Stanley Crouch was an intellectual in an old-fashioned sense: someone who understands systematic ideologies but does not have one ... more »
It's always been hard to make a living as an artist. But has the aspiration essentially become obsolete? ... more »
A bookstore is a place of reverie, digression, discovery. As efficiency-accustomed customers have discovered, it is not Amazon Prime... more »
Amid the volatile political scene of 1920s Austria, a group of thinkers — the Vienna Circle — set the agenda for postwar philosophy ... more »
The 2020 intellectual situation: The politics of consumerism, and of grievance, have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility ... more »
Some poets harvest a narrow field. Robert Conquest had an appetite — and a satirical bite — for the world and all it contains ... more »
You can say a lot of unkind things about Germaine Greer. But no one can confirm that she doesn't know how to enjoy herself ... more »
"If you are reading this, you are very probably WEIRD," says Daniel Dennett. “But we are outliers on many psychological measures" ... more »
Stanley Kubrick demonstrated a contradiction: He was a rebel who succeeded, yet his films are about rebels who fail ... more »
The Consolation of Philosophy, a best seller for centuries, has fallen out of favor. Uet we sorely need its lessons in epistemic humility... more »
John Steinbeck did not take feedback well. He scorned the Pulitzer and the Nobel. And criticism sent him into a rage... more »
For seven weeks in 1726, it was believed that a woman, Mary Toft, could give birth to rabbits. It was a gift to satirists, but torment for Toft... more »
What ruined D.H. Lawrence wasn’t second-wave feminism, but rather F.R. Leavis, who canonized the author’s blandest work ... more »
Portrait painters live to please, Dr. Johnson said, and must please to live. Goya was not like that ... more »
Many of us still believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch. Why? An improvisational millenarianism has taken root ... more »
For the biologist and French resistance fighter Jacques Monod, love of truth was exceeded only by hatred of lies... more »
Kafka, unfinished. To see the author as he was, turn to a new collection of his fragments... more »
Liberalism’s discontents. Does it, as Catholic intellectuals contend, offer “thin gruel” in lieu of deeper moral commitments?... more »
What happened at HAU? The hip anthropology journal imploded amid threats, rumors, and infighting. Is the editor to blame?... more »
Richard Hofstadter has entered the pantheon as a status-quo-defending liberal. But what of his radical roots?... more »
In a 50-year run at The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett produced more than 500 essays on jazz. They amount to a blueprint for arts criticism... more »
Caravaggio’s Baroque art exploded against the orderliness of the Renaissance, pulling viewers into “some cosmic soup of slow knowing"... more »
The knock on Derrida was that he was a peddler of gimmicks. He never shook the fear that those who saw him as a charlatan were right... more »
In America, self-storage is a national psychopathology. Behind it lurks the dream of infinite space... more »
Faux Fitzgerald. We think of him as frivolous and unfailingly rhapsodic, but that obscures the bracing acidity of his satire ... more »
The 18th century brought an end to the age of the polymath. Specialization made it both more challenging and more important to seek holistic knowledge ... more »
Luc Sante on reality TV: “It’s like the stuff I’m interested in, but with all the poetry taken out and all the money put in” ... more »
For a while in the 1870s, Cézanne and Pissarro worked together. Their union is a mystery that holds key to understanding French painting ... more »
Is there such a thing as "the Viking Mind," a shared sensibility and worldview that emanated from medieval Scandinavia? ... more »
To understand seduction, we must consider both Pamela and the modern pickup artist. So claims a new book, dubiously ... more »
“Meritocracy is an attractive, even inspiring ideal, but it has a dark side: It generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among the losers” ... more »
For John Steinbeck, individuals revealed little of humanity. Our true nature could only be grasped in the plural — by groups and phalanxes ... more »
As Homer shows, truth can be revealed in concentric circles radiating out from the plot. As Sebald shows, such narrative rings can also bamboozle ... more »
Troy Young got Hearst magazines to abandon elegance and glamour for clickbait riches. It worked — and then it all fell apart... more »
Is there a better parodist and pasticheur alive than Tom Stoppard? But is he an artistic parasite? Hardly... more »
Universities have long played host to eccentric ideas. But a tolerance for debate has survived. Is that now in doubt? ... more »
What is “creative destruction”? In Silicon Valley, it’s the intellectual bedrock. Elsewhere, it’s nonsense ... more »
What was it about Nazi ideology, at least early on, that appealed to Germans? Its vagueness. People saw what they wanted to see... more »
Surrounded by revolutionary fervor in China, Eileen Chang chronicled smaller revolutions, in romance and lust. She would have been 100 today ... more »
What's behind Agatha Christie’s enduring appeal? Her ability to change with the times, for one thing ... more »
The monstrosity at the heart of modern science. To get to the top requires “a degree of single-mindedness that is quite inhuman” ... more »
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop exported a literature of individualism and domesticity, not of solidarity and big ideas. Creative writing is still recovering ... more »
Stanley Crouch’s position in the jazz world was formidable. Whether or not you agreed with his criticism, you had to deal with him ... more »
Will Self is known for both his gloom and his antic joviality. His memoir reveals a life spent skirting every commitment — except to inebriation ... more »
Beethoven, political leftist? The melodies have been dulled through overuse, their subversiveness no longer audible ... more »
Lettering was everywhere in Medieval Western Europe, but only about one in 10 could read. As a result, words were considered holy... more »
What is a Shakespearean sensibility? Via musicality, rhythm, grandeur, "we seem to hear words pushing restlessly through the soil of thinking." ... more »
Are we living in a historical inflection point — the exact moment at which the most consequential human decisions are being made? Probably not ... more »
"If the only way to get anything done at a university is to raise money from a corporation, we’re not going to know what we need to know about the world and the human condition," says Jill Lepore. ... more »
Though their work is rooted in the visual, most art historians are readers rather than lookers. Leo Steinberg was different ... more »
Editing RBG. She was precise and unyielding. At the book party, she wore black-lace gloves. Scalia worked the door ... more »
History and its futilities. Orlando Patterson brought social science to bear on postcolonial Jamaica. Now he chronicles the failures of such efforts ... more »
Streaming music is more efficient than CDs, right? Wrong. “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time” ... more »
Camus didn't do inspiration. And hope, he believed, is for suckers. But that doesn't mean he condoned despair ... more »
G.E. Moore, who championed common sense, was an influential philosopher. But a great one? Probably not ... more »
Walter Gropius achieved fame by passing off Lucia Moholy’s work as his own. Meanwhile, she lived in poverty ... more »
The “encrappification” of America. From the Veg-O-Matic to Beanie Babies, the nation has a long, wasteful history of loving cheap stuff ... more »
If Christopher Hitchens were still around, what would he make of the world today? Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie discuss ... more »
In the ’60s, predictive voter analytics was taken as science fiction, as dystopian, as a scandal. Now we meekly accept it... more »
Before Robin DiAngelo, there was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both reveal the limits of reading in pursuit of social justice... more »
Disease in the time of Defoe. In 1722 he offered advice: Avoid excessive eating and drinking, and restore humoral balance ... more »
For Vivian Gornick, feminism was a new way of interpreting the world. Then, around 1980, she returned to literature ... more »
The tech gurus tell us that the future of higher ed is adaptive tutors, chatbots, AI, and virtual reality. They're wrong ... more »
Stanley Crouch was an intellectual in an old-fashioned sense: someone who understands systematic ideologies but does not have one ... more »
Amid the volatile political scene of 1920s Austria, a group of thinkers — the Vienna Circle — set the agenda for postwar philosophy ... more »
You can say a lot of unkind things about Germaine Greer. But no one can confirm that she doesn't know how to enjoy herself ... more »
The Consolation of Philosophy, a best seller for centuries, has fallen out of favor. Uet we sorely need its lessons in epistemic humility... more »
What ruined D.H. Lawrence wasn’t second-wave feminism, but rather F.R. Leavis, who canonized the author’s blandest work ... more »
For the biologist and French resistance fighter Jacques Monod, love of truth was exceeded only by hatred of lies... more »
What happened at HAU? The hip anthropology journal imploded amid threats, rumors, and infighting. Is the editor to blame?... more »
Caravaggio’s Baroque art exploded against the orderliness of the Renaissance, pulling viewers into “some cosmic soup of slow knowing"... more »
Faux Fitzgerald. We think of him as frivolous and unfailingly rhapsodic, but that obscures the bracing acidity of his satire ... more »
For a while in the 1870s, Cézanne and Pissarro worked together. Their union is a mystery that holds key to understanding French painting ... more »
“Meritocracy is an attractive, even inspiring ideal, but it has a dark side: It generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among the losers” ... more »
Troy Young got Hearst magazines to abandon elegance and glamour for clickbait riches. It worked — and then it all fell apart... more »
What is “creative destruction”? In Silicon Valley, it’s the intellectual bedrock. Elsewhere, it’s nonsense ... more »
What's behind Agatha Christie’s enduring appeal? Her ability to change with the times, for one thing ... more »
Stanley Crouch’s position in the jazz world was formidable. Whether or not you agreed with his criticism, you had to deal with him ... more »
Lettering was everywhere in Medieval Western Europe, but only about one in 10 could read. As a result, words were considered holy... more »
"If the only way to get anything done at a university is to raise money from a corporation, we’re not going to know what we need to know about the world and the human condition," says Jill Lepore. ... more »
History and its futilities. Orlando Patterson brought social science to bear on postcolonial Jamaica. Now he chronicles the failures of such efforts ... more »
G.E. Moore, who championed common sense, was an influential philosopher. But a great one? Probably not ... more »
If Christopher Hitchens were still around, what would he make of the world today? Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie discuss ... more »
Disease in the time of Defoe. In 1722 he offered advice: Avoid excessive eating and drinking, and restore humoral balance ... more »
A museum is auctioning off a Jackson Pollock to raise money to diversify its collection. Laudable goal, bad plan ... more »
Stanley Crouch, the jazz critic whose outsize opinions were rendered in scalding, pugilistic prose, has died. He was 74 ... more »
When Waltham was radical. How a suburb of Boston became an unlikely fount of new currents in leftism... more »
An Ancient Roman paradox: parricide was punished gruesomely, but revenge killings weren’t prosecuted at all... more »
Despite the vitriol Philip Larkin held for his parents, he wrote home about every little thing — his red trousers, his allergies, his constipation... more »
What will save the English department? Love, says Mark Edmundson. Professors need to remind themselves that their love for literature is what brought most of them into the profession ... more »
“A deluge of things.” We inherit our passion for clutter from Victorians like Marion Sambourne, who owned 66 upright chairs ... more »
To read great books by flawed authors, we must recognize the sins of the past but also look for moments of shared human experience ... more »
New Yorker writers cultivate reticence, self-deprecation, and wit. As Janet Malcolm learned, those are the last things a jury wants in a witness ... more »
We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »
Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »
The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »
The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »
The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »
Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »
Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »
Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »
To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »
Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »
It's always been hard to make a living as an artist. But has the aspiration essentially become obsolete? ... more »
The 2020 intellectual situation: The politics of consumerism, and of grievance, have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility ... more »
"If you are reading this, you are very probably WEIRD," says Daniel Dennett. “But we are outliers on many psychological measures" ... more »
John Steinbeck did not take feedback well. He scorned the Pulitzer and the Nobel. And criticism sent him into a rage... more »
Portrait painters live to please, Dr. Johnson said, and must please to live. Goya was not like that ... more »
Kafka, unfinished. To see the author as he was, turn to a new collection of his fragments... more »
Richard Hofstadter has entered the pantheon as a status-quo-defending liberal. But what of his radical roots?... more »
The knock on Derrida was that he was a peddler of gimmicks. He never shook the fear that those who saw him as a charlatan were right... more »
The 18th century brought an end to the age of the polymath. Specialization made it both more challenging and more important to seek holistic knowledge ... more »
Is there such a thing as "the Viking Mind," a shared sensibility and worldview that emanated from medieval Scandinavia? ... more »
For John Steinbeck, individuals revealed little of humanity. Our true nature could only be grasped in the plural — by groups and phalanxes ... more »
Is there a better parodist and pasticheur alive than Tom Stoppard? But is he an artistic parasite? Hardly... more »
What was it about Nazi ideology, at least early on, that appealed to Germans? Its vagueness. People saw what they wanted to see... more »
The monstrosity at the heart of modern science. To get to the top requires “a degree of single-mindedness that is quite inhuman” ... more »
Will Self is known for both his gloom and his antic joviality. His memoir reveals a life spent skirting every commitment — except to inebriation ... more »
What is a Shakespearean sensibility? Via musicality, rhythm, grandeur, "we seem to hear words pushing restlessly through the soil of thinking." ... more »
Though their work is rooted in the visual, most art historians are readers rather than lookers. Leo Steinberg was different ... more »
Streaming music is more efficient than CDs, right? Wrong. “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time” ... more »
Walter Gropius achieved fame by passing off Lucia Moholy’s work as his own. Meanwhile, she lived in poverty ... more »
In the ’60s, predictive voter analytics was taken as science fiction, as dystopian, as a scandal. Now we meekly accept it... more »
For Vivian Gornick, feminism was a new way of interpreting the world. Then, around 1980, she returned to literature ... more »
Was Beowulf a bro? A new, feminist version of the epic paints a fierce picture of masculine weakness ... more »
It’s been said that the correspondence of great artists and idealists is mostly about money. Van Gogh is no exception ... more »
The Reformation was “one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge.” Why? Its fondness for book burning... more »
How to think about disaster. Accepting one’s place in a vast, complex, and violent world is healthier than it sounds... more »
When Christopher met Martin. It happened at the New Statesman in the early '70s. Now Hitchens is at the heart of Amis's new novel... more »
Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived ... more »
Nathalie Sarraute is remembered as a “boring formalist” within the insipid “new novel” movement. She was much more than that ... more »
When William James gave up on religion, he went in search of a new avenue to save his life. Can his approach help you save your own? ... more »
For more than a century, Wagner's music has been a "drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans" ... more »
The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »
Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »
"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »
The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »
Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »
Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »
Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »
For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »
A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »
A bookstore is a place of reverie, digression, discovery. As efficiency-accustomed customers have discovered, it is not Amazon Prime... more »
Some poets harvest a narrow field. Robert Conquest had an appetite — and a satirical bite — for the world and all it contains ... more »
Stanley Kubrick demonstrated a contradiction: He was a rebel who succeeded, yet his films are about rebels who fail ... more »
For seven weeks in 1726, it was believed that a woman, Mary Toft, could give birth to rabbits. It was a gift to satirists, but torment for Toft... more »
Many of us still believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch. Why? An improvisational millenarianism has taken root ... more »
Liberalism’s discontents. Does it, as Catholic intellectuals contend, offer “thin gruel” in lieu of deeper moral commitments?... more »
In a 50-year run at The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett produced more than 500 essays on jazz. They amount to a blueprint for arts criticism... more »
In America, self-storage is a national psychopathology. Behind it lurks the dream of infinite space... more »
Luc Sante on reality TV: “It’s like the stuff I’m interested in, but with all the poetry taken out and all the money put in” ... more »
To understand seduction, we must consider both Pamela and the modern pickup artist. So claims a new book, dubiously ... more »
As Homer shows, truth can be revealed in concentric circles radiating out from the plot. As Sebald shows, such narrative rings can also bamboozle ... more »
Universities have long played host to eccentric ideas. But a tolerance for debate has survived. Is that now in doubt? ... more »
Surrounded by revolutionary fervor in China, Eileen Chang chronicled smaller revolutions, in romance and lust. She would have been 100 today ... more »
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop exported a literature of individualism and domesticity, not of solidarity and big ideas. Creative writing is still recovering ... more »
Beethoven, political leftist? The melodies have been dulled through overuse, their subversiveness no longer audible ... more »
Are we living in a historical inflection point — the exact moment at which the most consequential human decisions are being made? Probably not ... more »
Editing RBG. She was precise and unyielding. At the book party, she wore black-lace gloves. Scalia worked the door ... more »
Camus didn't do inspiration. And hope, he believed, is for suckers. But that doesn't mean he condoned despair ... more »
The “encrappification” of America. From the Veg-O-Matic to Beanie Babies, the nation has a long, wasteful history of loving cheap stuff ... more »
Before Robin DiAngelo, there was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both reveal the limits of reading in pursuit of social justice... more »
The tech gurus tell us that the future of higher ed is adaptive tutors, chatbots, AI, and virtual reality. They're wrong ... more »
The tempo of life reaches a frenzy, and yet we feel stuck. One balm for our internet-accelerated age: read old books... more »
The internet is not what you think it is. For one thing, its intellectual roots go back to 19th-century conjecture on snail copulation ... more »
The “bad old days” of academia were full of favoritism, prejudice, and indolence. But sometimes the professors showed up fully clad and sober ... more »
Down with the dons. English professors have all the book reviewer’s traditional faults — only more so... more »
Synthesis, sweep, and all-encompassing theorizing are out of fashion in the academy today. Was René Girard the last of the hedgehogs? ... more »
A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested? ... more »
Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be? ... more »
Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »
Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »
Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »
Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »
Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »
Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »
We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »
In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »
What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »
Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »
More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »
Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »
John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »
Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »
Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »
Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology ... more »
Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »
Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »
Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... 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 — 2020
Arts & Letters Daily is brought to you by
The Chronicle of Higher Education