Infidelity, bullying, callousness, malice — Dickens’s demons were not secret. In his fiction, they appear in plain sight... more »
In the quixotic nature of writing — a craft that gently drives its practitioners mad — lies the reason it matters so much... more »
“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »
Aristotle defended slavery, Kant and Hume were racists, Wittgenstein was sexist. Is it possible to set aside those positions? Is it wise? Depends on the philosopher... more »
The Churchills were famously terrible employers — Winston's wandering around naked didn’t help. Many a cook and kitchen maid left in tears; one reputedly went mad... more »
Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »
The neuroscience of nostalgia. How can we miss things we’ve never experienced firsthand? Science offers a clue... more »
“No serious Black intellectual today thinks anti-Black racism is not a matter of life and death. The question is still the old one: What is to be done?”... more »
Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »
With her best-selling book and antiracism training sessions, Robin DiAngelo has illuminated the notion of white fragility. But what, exactly, is that changing?... more »
What to make of Wordsworth? For every line of his that intones the still, sad music of humanity, another drones the shrill, mad music of inanity... more »
What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »
Paperback writers. How Carr, Hobsbawm, Taylor, and Trevor-Roper became the first generation of British historians who wrote for a large, mainstream audience... more »
Charles Péguy was neither a modernist nor an antimodernist. Rather, he was something quite distinctive, instructive, and relevant to our times: an amodernist... more »
The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »
Almost from the time Wuthering Heights was published, a vocal minority has argued that Emily Brontë can't be the true author. Now that theory has been tested... more »
Believing falsehoods is one problem; not knowing the truth is another. To understand our moment, we must understand the anatomy of knowledge and ignorance... more »
Before “prestige” TV, the medium was considered the “idiot box.” With new shows like Floor Is Lava, the pendulum is swinging back again... more »
Against open letters. They are badly written. They are open to doubt. They aren't necessary. They look cowardly. They are contagious... more »
In Martin Hägglund’s worldview, socialism is spiritual. But does that deepen our understanding of politics or distract from it?... more »
The plight of the plague specialist. As a pestilence once again rains down on humanity, what good is literary expertise in disease and disaster?... more »
Scientists are trained to be precise and clinical. But emotions — especially the feeling of awe — are at the heart of what they do... more »
The last of the Enlightenment intellectuals. John Maynard Keynes pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design... more »
What is this cancel culture? Is it even a real thing? It's complicated, says Ross Douthat, who offers a guide to the perplexed... more »
Silicon Valley “rationalists” have erupted at The New York Times in a debate over anonymity. Cue the conspiracy theories and irrational thinking... more »
The business of being Beethoven. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how much tickets should cost, how to attract rich sponsors, how to promote himself... more »
Irving Fisher and the quantification of everything. The economist died in 1947, but he anticipated the temper of our own times... more »
Twenty years ago, Anne Applebaum was among history's winners as a liberal internationalist. Now she is a heretic among former friends... more »
At his best, T.S. Eliot said a lot by saying relatively little. Unfortunately, he was not always — or even often — at his best... more »
How did Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, achieve such success as socialism was in decline? He was a master of argument-driven synthesis... more »
The Shostakovich problem. What is it about the composer that makes some people withhold their approval?... more »
As Martin Amis wrote, art “celebrates life,” increasing “the store of what might be lost.” Can art — at the same time — lament what will be lost in climate change?... more »
Covid-19 has exposed Anglo-America as woefully lacking in crucial ways. In rebuilding, the world will turn to Germany, Japan, and South Korea... more »
What was the origin of the novel? Perhaps it was Robinson Crusoe, perhaps Don Quixote. Or perhaps the question is nonsensical... more »
A pain “unlimited in both intensity and duration.” For George Scialabba, depression seemed as if it would never end, and life became an eternal, excruciating present... more »
YouTube, as Nicholson Baker explains, is an “indispensable, life-enhancing tool, and also a source of poisonous neo-medieval yammering”... more »
A bold broadside against a dogmatic intellectual culture? Or “fatuous, self-important drivel”? Artists, writers, and thinkers react to that Harper’s letter... more »
Culture, identity, psychology — Instagram takes the content of our private lives to digitize, feed through algorithms, and repackage for our consumption... more »
“Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.” Patricia Lockwood shares her notes from living with coronavirus... more »
Against “decency, morality, and good taste” the men of 1840s Brighton, England invariably swam naked. The problem was acute at low tide... more »
“She was a good old stick,” said Orwell, when his first wife died at the age of 39. But Eileen Blair’s story was more interesting than that... more »
A hunger for auditory escape. Now 40 years old, the Walkman was the device that taught us social distancing. Its legacy lives on today... more »
Composers come in the form of two seasons — winter and summer. Gustav Mahler, who worked in a shed beside a lake, is the archetypal summer composer.... more »
To read Seamus Heaney is to experience a downward and backward pull. What drew him to bogs, slime, and ritualized violence?... more »
Gregory Bateson was one of the most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture. His ideas are attuned to the peculiar dysfunctions of our own time... more »
"Patriotism is a moral mistake and an intellectual mistake, a mistake twice over," says George Kateb. "We are all subject to it"... more »
Glamour is a form of persuasion, says Virginia Postrel, and jet-age glamour changed the way people think about the relationship between humans and technology... more »
Matisse was a lover of women. Karen Wilkins explains the layered richness of his response to the female body... more »
Michelangelo outlived his patrons, assistants, friends. Late in life he took on huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would not see them completed... more »
The bunker is one of the oldest building types made by humans, dating to around 1200 BC. Its dark charisma endures... more »
The melancholy of reading Max Weber resonates today, maybe more than ever, even if he offers little illumination and less consolation... more »
What’s it like working in publishing while Black? Seven industry insiders on rank discrimination, systemic racism, and the misconconception that “Black books don’t sell”... more »
All is not minimalism. According to Kyle Chayka’s recent book, Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Marx all inform modern minimalist lifestyles. Not quite... more »
“Britain’s a world/By itself,” says a typically villainous Shakespearean character. The Bard has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet... more »
There’s no reason that the art gallery as we know it, a 19th-century invention, should last forever. Does it have a post-pandemic future?... more »
Why do people swim? "To witness metamorphosis, in our environment, in ourselves. To swim is to accept all the myriad conditions of life"... more »
The miseries of the male libido were obsessions of Bellow, Roth, and Updike. Now, if male novelists take up the subject at all, they force sex into a neat moral framework... more »
The social cost of cheap food. In Victorian England, rock-bottom prices meant poverty for food growers and sellers. So, too, in the rest of the world today... more »
The scientist J.B.S. Haldane is best remembered as an example of how someone so smart can be so dumb when enthralled by ideology... more »
Max Weber’s troubles were at least in part sexual — castration was discussed as a cure. That changed when he met Else Jaffé in his later years... more »
Joyce Carol Oates and the war against literary pieties. Novels should have “symmetry, unity of tone, precision” the thinking went. She is having none of that... more »
How to be alone. Solitude is not about alienation, isolation, or even physical surroundings. It's a state of mind... more »
Do theoretical asides — like those in The Magic Mountain — happen on the level of plot? The novel of ideas is full of such riddles... more »
Infidelity, bullying, callousness, malice — Dickens’s demons were not secret. In his fiction, they appear in plain sight... more »
Aristotle defended slavery, Kant and Hume were racists, Wittgenstein was sexist. Is it possible to set aside those positions? Is it wise? Depends on the philosopher... more »
The neuroscience of nostalgia. How can we miss things we’ve never experienced firsthand? Science offers a clue... more »
With her best-selling book and antiracism training sessions, Robin DiAngelo has illuminated the notion of white fragility. But what, exactly, is that changing?... more »
Paperback writers. How Carr, Hobsbawm, Taylor, and Trevor-Roper became the first generation of British historians who wrote for a large, mainstream audience... more »
Almost from the time Wuthering Heights was published, a vocal minority has argued that Emily Brontë can't be the true author. Now that theory has been tested... more »
Against open letters. They are badly written. They are open to doubt. They aren't necessary. They look cowardly. They are contagious... more »
Scientists are trained to be precise and clinical. But emotions — especially the feeling of awe — are at the heart of what they do... more »
Silicon Valley “rationalists” have erupted at The New York Times in a debate over anonymity. Cue the conspiracy theories and irrational thinking... more »
Twenty years ago, Anne Applebaum was among history's winners as a liberal internationalist. Now she is a heretic among former friends... more »
The Shostakovich problem. What is it about the composer that makes some people withhold their approval?... more »
What was the origin of the novel? Perhaps it was Robinson Crusoe, perhaps Don Quixote. Or perhaps the question is nonsensical... more »
A bold broadside against a dogmatic intellectual culture? Or “fatuous, self-important drivel”? Artists, writers, and thinkers react to that Harper’s letter... more »
Against “decency, morality, and good taste” the men of 1840s Brighton, England invariably swam naked. The problem was acute at low tide... more »
Composers come in the form of two seasons — winter and summer. Gustav Mahler, who worked in a shed beside a lake, is the archetypal summer composer.... more »
"Patriotism is a moral mistake and an intellectual mistake, a mistake twice over," says George Kateb. "We are all subject to it"... more »
Michelangelo outlived his patrons, assistants, friends. Late in life he took on huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would not see them completed... more »
What’s it like working in publishing while Black? Seven industry insiders on rank discrimination, systemic racism, and the misconconception that “Black books don’t sell”... more »
There’s no reason that the art gallery as we know it, a 19th-century invention, should last forever. Does it have a post-pandemic future?... more »
The social cost of cheap food. In Victorian England, rock-bottom prices meant poverty for food growers and sellers. So, too, in the rest of the world today... more »
Joyce Carol Oates and the war against literary pieties. Novels should have “symmetry, unity of tone, precision” the thinking went. She is having none of that... more »
You may not have heard of Jean-Michel Frank, but he helped create minimalism. To channel his vision: “Throw out and keep throwing out!”... more »
"The worst-case scenario, which is entirely possible, is a historical bloodletting in academic research unlike which you have never seen"... more »
Sianne Ngai renovated the field of aesthetics by studying the small stuff: the cute, the zany, and now, in her magnum opus, the gimmicky... more »
Victorian women with the temerity to harbor their own ambitions faced a bitter sequence of humiliation, betrayal, and scandal... more »
Despite their pivotal role in our lives, we read so little about door handles. Yet their story is, in microcosm, that of architecture... more »
It was in the gym that Bruce Lee, a failing philosophy student, turned his musings into mantras: Using no way as way; having no limitation as limitation... more »
Until 1834 there was no general name for those who studied the material world. Then the English philosopher William Whewell coined one: scientist... more »
The end of the performing arts? The pandemic has muted symphonies and opera houses. When they return, things will not be the same... more »
Mozart wrote some of his most sublime works in E flat major. There is no better key in which to hear music in dark times... more »
Darwin and the earthworms. To prove their intelligence, he glued leaves together, shouted at them, and serenaded them with a bassoon... more »
In the 15th century, “correctors” toiled away in printing shops, earning a pittance for their scholarly labors. Such is the quintessential fate of humanists... more »
Flannery O’Connor’s racism. She was a product of her time, her defenders say — but that understates her intellectual independence... more »
Philip Roth and Robert Stone were anarchic in their hedonism, yet fanatically disciplined as writers... more »
For Hollywood’s silent-film stars, celebrity faded quickly — and no family experienced it as intimately as the Costellos... more »
“When intellectuals can do nothing else they start a magazine,” wrote Irving Howe. What sounds like an admission of futility is the opposite... more »
The Lake District poets, so radical during the French Revolution, quickly turned conservative. Wordsworth’s apostasy was the hardest to swallow... more »
Things unlikely to go viral: a classical musician’s monotonous practice. And yet the rise of the bassoonfluencer is real... more »
The project to collect and publish Samuel Johnson's massive oeuvre began during the Eisenhower administration. It has finally come to fruition... more »
After the publication of “The Song of Hiawatha,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was everywhere. Then he was ejected from the pantheon. What happened?... more »
In the quixotic nature of writing — a craft that gently drives its practitioners mad — lies the reason it matters so much... more »
The Churchills were famously terrible employers — Winston's wandering around naked didn’t help. Many a cook and kitchen maid left in tears; one reputedly went mad... more »
“No serious Black intellectual today thinks anti-Black racism is not a matter of life and death. The question is still the old one: What is to be done?”... more »
What to make of Wordsworth? For every line of his that intones the still, sad music of humanity, another drones the shrill, mad music of inanity... more »
Charles Péguy was neither a modernist nor an antimodernist. Rather, he was something quite distinctive, instructive, and relevant to our times: an amodernist... more »
Believing falsehoods is one problem; not knowing the truth is another. To understand our moment, we must understand the anatomy of knowledge and ignorance... more »
In Martin Hägglund’s worldview, socialism is spiritual. But does that deepen our understanding of politics or distract from it?... more »
The last of the Enlightenment intellectuals. John Maynard Keynes pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design... more »
The business of being Beethoven. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how much tickets should cost, how to attract rich sponsors, how to promote himself... more »
At his best, T.S. Eliot said a lot by saying relatively little. Unfortunately, he was not always — or even often — at his best... more »
As Martin Amis wrote, art “celebrates life,” increasing “the store of what might be lost.” Can art — at the same time — lament what will be lost in climate change?... more »
A pain “unlimited in both intensity and duration.” For George Scialabba, depression seemed as if it would never end, and life became an eternal, excruciating present... more »
Culture, identity, psychology — Instagram takes the content of our private lives to digitize, feed through algorithms, and repackage for our consumption... more »
“She was a good old stick,” said Orwell, when his first wife died at the age of 39. But Eileen Blair’s story was more interesting than that... more »
To read Seamus Heaney is to experience a downward and backward pull. What drew him to bogs, slime, and ritualized violence?... more »
Glamour is a form of persuasion, says Virginia Postrel, and jet-age glamour changed the way people think about the relationship between humans and technology... more »
The bunker is one of the oldest building types made by humans, dating to around 1200 BC. Its dark charisma endures... more »
All is not minimalism. According to Kyle Chayka’s recent book, Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Marx all inform modern minimalist lifestyles. Not quite... more »
Why do people swim? "To witness metamorphosis, in our environment, in ourselves. To swim is to accept all the myriad conditions of life"... more »
The scientist J.B.S. Haldane is best remembered as an example of how someone so smart can be so dumb when enthralled by ideology... more »
How to be alone. Solitude is not about alienation, isolation, or even physical surroundings. It's a state of mind... more »
Innovation is prized but misunderstood. We don't how it happens or how to nurture it. We can't even agree on what it is... more »
Driverless cars are not primarily about saving lives. They are about eliminating contingency and replacing it with machine-generated certainty. That's terrifying... more »
All shall be saved. Hell is a vestige of Christendom, not of Christianity itself. David Bentley Hart explains... more »
For Patricia Churchland, conscience is rooted in evolutionary biology; moral choices are explained away by neuroscience. Raymond Tallis isn’t buying it... more »
After years of correspondence, Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally met Emily Dickinson, who promptly unleashed — in a torrent — a literary manifesto... more »
Being Kierkegaardian precludes any dutiful fealty to Kierkegaard himself. Unfortunately, a new book misses this point... more »
Longfellow’s ode to Fanny Appleton was not welcome: “It is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches,” she said. They married four years later... more »
Military overreach, excessive spending and taxation, the rise of Christianity: many explanations for the fall of Rome. Was a pandemic to blame?... more »
The race for domination in publishing Trump tell-alls is between Simon & Schuster and Henry Holt. For now, Simon & Schuster is winning... more »
For Deirdre Bair, being Beckett’s biographer entailed exhausting hours spent on bar stools, keeping out of the reach of drunken Irish poets and professors... more »
Frida Kahlo's years in Paris were a high point of her life. She spent much of her time conveying disdain for French culture... more »
In 1911 Einstein moved to Prague, becoming part of an intellectual milieu that would influence Central Europe for decades to come... more »
“I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures.” Apparently that passes for a bold claim these days... more »
How can a 976-page biography of Warhol fail to contain a single fresh idea? Gary Indiana on an “incredibly prolonged, masturbatory trance of graphomania”... more »
Gulch, hankering, woolypates, foofoo, squaw: Behold the promiscuous range of Walt Whitman’s vocabulary... more »
“It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil,” wrote Keynes. But his own story points to ideas' limited power... more »
“Origins and Entropy,” “Particles and Consciousness,” “Duration and Impermanence": How pop science became metaphysical self-help... more »
When Mary Bunting created an institute for high-achieving women, she knew she had to provide them with the material support that would allow them to succeed... more »
“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »
Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »
Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »
What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »
The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »
Before “prestige” TV, the medium was considered the “idiot box.” With new shows like Floor Is Lava, the pendulum is swinging back again... more »
The plight of the plague specialist. As a pestilence once again rains down on humanity, what good is literary expertise in disease and disaster?... more »
What is this cancel culture? Is it even a real thing? It's complicated, says Ross Douthat, who offers a guide to the perplexed... more »
Irving Fisher and the quantification of everything. The economist died in 1947, but he anticipated the temper of our own times... more »
How did Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, achieve such success as socialism was in decline? He was a master of argument-driven synthesis... more »
Covid-19 has exposed Anglo-America as woefully lacking in crucial ways. In rebuilding, the world will turn to Germany, Japan, and South Korea... more »
YouTube, as Nicholson Baker explains, is an “indispensable, life-enhancing tool, and also a source of poisonous neo-medieval yammering”... more »
“Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.” Patricia Lockwood shares her notes from living with coronavirus... more »
A hunger for auditory escape. Now 40 years old, the Walkman was the device that taught us social distancing. Its legacy lives on today... more »
Gregory Bateson was one of the most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture. His ideas are attuned to the peculiar dysfunctions of our own time... more »
Matisse was a lover of women. Karen Wilkins explains the layered richness of his response to the female body... more »
The melancholy of reading Max Weber resonates today, maybe more than ever, even if he offers little illumination and less consolation... more »
“Britain’s a world/By itself,” says a typically villainous Shakespearean character. The Bard has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet... more »
The miseries of the male libido were obsessions of Bellow, Roth, and Updike. Now, if male novelists take up the subject at all, they force sex into a neat moral framework... more »
Max Weber’s troubles were at least in part sexual — castration was discussed as a cure. That changed when he met Else Jaffé in his later years... more »
Do theoretical asides — like those in The Magic Mountain — happen on the level of plot? The novel of ideas is full of such riddles... more »
"Time exists, as love exists, as a myth: real because contingent, real because constructed, a catch-all term for phenomena bigger"... more »
The Point, n+1, Jacobin — today’s little magazines all suffer from the same flaw: a congenital addiction to seriousness... more »
Henry Fielding, Adam Smith, and other 18th-century intellectuals found no food finer than the potato. It was Enlightenment superfood — the kale of its time... more »
“The cat of the wood,” “the stag of the cabbages” — if there is magic in this world, no small part of it lies with that majestic creature, the hare... more »
Was the chilly stroll by Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929 the moment that analytic and Continental philosophy truly split?... more »
What has the coronavirus revealed? For many, the answer is: “Whatever I thought was wrong with the world before, well, this proves it”... more »
Can American racism be seen in the same terms as the murderous ideology of the Nazis and be similarly discredited? No, such a comparison only confuses... more »
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1965, in words that echo today... more »
In his 90s, Habermas is increasingly consumed by questions of faith and religion. His latest book spans more than 3,000 years and 1,700 pages... more »
Loud, constant parakeet chatter, the squawking of crows – there is no such thing as bad birdsong, a welcome respite from self-absorption... more »
How to decide which statues can remain standing and which should be toppled because they honor racists? Julian Baggini offers a rational... more »
“The intractable problem for thinking beyond the nation-state is that its imputed obsolescence can neither be easily forced nor messianically awaited”... more »
Is an exhausted liberalism being supplanted by a successor ideology that's apparent everywhere? Ross Douthat makes the case... more »
Descartes argued that developing grand philosophical visions requires meditative solitude. Is such work incompatible with being a parent?... more »
“The real point about Communists,” wrote Vivian Gornick decades ago, is that they “were like everybody else, only more so.” Her point is finally sinking in... more »
Minimalism was in, KonMari was all the rage, and then a pandemic hit. Now clutter is useful as never before... more »
Charles Portis, author of True Grit, died in February at 86. He was a master of American vernacular... more »
To see the Third Reich captured in 100 vile objects is to realize how good the Nazis were at photography and industrial design... more »
Want a job in academia? No problem — as long as you specialize in Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and everything else... more »
Wesley Morris: "The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones”... more »
To Richard Russo, time spent arguing over cultural appropriation might be better spent extolling the triumphs of the literary imagination... more »
We have developed an ill-advised self-seriousness about the novel — so much so, says Dave Eggers, that we have overlooked one of the wittiest books ever written... more »
Literary culture is tactile, embedded in our social environment. When cities go quiet, and intellectual life happens remotely, much is lost... more »
Do aphorisms convey wisdom or merely impersonate it? For Plato, they were enigmatic evasions — the scattered utterances of clever men... more »
After the pandemic. Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, and others try forecasting a dark future... more »
A culinary mystery: Vinaigrette has been hailed as a triumph of French culture — but is its origin actually Italian?... more »
"The trolley-problem problem." Thought experiments are as old as philosophy itself, but are they a useful way to reason about ethics?... more »
As an experience and an idea, solitude is no simple matter. It is both a necessary refuge and a public health menace... more »
Success requires flirting with the public, said George Bernard Shaw. He was more accomplished as a flirt than as a playwright... more »
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