Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis on and off from 1951 to 1985. It shaped her art but didn't relieve her misery ... more »
"Within this wide great Universe,/Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare." The Faerie Queene approaches atheism ... more »
Philosophy barely progresses, but what impedes it? Perhaps the solutions to the problems it takes on generate their own problems ... more »
“Have you ever made a decision that ended up ruining someone’s life?” A college dean has second thoughts ... more »
Early 19th-century America was gripped by a war on science. Edgar Allan Poe battled for both sides... more »
When a writer declines to such a degree as Naomi Wolf has, we need to ask: Was she always full of shit? ... more »
Nero: Not that bad. The grisly and perverse crimes of the Roman emperor were very likely invented by vituperative historians ... more »
The way we grieve now. For the social-media influencer Amanda Kloots, going offline was never an option, even when the worst happened ... more »
Why have English departments fallen on hard times? Because professors stopped speaking the truth about literature ... more »
Eve Babitz, trying to get the Doors to change their name: "The Doors of Perception ... what an Ojai-geeky-too-LA-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea" ... more »
Dave Hickey's idiosyncratic blend of high and low - French theory and California surfing - gave him an unmistakable voice ... more »
Retrospectives at the Tate and the Met, a five-volume catalogue raisonné, many biographies: Is there anything left to say about Francis Bacon?... more »
The U.S. Army’s dalliance with positive psychology was a carnival of unskilled intuition and exaggerated storytelling — a textbook misuse of science ... more »
Much has been made of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt. What about her influence on him? ... more »
“The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism” ... more »
18th-century anatomy lessons had one big problem: the stench. Enter Marie-Marguerite Biheron and her perfectly accurate wax models ... more »
The Homeric Question: Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer?... more »
If theology, science, and philosophy once shaped souls, a new power has superseded them: HR, the central organizing power of society... more »
What are scientific papers meant to communicate? Reliable discoveries or messy, inspired guesswork? ... more »
Before conquering Broadway and Hollywood, Mike Nichols was a bullied, hairless Jewish refugee without a word of English ... more »
A clock is not just a clock. It was created for social and political purposes, and it has a distinctive hold on our lives ... more »
Cicero, the first intellectual to succeed in politics, was more rhetorician than philosopher. He owed his rise to his sense of humor ... more »
The shock isn’t that America’s fragile union broke apart so spectacularly in 1861, but that it didn’t happen sooner ... more »
Rachel Cusk’s “tribute” to Mabel Dodge Luhan does not not so much update her story as erode its complexity ... more »
Cantankerous and unwieldy, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man punctures the pieties of our time ... more »
He invented or perfected the short story, the mystery, science fiction, and gothic horror: Is Poe the most influential American writer? ... more »
For progressives, Foucault can no longer be “the ‘unsurpassable horizon’ of critical thought.” So what comes next? ... more »
In June 1965, six boys washed up on a deserted island, where they stayed for a year. The real Lord of the Flies
... more »
Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: A history of political murder
... more »
Coming out of a long depression, William James made a study of habits. The healthiest ones, he concluded, are those we manage to break... more »
The heist was brazen: a Magritte snatched at gunpoint. Two years later, someone walked it into a Brussels police station. What happened? ... more »
What do two centuries of American self-help best sellers say about the country? Louis Menand digs in ... more »
The antagonistic relationship between writers and critics has produced a rich literature of trolling. Both parties are vulnerable to humiliation... more »
The misinformation age. Understanding the spread of wacky is about who you know, not what you think ... more »
“Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.” In a pandemic, such theft is even more prevalent ... more »
Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think ... more »
A horizontal suggests a landscape. A square evokes timelessness. A circle, the universe itself. How to frame our experiences? ... more »
"It is startling to witness just how much the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at Jefferson's own university dislikes its patron, Thomas Jefferson” ... more »
Thomas Nagel on moral intuition: Treating people decently is a vital part of our lives, regardless of the consequences ... more »
Why is it so easy to hate think tanks? Created to advance scientific thinking, they've become factories of partisan grift... more »
To understand architecture, look beyond surface materials, like brick and glass, to the technologies that fueled construction... more »
Because the art world is loath to fully censor harmful works, a new tactic has emerged: “curatorial activism”... more »
In the 1940s, a fiery debate over inclusion, history, and identity swept a city: Whether to hyphenate “New-York”... more »
Dilemma of the Dylan biographer: His fabulism is baked into his DNA. Explaining him is about as interesting as explaining a magic trick ... more »
Book reviewing: An elegy. Ever since there has been literature, there have been critics. Now that’s in doubt ... more »
Just below the dream of space travel lurks a nightmare. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s all enclosures and pressurized chambers ... more »
Mabel Loomis Todd is remembered as a literary villain: a seductress who butchered Emily Dickinson’s poems while editing them. The truth is more complex... more »
Who's the 83-year-old muckraker who turned up a Chinese government operation at the University of Chicago? Marshall Sahlins... more »
Tyler Cowen knows a dirty little secret about economics professors that helps to explain why the field generates so few radical new ideas... more »
What’s the link between revolutionary thought and conservative disposition? Consider George Berkeley... more »
Conservatives have an unlikely tool to fight the new progressivism and the church of intersectionality: the theories of Michel Foucault... more »
Both Mike Nichols and Tom Stoppard were interested in comedy, loved the theater, but landed in Hollywood. The paths each followed are telling... more »
Salman Rushdie has many theories as to why his recent work has been considered abominable. If only those theories carried water... more »
Thomas Sowell, a year into his U. of Chicago Ph.D. under Milton Friedman, remained a staunch Marxist. What changed his mind?... more »
Orwell in Spain. He had gone to fight for socialism and democracy, but quickly concluded that dictatorship was inevitable. ... more »
How we dress -- and why. Our wardrobes are filled with coded messages about power, wealth, and status. ... more »
Freud and others warned about the violence and irrationality of crowds. We hear less about their immense dignity ... more »
Will Roth's personal letters burn? Scholars are trying to prevent that fate, but his biographer's deal with the estate is shrouded in mystery... more »
The novelist Joshua Cohen is clearly a genius. Now if he could only channel his prodigious talent toward a calmer sort of wisdom ... more »
"Can someone tell when you Google them?" Becca Rothfeld considers the emotional investment and aesthetics of online stalking... more »
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind The New York Times’s “1619 Project” has been denied tenure at UNC. What happened? ... more »
Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein: Why did lesbians tend to be not just custodians but also creators of modernist work? ... more »
For Leo Strauss, the public sphere was for unsophisticated opinion writing, not true philosophical reflection ... more »
Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis on and off from 1951 to 1985. It shaped her art but didn't relieve her misery ... more »
“Have you ever made a decision that ended up ruining someone’s life?” A college dean has second thoughts ... more »
Nero: Not that bad. The grisly and perverse crimes of the Roman emperor were very likely invented by vituperative historians ... more »
Eve Babitz, trying to get the Doors to change their name: "The Doors of Perception ... what an Ojai-geeky-too-LA-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea" ... more »
The U.S. Army’s dalliance with positive psychology was a carnival of unskilled intuition and exaggerated storytelling — a textbook misuse of science ... more »
18th-century anatomy lessons had one big problem: the stench. Enter Marie-Marguerite Biheron and her perfectly accurate wax models ... more »
What are scientific papers meant to communicate? Reliable discoveries or messy, inspired guesswork? ... more »
Cicero, the first intellectual to succeed in politics, was more rhetorician than philosopher. He owed his rise to his sense of humor ... more »
Cantankerous and unwieldy, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man punctures the pieties of our time ... more »
In June 1965, six boys washed up on a deserted island, where they stayed for a year. The real Lord of the Flies
... more »
The heist was brazen: a Magritte snatched at gunpoint. Two years later, someone walked it into a Brussels police station. What happened? ... more »
The misinformation age. Understanding the spread of wacky is about who you know, not what you think ... more »
A horizontal suggests a landscape. A square evokes timelessness. A circle, the universe itself. How to frame our experiences? ... more »
Why is it so easy to hate think tanks? Created to advance scientific thinking, they've become factories of partisan grift... more »
In the 1940s, a fiery debate over inclusion, history, and identity swept a city: Whether to hyphenate “New-York”... more »
Just below the dream of space travel lurks a nightmare. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s all enclosures and pressurized chambers ... more »
Tyler Cowen knows a dirty little secret about economics professors that helps to explain why the field generates so few radical new ideas... more »
Both Mike Nichols and Tom Stoppard were interested in comedy, loved the theater, but landed in Hollywood. The paths each followed are telling... more »
Orwell in Spain. He had gone to fight for socialism and democracy, but quickly concluded that dictatorship was inevitable. ... more »
Will Roth's personal letters burn? Scholars are trying to prevent that fate, but his biographer's deal with the estate is shrouded in mystery... more »
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind The New York Times’s “1619 Project” has been denied tenure at UNC. What happened? ... more »
Michael Dirda is back to browsing bookstores. Among his first purchases are Memoirs of an Oxford Don and The Ultimate Spider-Man... more »
Take note, would-be iconoclasts: The Journal of Controversial Ideas wants to see what you've been afraid to submit... more »
Banal, pervasive, and crucial to modernity: the history of the humble file cabinet shall be ignored no longer... more »
Ask Salman Rushdie about anything - but not about the fatwa. "I'm not a geopolitical entity. I'm someone writing in a room." ... more »
At 30, Francis Bacon took stock: Failed designer. Failed artist. Two years later, he emerged as a confident painter ... more »
Mark Crispin Miller, a scholar of propaganda and mass persuasion, made his name studying conspiracy theories. Now he pushes them ... more »
Trick photography is as old as photography itself. Behold the craze for decapitation and person-in-the-bottle photographs ... more »
The Guardian, born on the day Napoleon died, was established to shape opinion more than to make money ... more »
Despite fierce criticism, Jordan Peterson has held on to his academic post, his publisher, and his YouTube channel. Why hasn’t he been canceled? He has some ideas... more »
Larry McMurtry wrote 50 books. Not all were good. Some were masterpieces. For a great writer, the successes depend on the failures ... more »
Take a bunch of clever, ambitious academics and tell them to publish as many papers as possible. What happens? The system gets gamed... more »
The Hume paradox: How did one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived get so much wrong? ... more »
The mysterious majesty of whales. When Albrecht Dürer heard of a 100-fathom-long beached whale, he set off with a motley crew of lords ... more »
As recently as 50 years go, photography was a marginal creative form. Then it transformed the art world ... more »
A grand tour gone wrong. The lexicographer Peter Mark Roget enjoyed the Alps and seeing Napoleon. Then war broke out... more »
It's comforting to believe that all music is rooted in common ground. But what does universality in music really mean? ... more »
“A tired person is literally and actually a poisoned person.” The science of fatigue took off in the newly industrialized world ... more »
In the 1940s Signal, a glossy, high-brow magazine critiqued American capitalism and racial injustice. Its publisher? The Wehrmacht ... more »
Artificial intelligence is poised to crack interspecies communication — or is it? As one dolphin researcher puts it, “You can’t just have a Skype conversation” ... more »
"Within this wide great Universe,/Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare." The Faerie Queene approaches atheism ... more »
Early 19th-century America was gripped by a war on science. Edgar Allan Poe battled for both sides... more »
The way we grieve now. For the social-media influencer Amanda Kloots, going offline was never an option, even when the worst happened ... more »
Dave Hickey's idiosyncratic blend of high and low - French theory and California surfing - gave him an unmistakable voice ... more »
Much has been made of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt. What about her influence on him? ... more »
The Homeric Question: Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer?... more »
Before conquering Broadway and Hollywood, Mike Nichols was a bullied, hairless Jewish refugee without a word of English ... more »
The shock isn’t that America’s fragile union broke apart so spectacularly in 1861, but that it didn’t happen sooner ... more »
He invented or perfected the short story, the mystery, science fiction, and gothic horror: Is Poe the most influential American writer? ... more »
Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: A history of political murder
... more »
What do two centuries of American self-help best sellers say about the country? Louis Menand digs in ... more »
“Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.” In a pandemic, such theft is even more prevalent ... more »
"It is startling to witness just how much the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at Jefferson's own university dislikes its patron, Thomas Jefferson” ... more »
To understand architecture, look beyond surface materials, like brick and glass, to the technologies that fueled construction... more »
Dilemma of the Dylan biographer: His fabulism is baked into his DNA. Explaining him is about as interesting as explaining a magic trick ... more »
Mabel Loomis Todd is remembered as a literary villain: a seductress who butchered Emily Dickinson’s poems while editing them. The truth is more complex... more »
What’s the link between revolutionary thought and conservative disposition? Consider George Berkeley... more »
Salman Rushdie has many theories as to why his recent work has been considered abominable. If only those theories carried water... more »
How we dress -- and why. Our wardrobes are filled with coded messages about power, wealth, and status. ... more »
The novelist Joshua Cohen is clearly a genius. Now if he could only channel his prodigious talent toward a calmer sort of wisdom ... more »
Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein: Why did lesbians tend to be not just custodians but also creators of modernist work? ... more »
Edmund de Waal’s tour of belle époque Paris is singular in its preoccupation — or obsession — with things... more »
For most of history, there were just two types of food: plants and animals. Then along came a third, more akin to poison... more »
For most human history, life expectancy was 30 and a quarter of children died before their first birthday. What changed is humanity’s greatest achievement... more »
As a child, Kurt Gödel wouldn't stop asking questions. He acquired a nickname, Herr Warum: "Mr. Why" ... more »
For Adrienne Rich, the gap between life and art was fraught. She was too narrow or too wide, too personal or too political ... more »
"Spite is for people who want to shove you off the garden walk. A more humane politics would ask how to make the path wider" ... more »
A tip from alchemists of yore: Tag your books with Greek graffiti for an impression of academic credibility and a hermetic mystique... more »
A worldview based on identity and suffused with grievance is ascendant. Is it here to stay? ... more »
Critical race theory stems from a small corner of legal academia. But conservatives, citing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, are caricaturing its significance as something very different... more »
Meet Ruben Blum, historian, Jew, fictional creation of Joshua Cohen, and the center of a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas... more »
Jhumpa Lahiri has inspired a school of good immigrant fiction: Lahirism, in which pretty prose and realist narrative culminate in subtle revelation ... more »
The age of swagger. Late Victorian and Edwardian England was marked by empire builders, activists, and rich men behaving badly ... more »
Why does a piece of art endure? Is it the quality of the work that matters most, or the artist’s skill at self-promotion and provocation? ... more »
D.H. Lawrence long endured a reputational deep freeze. What he needed, most of all, was to be saved from himself ... more »
Milman Parry died at 33, the victim of an accidentally jostled handgun. He'd already changed the humanities forever ... more »
Joan Didion learned how to read at the University of California at Berkeley. She learned how to write at Vogue... more »
Aerial bombardment, war ethics, and the bloodiest six hours in all of human history... more »
By the end of his life, Edward Said's arguments were being directed at him. He'd run afoul of the PC brigade ... more »
Philosophy barely progresses, but what impedes it? Perhaps the solutions to the problems it takes on generate their own problems ... more »
When a writer declines to such a degree as Naomi Wolf has, we need to ask: Was she always full of shit? ... more »
Why have English departments fallen on hard times? Because professors stopped speaking the truth about literature ... more »
Retrospectives at the Tate and the Met, a five-volume catalogue raisonné, many biographies: Is there anything left to say about Francis Bacon?... more »
“The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism” ... more »
If theology, science, and philosophy once shaped souls, a new power has superseded them: HR, the central organizing power of society... more »
A clock is not just a clock. It was created for social and political purposes, and it has a distinctive hold on our lives ... more »
Rachel Cusk’s “tribute” to Mabel Dodge Luhan does not not so much update her story as erode its complexity ... more »
For progressives, Foucault can no longer be “the ‘unsurpassable horizon’ of critical thought.” So what comes next? ... more »
Coming out of a long depression, William James made a study of habits. The healthiest ones, he concluded, are those we manage to break... more »
The antagonistic relationship between writers and critics has produced a rich literature of trolling. Both parties are vulnerable to humiliation... more »
Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think ... more »
Thomas Nagel on moral intuition: Treating people decently is a vital part of our lives, regardless of the consequences ... more »
Because the art world is loath to fully censor harmful works, a new tactic has emerged: “curatorial activism”... more »
Book reviewing: An elegy. Ever since there has been literature, there have been critics. Now that’s in doubt ... more »
Who's the 83-year-old muckraker who turned up a Chinese government operation at the University of Chicago? Marshall Sahlins... more »
Conservatives have an unlikely tool to fight the new progressivism and the church of intersectionality: the theories of Michel Foucault... more »
Thomas Sowell, a year into his U. of Chicago Ph.D. under Milton Friedman, remained a staunch Marxist. What changed his mind?... more »
Freud and others warned about the violence and irrationality of crowds. We hear less about their immense dignity ... more »
"Can someone tell when you Google them?" Becca Rothfeld considers the emotional investment and aesthetics of online stalking... more »
For Leo Strauss, the public sphere was for unsophisticated opinion writing, not true philosophical reflection ... more »
Among the most reproduced books in English are the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and The Compleat Angler, a 17th-century fishing manual... more »
Mary Beard: “Classics is what we make it, and the fact that the classical world has been misrepresented should not be used against it” ... more »
What has Covid done to the arts? It’s “not a recession. It is not even a depression. It is a catastrophe”... more »
When Richard Wright moved to Paris, he did not turn his back on America. Rather, he gained a new vantage ... more »
The textile hypothesis: The reason for humankind’s shift to agriculture has to do less with food and more with clothing... more »
Bolaño's shadow. Marketing trends mislead the few U.S. publishers devoted to Latin American literature ... more »
She was born in Germany; he was born in Newark. Their differences were obvious. But Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth had common cause ... more »
Why did Stephen Hawking support kooky ideas like the building of ultra-tiny spacecraft? He needed money ... more »
Why are architectural awards going to buildings that are drab and lifeless? Modern architecture has taken a wrong, wrong turn... more »
The tyranny of the footnote. In the age of Google, chasing one literary citation leads to another, and down a digital rabbit hole ... more »
Bloated by methodological hot air, literary studies is charged with callow polemicizing and careerist branding. Time to take a step back ... more »
Ross Douthat scans the landscape for novelists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and everywhere sees torpor and repetition ... more »
Are literary scholars aesthetic experts or moral experts? They haven’t claimed either mantle, and the result is a vacuum of expertise... more »
Life as an underemployed academic can be paranoid, anxious, stupefying. It's the stuff of literature ... more »
Humanists like Jill Lepore see data as an enemy epistemology. That doesn’t have to be the case ... more »
It's not unusual for philosophers to receive death threats - especially if they are philosophers who deny that humans possess free will... more »
What determines the thickness of novels? The 19th century favored lengthiness, the early 20th brevity. Now they’re long again. Why?... more »
Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think ... more »
The authenticity hustle. Be yourself! Stay true to yourself! Find yourself! That's what the conformist poseurs say ... more »
In a time of sanctimony literature, novelists and novels are stupefyingly smug and egregiously simplistic. Becca Rothfeld explains ... more »
When did we start believing that colleges transform lives and change society? What happens when that notion starts to crumble?... more »
Who determines what science means? For Andrew Jewett, the answer is philosophers, pundits, and polemicists — not scientists themselves ... more »
In 2017, Black writers for the first time won more literary prizes, 38 percent, than writers of any other race or ethnicity ... more »
“It is more than a terrible irony that a biographer of a man so dogged by claims of misogyny should himself stand accused of violence against women” ... more »
“The first printed miscellany of English poetry,” which had “mouldered in manuscript,” Songes and Sonettes paved the way for modern anthologies... more »
While Coleridge’s poetry has entered the pantheon, his philosophical tomes have mostly collected dust. It’s time to revisit them... more »
Maria Stepanova: “Poetry is maybe the main thing happening now in Russian literature: powerful, daring, cutting-edge, diverse” ... more »
Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look? ... more »
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