantiated theories to explain him... more »
The tyranny of language. European colonizers tried to stamp out indigenous languages. The legacy of linguistic imperialism lives on... more »
How would Aristotle cater a luncheon? What would he say about résumés or global warming? Such tidbits, among other fluff, make up a new book... more »
Choosing what to read takes time and effort and often results in disappointment. Do yourself a favor: Ditch the best-seller list. Read old books instead... more »
What’s it like to take a psychedelic drug? Answers may tend to echo the “love conquers all” platitudes of Hallmark cards, but they're convincing... more »
The trial over The Trial. German scholars argued that Kafka’s manuscripts belonged to Germany; Israeli scholars disagreed. Then things got contentious... more »
"Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment." Donald Hall on life at 90... more »
Black English is not a degraded form of the language. It's an alternative form. There's nothing wrong with it. So should white writers get in trouble for using it?... more »
Life finds a way — but should it? The de-extinction movement promises to bring back mammoths and dinosaurs. Perhaps this hasn't been adequately thought through... more »
We've become indifferent to memory, allergic to tradition. Truth has been eclipsed by useful knowledge. Technocracy reigns, humanism wanes. Deep thoughts with Ross Douthat... more »
Simone Weil was a French pseudo-Catholic mystic and writer of monkish austerity. Her life and death are stark and memorable. But is she relevant?... more »
Why did Descartes, a social climber, leave Paris, a city he loved? His life was in danger. Or so says a new biography... more »
The life of the mind has been overtaken by the imperatives of advertising. Welcome to the era of the promotional intellectual ... more »
The neuroscientist Barbara Lipska spent her career mapping the line between sanity and insanity. Then her own mind began to go wrong... more »
A curious fact about the giants of utopian literature: The authors' own lives are far more interesting than those they imagined... more »
Anger and tenderness. Adrienne Rich wrote little while raising her three sons, but the experience changed her: “Motherhood radicalized me”... more »
"Bodies are unruly sites for politics," says Merve Emre. "Between the body and the political lies a vastly mediated world where belief and behavior do not always overlap"... more »
“It is a miracle that New York works at all,” wrote E.B. White. “The whole thing is implausible.” Is the city the apotheosis of America or a national outlier? Maybe both... more »
Happy endings are rare in literary fiction. Instead we get bleak plots and pervasive pessimism. Can we really say literature is good for us?... more »
Holocaust-deniers, anti-vaccinators, climate-change skeptics: The psychology of denialism runs deep and affects us all... more »
Yuval Noah Harari dwells on big subjects – war, terrorism, nationalism, God. He does so by combining great swaths of padding with observations of crushing banality... more »
Reading Lolita in the age of #MeToo. The book never pardons us for the sin of participating in it. The revulsion is why it endures. Caitlin Flanagan explains... more »
The mythic personification of evil has been around for a long time, and our sense of its reality has not vanished with the steady march of rationalism... more »
Oscar Wilde’s American book tour. He reclined sensuously on a fur rug for publicity stills, mastered the pungent axiom, and faced down rowdy hecklers... more »
Learning French has been likened to joining a gang. Both involve "a long and intensive period of hazing.” Why bother? It forces you to rethink your approach to language itself... more »
The big business of the “war of ideas.” In front of 6,000 people, Jordan Peterson riffs on the human brain, God, and genocide, mining mass ennui for money... more »
For 19th-century British poets, to die in Italy was a guarantee of sanctification. Exhibit A: Oscar Wilde throwing himself on the ground at Keats’s grave... more »
We used to reach for metaphors, idioms, and images to convey abstract ideas, says Steven Pinker. Now our prose is more efficient, but more lifeless... more »
In defense of ugly art. From da Vinci’s “series of disgusts” to such works as “A Grotesque Old Woman,” viewers tend to gawk at the hideous. They should look deeper... more »
Every generation gets the Emily Brontë it needs. The latest iteration: Proto-feminist who chafed at traditional gender roles; bread-making maven; skilled musician... more »
The cult of Evelyn Waugh included Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis. The modern Waughian wears tweed, rides a bike, and, most likely, blogs... more »
Recondite, scholarly works on human evolution or the history of trade have topped the best-seller list. Is this a boom in “brainy” books?... more »
“Work is a good thing in small doses,” wrote Philip Larkin, who proved an efficient librarian. Today, however, labor often goes hand in hand with soul-crushing misery... more »
Russia came early to the idea that "the people" carry the moral solution to the world’s ills. These populists, fueled by a guilty idealism, failed utterly... more »
Have people said that you should write a book? Hate to break it to you, but they're almost certainly wrong... more »
In 1948, Hemingway set sail for Europe with more than 30 pieces of luggage and a royal-blue Buick convertible. He was in search of a second act. Improbably, he found it... more »
Peter Berger did as much as anyone to illuminate the place of religion in the modern world. He was more opaque about his own religious identity... more »
What English has wrought. It's everywhere. Meantime, a language goes extinct every two weeks; up to 90 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages are at risk of disappearing... more »
All utopias are not progressive, and progressive utopias are not liberal. Indeed, as close as liberalism gets to utopia is a society flawed, like our own, but less cruel... more »
If art can do harm -- and it can -- it can also do good. If it’s beautiful enough or moving enough or original enough, maybe it can even atone for the sins of the artist... more »
Welcome to the David Foster Wallace Conference, where “DFDubs” was, by turns, venerated and exhaustively flayed for being a misogynist... more »
Handsome, smart, and devious, George Villiers ascended in King James I’s court. But his rise ended with sexual shenanigans and, it seems, murder... more »
Charles Mills is sensitive to the weaknesses and limitations of liberal political theory. His critique is a reckoning, and an effort to save liberalism... more »
“In poetry, words rhyme; in puns, ideas rhyme,” says James Geary. “This is the ultimate test of wittiness, keeping your balance even when you’re of two minds.” So why do puns have a bad reputation?... more »
Sixty-six million years ago, three-quarters of the earth’s species went extinct. Why? Enter one of the longest and most rancorous controversies in science... more »
More than 10 million antiquities have disappeared from China, some of them ending up in museums around the world. Why are so many being stolen?... more »
The years leading up to World War I were a time of radical artistic experimentation — vorticism, cubism, futurism, "anti-art." These new movements turned out to be further casualties of the war... more »
For Roland Barthes, understanding society required understanding how meaning is produced and consumed. It led him to a social psychology of human alienation... more »
V.S. Naipaul was a grumpy reactionary whose sense of humor bordered on cruelty. His irascibility sharpened his vision... more »
The physicist Leo Szilard was integral to the creation of nuclear weapons. His literary legacy, including a cabal of messianic dolphins, is less well known... more »
The tyranny of language. European colonizers tried to stamp out indigenous languages. The legacy of linguistic imperialism lives on... more »
What’s it like to take a psychedelic drug? Answers may tend to echo the “love conquers all” platitudes of Hallmark cards, but they're convincing... more »
Black English is not a degraded form of the language. It's an alternative form. There's nothing wrong with it. So should white writers get in trouble for using it?... more »
Simone Weil was a French pseudo-Catholic mystic and writer of monkish austerity. Her life and death are stark and memorable. But is she relevant?... more »
The neuroscientist Barbara Lipska spent her career mapping the line between sanity and insanity. Then her own mind began to go wrong... more »
"Bodies are unruly sites for politics," says Merve Emre. "Between the body and the political lies a vastly mediated world where belief and behavior do not always overlap"... more »
Holocaust-deniers, anti-vaccinators, climate-change skeptics: The psychology of denialism runs deep and affects us all... more »
The mythic personification of evil has been around for a long time, and our sense of its reality has not vanished with the steady march of rationalism... more »
The big business of the “war of ideas.” In front of 6,000 people, Jordan Peterson riffs on the human brain, God, and genocide, mining mass ennui for money... more »
In defense of ugly art. From da Vinci’s “series of disgusts” to such works as “A Grotesque Old Woman,” viewers tend to gawk at the hideous. They should look deeper... more »
Recondite, scholarly works on human evolution or the history of trade have topped the best-seller list. Is this a boom in “brainy” books?... more »
Have people said that you should write a book? Hate to break it to you, but they're almost certainly wrong... more »
What English has wrought. It's everywhere. Meantime, a language goes extinct every two weeks; up to 90 percent of the world’s 6,000 languages are at risk of disappearing... more »
Welcome to the David Foster Wallace Conference, where “DFDubs” was, by turns, venerated and exhaustively flayed for being a misogynist... more »
Long before the invention of modern recording technology, scholars captured the music of Ukrainian Jewry. It is the sound of a vanished world ... more »
The intellectual hucksterism of AlienCon. Thousands gather to learn about iridology, divine muscle testing, and ancient astronaut theory — for a price, of course... more »
Wuthering Heights makes too much noise and not enough sense. But what’s significant about the novel is the fact that it exists at all... more »
Aristotle wrote an essay, “On Sleep and Sleeplessness,” wondering how and why we sleep. Maybe the real wonder is why we bother to stay awake... more »
The "intellectual dark web" is many things: crusade against political correctness, revolt against conventional beliefs, check on the illiberal left. One thing it is not: new... more »
Balzac and Paris. Faulkner and Mississippi. Thoreau and Walden Pond. Solzhenitsyn and ... Vermont? How the Russian novelist made rural New England his home... more »
The Swedish Academy has always been consumed by self-importance. Now the bestower of Nobels in literature is consumed by scandals of sex and corruption... more »
When Mount Vesuvius erupted, thousands of papyrus scrolls were buried — the only intact ancient library. Will they finally be read?... more »
Auden left Britain for America in 1939 — “at the first squeak of an air-raid warning,” said Evelyn Waugh. Was it mere cowardice?... more »
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea that became the internet. Since then he's thought of little but how to guard it — and of how he's failed to do so... more »
For the past 25 years, in novel after novel, Michel Houellebecq advanced a case against modern sexuality. Now his dystopia is our reality... more »
During Shoah’s, 9 1/2 hours, Claude Lanzmann, who died last week, displayed a genius for not looking away from enormities and not tolerating niceties... more »
Pity the semicolon. In poor favor since the mid-19th century, now it’s an object of derision. The semicolon is a goofy antique, yes, but it still works... more »
The man who discovered probability. We now live in a Bayesian age, but for centuries Thomas Bayes was dismissed as a crank. It's a scandal of modern intellectual life... more »
Concerns about cultural appropriation in literature have mounted. These complaints are baffling: What, exactly, is cultural appropriation?... more »
Lewis Carroll in Russia. He arrived with wide-eyed enthusiasm and by all accounts seemed to enjoy himself. Yet he would never venture abroad again... more »
A rave, in 1518. A woman stepped outside her house in Strasbourg and jigged for days on end. Hundreds joined in, some until they lost consciousness or died... more »
Taken from his dorm at Moscow’s Literary Institute in the middle of the night, Naum Korzhavin faced down his interrogators and survived. He “won this idiocy contest”... more »
At the age of 38, Alexander Wilson was a middling poet with no scientific expertise. So how did he produce, over the next 10 years, his astounding ornithological writings?... more »
Maryanne Wolf was worried. She wasn't reading as she used to. She conducted an experiment on herself, which confirmed that she'd lost "cognitive patience." Have you?... more »
Anne Hathaway’s rough ride. She's been exploited and slandered in the dim hope that her shadowy life will tell us something essential about her husband, Shakespeare. It doesn't... more »
Weegee specialized in photographing crime scenes. Murder was his business, he said. Art critics loved his style. Then he slipped into obscurity... more »
In 1837, Darwin sketched a tree of life: a common ancestor at the trunk, ever-dividing branches leading to new species. Turns out those branches aren't as separate as we thought... more »
More than 800 pre-Gutenberg editions of The Divine Comedy are known to exist. The history of translations and interpretations is long and fractious... more »
The architecture critic Owen Hatherley has announced his last “walking around and looking at things” book. We look forward to his stopping... more »
Pentecostal churches were hellfire preaching, general pandemonium — and music. They were where Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and James Brown learned to move a crowd... more »
How would Aristotle cater a luncheon? What would he say about résumés or global warming? Such tidbits, among other fluff, make up a new book... more »
The trial over The Trial. German scholars argued that Kafka’s manuscripts belonged to Germany; Israeli scholars disagreed. Then things got contentious... more »
Life finds a way — but should it? The de-extinction movement promises to bring back mammoths and dinosaurs. Perhaps this hasn't been adequately thought through... more »
Why did Descartes, a social climber, leave Paris, a city he loved? His life was in danger. Or so says a new biography... more »
A curious fact about the giants of utopian literature: The authors' own lives are far more interesting than those they imagined... more »
“It is a miracle that New York works at all,” wrote E.B. White. “The whole thing is implausible.” Is the city the apotheosis of America or a national outlier? Maybe both... more »
Yuval Noah Harari dwells on big subjects – war, terrorism, nationalism, God. He does so by combining great swaths of padding with observations of crushing banality... more »
Oscar Wilde’s American book tour. He reclined sensuously on a fur rug for publicity stills, mastered the pungent axiom, and faced down rowdy hecklers... more »
For 19th-century British poets, to die in Italy was a guarantee of sanctification. Exhibit A: Oscar Wilde throwing himself on the ground at Keats’s grave... more »
Every generation gets the Emily Brontë it needs. The latest iteration: Proto-feminist who chafed at traditional gender roles; bread-making maven; skilled musician... more »
“Work is a good thing in small doses,” wrote Philip Larkin, who proved an efficient librarian. Today, however, labor often goes hand in hand with soul-crushing misery... more »
In 1948, Hemingway set sail for Europe with more than 30 pieces of luggage and a royal-blue Buick convertible. He was in search of a second act. Improbably, he found it... more »
All utopias are not progressive, and progressive utopias are not liberal. Indeed, as close as liberalism gets to utopia is a society flawed, like our own, but less cruel... more »
Handsome, smart, and devious, George Villiers ascended in King James I’s court. But his rise ended with sexual shenanigans and, it seems, murder... more »
Judith Shklar was a pessimist in an era of triumphalism. At odds with the political philosophy of her own time, her ideas are finally resonating... more »
The prestige of books has declined. But that hasn't dimmed tyrants' longtime desire to collect their dull thoughts between two covers... more »
Time is typically experienced as linear, uniform, and homogeneous. One appeal of books is that they function as time machines... more »
“Bitching Aplenty” could have been the title of Seymour Hersh's memoir. His antics wouldn't be tolerated today. Has journalism deprived itself of genius by depriving itself of depravity?... more »
The "problem of thinking" is a matter of overcoming discomfort, not biases. Thinking deeply is exhausting, and we instinctively avoid ideas that complicate our lives ... more »
Robert Caro’s five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson will have been published over three decades. The future of the genre, via video, ebook, or podcast, will be quite different... more »
Literary theory is choked with jargon and oracular prose, which makes John Farrell's achievement all the more remarkable... more »
Oscar Wilde, post-imprisonment, was a broken, tragic figure. Or was he? A different story lurks in his hilarious letters and his general seduction of Paris... more »
The imperialism of economics. The field explains away complicated realities, ignores culture, and exalts reductionism. Can it be saved?... more »
Life in the Matthiessen family. Hypermasculinity, CIA intrigue, multiple suicides, and literary brilliance. A member of the clan takes stock ... more »
In 1908, an elderly woman was murdered in her Glasgow apartment. The police had a suspect. Then Arthur Conan Doyle got involved... more »
A tale of two epics. Anthony Powell’s masterwork was as long and complex as Proust’s, and is of superior quality, writes Perry Anderson. Why has it been forgotten?... more »
Is Lucretius a useful guide to the American political situation? Martha Nussbaum thinks so. She's not so much wrong as oblivious... more »
Alcibiades punched his future father-in-law, bit his wrestling opponent, and tried to seduce everyone. How an appalling man became so appealing... more »
The memoir as manual is a most irksome publishing craze. As if life were a tidy moral lesson, and every idiosyncratic experience worthy of extrapolation... more »
To unpack the debate over “Afro-pessimism” and the theories of Frantz Fanon and Fred Moten, consider the work of the poet Aimé Césaire... more »
Horror, wonder, awe. To observe jellyfish is to experience both the beauty and the danger of the natural world... more »
A campaign against humanity. Invalided from civil service for alcoholism, Flann O’Brien turned his ire on publishers, television producers, and James Joyce... more »
Hemingway described Little Women as full of “sweetness and light.” Other critics characterize the book as treacly. True enough, in some ways. But it's also an angry book... more »
Given our collective mania for attention, and the boundless opportunities we now have to seek it, we might ask: What did people believe they lost when they lost their privacy?... more »
For all his renown, Hume remains a philosopher’s philosopher. Why? He's not a tragic or romantic figure, and did not offer an easily distilled message... more »
"A curious situation has arisen." That's how Leonard Bernstein began an unusual pre-concert address to an audience. He went on to disavow the performance he was about to conduct... more »
Kant believed that beautiful art “must always show a certain dignity in itself.” Alfred Brendel disagrees. He believes in musical jokes ... more »
“Relevant” is one of the great nonsense words in art, says Jay Nordlinger. The best art doesn't speak to our time. It speaks for all time... more »
Among the Leonardo loonies. How a strange subculture of da Vinci obsessives creates elaborate, unsubstantiated theories to explain him... more »
Choosing what to read takes time and effort and often results in disappointment. Do yourself a favor: Ditch the best-seller list. Read old books instead... more »
"Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment." Donald Hall on life at 90... more »
We've become indifferent to memory, allergic to tradition. Truth has been eclipsed by useful knowledge. Technocracy reigns, humanism wanes. Deep thoughts with Ross Douthat... more »
The life of the mind has been overtaken by the imperatives of advertising. Welcome to the era of the promotional intellectual ... more »
Anger and tenderness. Adrienne Rich wrote little while raising her three sons, but the experience changed her: “Motherhood radicalized me”... more »
Happy endings are rare in literary fiction. Instead we get bleak plots and pervasive pessimism. Can we really say literature is good for us?... more »
Reading Lolita in the age of #MeToo. The book never pardons us for the sin of participating in it. The revulsion is why it endures. Caitlin Flanagan explains... more »
Learning French has been likened to joining a gang. Both involve "a long and intensive period of hazing.” Why bother? It forces you to rethink your approach to language itself... more »
We used to reach for metaphors, idioms, and images to convey abstract ideas, says Steven Pinker. Now our prose is more efficient, but more lifeless... more »
The cult of Evelyn Waugh included Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis. The modern Waughian wears tweed, rides a bike, and, most likely, blogs... more »
Russia came early to the idea that "the people" carry the moral solution to the world’s ills. These populists, fueled by a guilty idealism, failed utterly... more »
Peter Berger did as much as anyone to illuminate the place of religion in the modern world. He was more opaque about his own religious identity... more »
If art can do harm -- and it can -- it can also do good. If it’s beautiful enough or moving enough or original enough, maybe it can even atone for the sins of the artist... more »
Charles Mills is sensitive to the weaknesses and limitations of liberal political theory. His critique is a reckoning, and an effort to save liberalism... more »
Diogenes Laertius may have been a flaming mediocrity, but he deserves our admiration: He's our best source on ancient philosophy ... more »
An unfortunate side effect of democracy is that it incentivizes ignorance, irrationality, and tribalism. So says Jason Brennan. He has a cure: epistocracy... more »
Extremism is too often seen as a foreign threat — an infection from an alien civilization. As Hannah Arendt knew, it grows out of a local problem: loneliness... more »
What is it like to be a man? We talk plenty about masculinity, but the topic resists straightforward discussion — even as men suck the air from every other conversation... more »
How is it that the gray mush inside our skulls can produce "hopes, fears, and dreams"? It's the sort of question that animates a lot of useless agonizing... more »
"Disrespecting your ideological predecessors is something of a sport in modern American feminism, and it reaches varsity level when it comes to criticizing the second wave"... more »
They cost 99 cents and depict glistening shirtless men. Romance e-books might seem frivolous, but the controversy over Her Cocky Doctors is anything but... more »
Writers and even academic institutes are celebrating the mystical power of psychedelics. The enthusiasm is based more on hope than on scientific evidence... more »
Shakespeare and science. He was a poet of Copernican astronomy before the telescope, and a poet of microbiology before the modern microscope... more »
What does it mean to acquire a taste for something, whether classical music, coffee, or conservatism? It means shedding who we are and becoming who we aspire to be... more »
Science is too white, too male, too straight. So efforts to increase diversity make sense. But do they undermine scientific progress?... more »
A mystical approach to translating Clarice Lispector. Hallucinations and prayers abounded; magic crystals were employed; when the dictionary failed, a psychic was consulted... more »
Privilege: We hear that word a lot these days, usually as an indictment lobbed by the privileged themselves. Why? Matthew Crawford has a theory... more »
Our culture scoffs at Freud and Jung and puts its faith in science and statistics. One hole in this pervasive rationality: the magic of coincidences... more »
The Western canon emerged from a textual culture. Now we're in a digital age, when information is infinite. What authority do the Great Books still possess? ... more »
Have we fundamentally misunderstood our relationship with the earth? Bruno Latour, suspecting so, goes to meet the 98-year-old behind the “Gaia” hypothesis... more »
The lone male artist has often been taken as a genius; the lone female artist as a muse or “art monster.” But art does not have to be masculine or feminine... more »
Donald Hall’s poetry could be dismissed as patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist. But it also teaches persistence, practicality, and farsightedness... more »
The good life, according to Aztec philosophy: The goal was not the pursuit of perfection but rather rootedness, moderation, prudence, and courage... more »
The conflict between the sciences and the humanities isn't resolvable as long as we disagree about what it means to be an educated person... more »
In 1838, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand went on vacation in Majorca. Thus began the most notoriously unsuccessful holiday in the history of classical music... more »
A boomlet of “death of liberalism” writing is underway. But look back: It first died in the 1870s and has been dying almost continuously since 1920... more »
Frida Kahlo’s ashtray, her eyebrow pencil, her prosthetic leg — they convey only emptiness, alienation, and loss. They are displayed in museums, but they are not art... more »
Nothing is more American than to proudly declare yourself outside the mainstream. And so we've become a herd of people busily declaring ourselves not part of the herd... more »
Neuroscientists chase incorrect theories; brain-imaging studies suffer from statistical mistakes; economics embraces faulty premises. Does bad science spread?... more »
Writing from Arles, France, van Gogh told his brother, “I’m in Japan here.” As French neoclassicism ran out of gas, his turn was to the East... more »
Fondling in the library, seduction in the bookstore — why do sex and literature go together? Edmund White on reading, writing, and romance... more »
Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young black painter who became the darling of rich, mostly white, collectors. We've had a hard time making the two go together easily. So did he... more »
Looking for a best-selling book for girls? Chances are it has a title like Bygone Badass Broads or Women Who Dared. But well-behaved women, too, make history... more »
New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week.
Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
Founding Editor (1998-2010): Denis Dutton
Editor: Evan Goldstein
Managing Editor: Tran Huu Dung
Assistant Editor: David Wescott
Copy Editor: Mitch Gerber
© 1998 — 2018
Arts & Letters Daily is brought to you by
The Chronicle of Higher Education