Janet Malcolm, whose literary reportage evinced an unsparing and precise gaze on the world, is dead. She was 86 ... NYTimes ... WaPo .. The New Yorker ... Guardian ... New Republic ... Ian Frazer ... Laura Marsh ... Leo Robson ... more »
The heroines of anthropology: One became a professor, one died, one was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and two quit academe ... more »
For Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition were central to modern identity. Now concerns over online reputation risk supplanting that principle ... more »
The history of early European encounters with African scripts is one of neglect, false assumptions, and outright destruction ... more »
The first of Dostoevsky’s seizures happened on his honeymoon. "If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married"... more »
David Hockney has known only fame and adulation. Why? His images are bright, breezy, decorous, and a bit boring... more »
1619, 1776 — America’s origins-obsessed historicism now dominates liberal circles. But origins are not our destinies ... more »
Borges to his English translator: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark…. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny” ... more »
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on those who “do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy”... more »
Curators, academics, governments, boards, funders: This blob of cultural dominance, Dave Hickey is here to remind us, diverts our attention from beauty... more »
We take graphs and charts for granted, but in their earliest incarnations — to help understand longitude or train times — they were revolutionary ... more »
In Joan Didion's writing, she doesn't quite tell us what she means. But we know how she feels... more »
Edward de Bono, champion of “lateral thinking” and many implausible creative-thinking schemes, has died. He was 88... more »
Jon Meacham, a soft-spoken historian with the president’s ear, is impressively — and maddeningly — everywhere... more »
Art galleries and auctions can feel like intimidating, insular places. Here’s how to successfully buy art... more »
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 »
Janet Malcolm, whose literary reportage evinced an unsparing and precise gaze on the world, is dead. She was 86 ... NYTimes ... WaPo .. The New Yorker ... Guardian ... New Republic ... Ian Frazer ... Laura Marsh ... Leo Robson ... more »
The history of early European encounters with African scripts is one of neglect, false assumptions, and outright destruction ... more »
1619, 1776 — America’s origins-obsessed historicism now dominates liberal circles. But origins are not our destinies ... more »
Curators, academics, governments, boards, funders: This blob of cultural dominance, Dave Hickey is here to remind us, diverts our attention from beauty... more »
Edward de Bono, champion of “lateral thinking” and many implausible creative-thinking schemes, has died. He was 88... 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 »
The heroines of anthropology: One became a professor, one died, one was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and two quit academe ... more »
The first of Dostoevsky’s seizures happened on his honeymoon. "If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married"... more »
Borges to his English translator: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark…. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny” ... more »
We take graphs and charts for granted, but in their earliest incarnations — to help understand longitude or train times — they were revolutionary ... more »
Jon Meacham, a soft-spoken historian with the president’s ear, is impressively — and maddeningly — everywhere... 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 »
For Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition were central to modern identity. Now concerns over online reputation risk supplanting that principle ... more »
David Hockney has known only fame and adulation. Why? His images are bright, breezy, decorous, and a bit boring... more »
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on those who “do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy”... more »
In Joan Didion's writing, she doesn't quite tell us what she means. But we know how she feels... more »
Art galleries and auctions can feel like intimidating, insular places. Here’s how to successfully buy art... 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 »
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