Forced to sign a document asserting no ill-treatment in 1938, Sigmund Freud added, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone” ... more »
For Louise Bourgeois, pain was an unavoidable condition of life, and no artistic “remedies or excuses” could lessen its intensity ... more »
Purveyors of ideas — whether religious or literary in nature — are followed by violence. Salman Rushie is the latest in this long line ... more »
America’s “smartest” people. Mensa’s Annual Gathering is a reminder that intelligence and test-taking skill are very different attributes... more »
Is “degrowth” a solution to environmental crises? Or is it, as Andrew McAfee contends, “the worst idea on the planet”?... more »
With his utilitarian approach to population ethics, William MacAskill makes the moral case for settlement beyond Earth. That should raise an eyebrow... more »
"On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, … we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how" ... more »
Auden toyed with Anglo-Saxon verse one moment, Elizabethan the next. No other English poet wrote well in so many forms ... more »
As Salman Rushdie’s stabbing shows, freedom of expression is no longer a “yawn-making liberal platitude” ... more »
Philip Larkin's penis. Is speculation about the poet's privates a prurient sideshow or a key to understanding his work? ... more »
Mark Fisher was little read in his own lifetime. Now his reputation is ascendant as a leftist cultural critic ... more »
"An insult to an ideology is not the same as a threat made to a people. It is the opposite of a threat made to a person" ... more »
Tenure is academe's most important and most embattled idea. Its history is strange and secret ... more »
The distinction between ideas that are unscientific and ideas that are ascientific is crucial but murky ... more »
What happens when a brilliant thinker gets ensnared in the myth-making power of his own prose? Consider George Kennan... more »
Elaine Castillo is troubled by the way white readers seek out Black writers as moral arbiters rather than as artists ... more »
Human ingenuity has led to penicillin and to repeated atrocities. Does that mean intelligence is a trap? ... more »
Zizek's value as a thinker, such as it is, lies in the joy he takes in pouncing on the nostrums of both the left and the right ... more »
The problem of empathy. For Edith Stein, a Jewish-born nun killed at Auschwitz, it was an innate part of being human ... more »
What gets written when there’s nothing to write? Edna St. Vincent Millay’s diary illuminates her world in ways wondrous and mundane ... more »
In praise of mischievous people. Their wit and light-heartedness make the world a better, more amusing place ... more »
Turd in your teeth, flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, fible-fable: What counts as an obscenity is always in flux... more »
John Locke in the New World. What explains the enduring affection of Americans for this liberal philosopher? ... more »
What had been a small, eclectic club of philosophers and do-gooders is now worth billions. Things are getting weird for effective altruism... more »
Jumbo’s ghost. His cause of death (freight-train collision) was one of a number of strange run-ins between elephant and machine... more »
The rise of the M.F.A. is a problem for fiction. Why? Because writing workshops too often ignore a work’s intended reader... more »
From Amsterdam to Xiamen, urban waterways are facing the same problem: They have become bicycle graveyards... more »
Stalin's architect. Boris Iofan’s career reflects the brutal compromises artists make with power... more »
Why has the popularity of modernist painting endured, while atonal music has largely vanished?... more »
Trash. The word is common in the long history of intellectual disdain for novels enjoyed by women... more »
As a young woman, Cynthia Ozick immersed herself in German, steeped herself in Goethe, and corresponded with a Nazi soldier... more »
T.S. Eliot, air-raid warden: “The first thing to do, when you hear the Syrens… is to have a good Piss: after that you are ready for the Jerry” ... more »
When men become gods, they are beholden to their believers. Those worshippers have plans for their deities... more »
The pug, the poodle, the French bulldog: We signal our class, our preferences, and our personality through our choice of dog ... more »
The great theorist of democratic paradox, Tocqueville eventually grew pessimistic about its long-run prospects ... more »
Danielle Steel the person is obscured by Danielle Steel the brand. And so her novels are a plea for recognition ... more »
"Auto-hogs," "speed maniacs," even "criminals" - by 1920, Americans had come to know - and resent - "the tyranny of the automobilist"... more »
Why did Susan Sontag become, of all things, a critic? Because art was an escape from life. Or maybe because she met a man at a party ... more »
Who poisoned the well? Conspiracy theories plagued 14th-century France, justifying the persecution of lepers and Jews ... more »
Admit it, you've claimed to have read a book you've at most merely browsed. It’s OK, don't feel ashamed... more »
Velvet gowns, scattered rose petals, pearl necklaces — the clichés of the 20th-century sex scene stem from the writing of Elinor Glyn ... more »
What exactly is “content”? Who produces it? Why and how did it come to be viewed as “essential”? ... more »
French has no word for homesickness. Chinese lacks a term for self-esteem. Are we to conclude that such emotions aren’t universal? ... more »
The word "tourist" is at least 250 years old. What began with moral purpose has often ended in destruction ... more »
For Elizabeth Jameson, life with multiple sclerosis is one of constraint. She’s found freedom in cursing with abandon... more »
On the internet, nothing is forgotten. So what will become of nostalgia, which depends on unreliable memories and half-true anecdotes? ... more »
When was the idea of "normal" born? It began with the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers ... more »
"Christianity has lost its traditional connection to the arts," says Dana Gioia. It’s forgotten “that beauty is the most direct and potent way to communicate the divine” ... more »
Gary Maynard was an adjunct criminology professor studying the mindset of arsonists. Now he’s in jail, accused of arson ... more »
The influence of Jews on American literature once seemed pervasive. How the people of the book made it in the book business ... more »
“No alcohol, no renown, no women, no newspapers, no honors”: Nietzsche before the breakdown... more »
The best writers unfreeze us. They override the notion that we’re helpless. Consider Ellison, Didion, Pynchon, O’Connor, Bishop ... more »
The unadulterated Elizabeth Hardwick. A new collection of her essays focuses on the concrete realities that shaped her life ... more »
Sheila Heti is a crusader for art in an era of political moralism. Why is that plain truth so hard for her critics to see? ... more »
Daniel Auster’s life was marked by drugs, clubgoing, and loss. His experiences were fodder for his parents’ books — to a point ... more »
David Foster Wallace's late work raises questions of style and morality. He didn't answer them, for good reason... more »
Deep in the dark mists of the German psyche lies an explanation for the country's "Russia complex” ... more »
Shelley spent time on the water, wrote about it, loved sailing, but couldn’t swim. He died by drowning ... more »
Historically, “it” girls have been doyennes of resourcefulness and stamina ... more »
Mad honey, ghost ships, flying snakes: Adrienne Mayor plumbs the engrossing strangeness of the ancient Greco-Roman world ... more »
Forced to sign a document asserting no ill-treatment in 1938, Sigmund Freud added, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone” ... more »
America’s “smartest” people. Mensa’s Annual Gathering is a reminder that intelligence and test-taking skill are very different attributes... more »
"On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, … we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how" ... more »
Philip Larkin's penis. Is speculation about the poet's privates a prurient sideshow or a key to understanding his work? ... more »
Tenure is academe's most important and most embattled idea. Its history is strange and secret ... more »
Elaine Castillo is troubled by the way white readers seek out Black writers as moral arbiters rather than as artists ... more »
The problem of empathy. For Edith Stein, a Jewish-born nun killed at Auschwitz, it was an innate part of being human ... more »
Turd in your teeth, flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, fible-fable: What counts as an obscenity is always in flux... more »
Jumbo’s ghost. His cause of death (freight-train collision) was one of a number of strange run-ins between elephant and machine... more »
Stalin's architect. Boris Iofan’s career reflects the brutal compromises artists make with power... more »
As a young woman, Cynthia Ozick immersed herself in German, steeped herself in Goethe, and corresponded with a Nazi soldier... more »
The pug, the poodle, the French bulldog: We signal our class, our preferences, and our personality through our choice of dog ... more »
"Auto-hogs," "speed maniacs," even "criminals" - by 1920, Americans had come to know - and resent - "the tyranny of the automobilist"... more »
Admit it, you've claimed to have read a book you've at most merely browsed. It’s OK, don't feel ashamed... more »
French has no word for homesickness. Chinese lacks a term for self-esteem. Are we to conclude that such emotions aren’t universal? ... more »
On the internet, nothing is forgotten. So what will become of nostalgia, which depends on unreliable memories and half-true anecdotes? ... more »
Gary Maynard was an adjunct criminology professor studying the mindset of arsonists. Now he’s in jail, accused of arson ... more »
The best writers unfreeze us. They override the notion that we’re helpless. Consider Ellison, Didion, Pynchon, O’Connor, Bishop ... more »
Daniel Auster’s life was marked by drugs, clubgoing, and loss. His experiences were fodder for his parents’ books — to a point ... more »
Shelley spent time on the water, wrote about it, loved sailing, but couldn’t swim. He died by drowning ... more »
Mad honey, ghost ships, flying snakes: Adrienne Mayor plumbs the engrossing strangeness of the ancient Greco-Roman world ... more »
Imaginary numbers have been integral to quantum theory for 100 years. Only now do we know they're real ... more »
The truth about Frank Kermode. When it came to the CIA’s funding of Encounter magazine, what did he know and when did he know it? ... more »
For Emmanuel Carrère, literature “is the place where you don’t lie.” So why does he play fast and loose with the truth? ... more »
“Being an Austen bro is a joy that confers untold benefits both literary and moral” ... more »
We are awash in “takes”: what X says about Y, or why X is an example of Y-culture. Stéphane Mallarmé saw this coming ... more »
The era of the novel of middle-class male malaise “burned itself most beautifully out, leaving the way clear for other stories” ... more »
Glossed over as a steppingstone to Hegel, Fichte’s radical philosophical system deserves reassessment and recognition ... more »
Spain was nearly the death of both Orwell and Koestler. That would have changed the way we think about the Cold War ... more »
Picasso sipped coffee and visited Parisian brothels while Spain was bombed. Before “Guernica," his political awakening seemed unlikely... more »
The intellectual historians of the last century regarded “game theory” as one of its great achievements. How wrong they were... more »
In postcolonial India, English was more than a language. It was the promise of social progress... more »
Adapting to a new energy source is painful. Exhibit A: the universally loathed 19th-century coal merchant... more »
In December, the James Webb Space Telescope was launched into orbit. Its first year in service could revolutionize astronomy... more »
The art of anatomy. To aid in his drawing the human form, Leonardo dissected more than 30 corpses... more »
Richard Taruskin, an influential, provocative, and prolific classical music scholar, has died. He was 77 ... more »
At the age of 16, June Huh dropped out to write poetry. Now a Princeton mathematician, he’s just won the Fields Medal ... more »
Emmanuel Carrère writes about murderers and disaster victims, trying to account for his own deficit of empathy... more »
T.S. Eliot kept his life so rigorously compartmentalized that he often seemed sealed off from himself ... more »
Harold Rosenberg was a harsh critic, especially of himself. Intellectual independence demanded scrutiny of his own “decayed absolutes”... more »
For Louise Bourgeois, pain was an unavoidable condition of life, and no artistic “remedies or excuses” could lessen its intensity ... more »
Is “degrowth” a solution to environmental crises? Or is it, as Andrew McAfee contends, “the worst idea on the planet”?... more »
Social media and surveillance now characterize governments — and so the rise of “monitory democracy”... more »
Auden toyed with Anglo-Saxon verse one moment, Elizabethan the next. No other English poet wrote well in so many forms ... more »
Mark Fisher was little read in his own lifetime. Now his reputation is ascendant as a leftist cultural critic ... more »
The distinction between ideas that are unscientific and ideas that are ascientific is crucial but murky ... more »
Human ingenuity has led to penicillin and to repeated atrocities. Does that mean intelligence is a trap? ... more »
What gets written when there’s nothing to write? Edna St. Vincent Millay’s diary illuminates her world in ways wondrous and mundane ... more »
John Locke in the New World. What explains the enduring affection of Americans for this liberal philosopher? ... more »
The rise of the M.F.A. is a problem for fiction. Why? Because writing workshops too often ignore a work’s intended reader... more »
Why has the popularity of modernist painting endured, while atonal music has largely vanished?... more »
T.S. Eliot, air-raid warden: “The first thing to do, when you hear the Syrens… is to have a good Piss: after that you are ready for the Jerry” ... more »
The great theorist of democratic paradox, Tocqueville eventually grew pessimistic about its long-run prospects ... more »
Why did Susan Sontag become, of all things, a critic? Because art was an escape from life. Or maybe because she met a man at a party ... more »
Velvet gowns, scattered rose petals, pearl necklaces — the clichés of the 20th-century sex scene stem from the writing of Elinor Glyn ... more »
The word "tourist" is at least 250 years old. What began with moral purpose has often ended in destruction ... more »
When was the idea of "normal" born? It began with the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers ... more »
The influence of Jews on American literature once seemed pervasive. How the people of the book made it in the book business ... more »
The unadulterated Elizabeth Hardwick. A new collection of her essays focuses on the concrete realities that shaped her life ... more »
David Foster Wallace's late work raises questions of style and morality. He didn't answer them, for good reason... more »
Historically, “it” girls have been doyennes of resourcefulness and stamina ... more »
Ibram X. Kendi is many things, but he’s no complex thinker. “He is not reflective or inquisitive, but dogmatic” ... more »
Frank O'Hara wrote lots of poems and wrote them quickly -- sometimes too quickly. The best of them don’t read like poetry ... more »
Can cheerfulness be rescued from the bullies, bosses, beaming charlatans, and self-improvement gurus? ... more »
Great patrons of art used to be rich individuals. Then a new patron arose: the American corporation ... more »
Many good memoirs have been written by antiquarian booksellers. But Marius Kociejowski's is by far the grouchiest ... more »
The cynic, the romantic, the ironist, the idealist, the materialist: Who was the real Christopher Hitchens? ... more »
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s metaphor-rich mind, translation is like swimming, a series of doors, a form of blindness, a kind of graft, a process of dismantling... more »
Reading Aristotle has been likened to eating "chopped hay." How enduring is his advice on how to tell a story? ... more »
Heroines of the Middle Ages, like Hildegard of Bingen and the Mercian Queen Aethelflaed, have too often been forgotten ... more »
Wittgenstein at war. For the first time in his life, he was side by side with illiterate proletarians. They loathed him... more »
Graydon Carter's greatest achievement wasn't editing Vanity Fair. It was creating a mystique ... more »
In order to create a Führermuseum, the Nazis embarked on the greatest looting of art in European history ... more »
Amsterdam, London, Brussels, Paris — Van Gogh, a restless soul, was never capable of settling anywhere for long... more »
An animal-rights dilemma: Do animals earn moral consideration by being like humans, or by being different from us?... more »
“Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned.” In the press, Shelley’s death was not cause for grand mourning... more »
Before “fieldwork,” anthropologists researched solely in libraries. It wasn’t until the 1900s that they began to travel... more »
Why is Viktor Shklovsky’s On the Theory of Prose, after nearly a century, still avidly read and discussed in M.F.A. circles?... more »
For Janet Malcolm, “the freedom to be cruel is one of journalism’s uncontested privileges” ... more »
Purveyors of ideas — whether religious or literary in nature — are followed by violence. Salman Rushie is the latest in this long line ... more »
With his utilitarian approach to population ethics, William MacAskill makes the moral case for settlement beyond Earth. That should raise an eyebrow... more »
The lawsuit over the publishing industry’s latest merger is colored by mega-agents, monopsony, and mystifying math... more »
“It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair”... more »
As Salman Rushdie’s stabbing shows, freedom of expression is no longer a “yawn-making liberal platitude” ... more »
"An insult to an ideology is not the same as a threat made to a people. It is the opposite of a threat made to a person" ... more »
What happens when a brilliant thinker gets ensnared in the myth-making power of his own prose? Consider George Kennan... more »
Zizek's value as a thinker, such as it is, lies in the joy he takes in pouncing on the nostrums of both the left and the right ... more »
In praise of mischievous people. Their wit and light-heartedness make the world a better, more amusing place ... more »
What had been a small, eclectic club of philosophers and do-gooders is now worth billions. Things are getting weird for effective altruism... more »
From Amsterdam to Xiamen, urban waterways are facing the same problem: They have become bicycle graveyards... more »
Trash. The word is common in the long history of intellectual disdain for novels enjoyed by women... more »
When men become gods, they are beholden to their believers. Those worshippers have plans for their deities... more »
Danielle Steel the person is obscured by Danielle Steel the brand. And so her novels are a plea for recognition ... more »
Who poisoned the well? Conspiracy theories plagued 14th-century France, justifying the persecution of lepers and Jews ... more »
What exactly is “content”? Who produces it? Why and how did it come to be viewed as “essential”? ... more »
For Elizabeth Jameson, life with multiple sclerosis is one of constraint. She’s found freedom in cursing with abandon... more »
"Christianity has lost its traditional connection to the arts," says Dana Gioia. It’s forgotten “that beauty is the most direct and potent way to communicate the divine” ... more »
“No alcohol, no renown, no women, no newspapers, no honors”: Nietzsche before the breakdown... more »
Sheila Heti is a crusader for art in an era of political moralism. Why is that plain truth so hard for her critics to see? ... more »
Deep in the dark mists of the German psyche lies an explanation for the country's "Russia complex” ... more »
Can queer intellectuals, committed to critiquing the state, rethink their relationship to political power? ... more »
The native language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky is also the language of war criminals. But don’t blame artists for the sins of the state ... more »
What makes a great death scene? And can 2,500 years of them be distilled into a top 50 list? Dan Kois gives it a shot ... more »
We humans are besotted by brains, especially our own. But is intelligence overrated? ... more »
Do animals dream? Insects probably don't, but it's possible the octopus does — and maybe not for the same reasons we do ... more »
The first punctuation mark. From the 4th century BC onward, the paragraph has been many things to many writers ... more »
The news is dispiriting, repetitive, often of dubious credibility. It makes us feel powerless. Is there a better way to be informed? ... more »
Reparations have long been proposed as a correction for historical injustice. A new theory holds that they’re actually future-looking ... more »
“The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the … blinkered project of leading a life” ... more »
A monk, a hunchback, a toga-wearing lunatic — did Fernando Pessoa control his personae, or did they control him? ... more »
Is monogamy morally wrong? A nascent school of philosophy makes the case for alternative arrangements... more »
"The nature of grief is quite as highly variegated as its causes," says Joseph Epstein. "Grief, like the devil, is in the details” ... more »
David Bromwich watches Top Gun and is repulsed by the stink of its catchphrases and righteous slogans... more »
A certain school of historical thinking may rule the day, but — since Thucydides — all history is revisionist history... more »
“Perfect storms,” “black swans,” “bubbles” galore — on Wall Street the market for clichés is booming... more »
Why write? To elicit pleasure — or pain. To aid in thinking — or feeling. There’s no one reason... more »
For Adam Tooze, our most distinguished crisis historian, the past few years have meant good business ... more »
Why we love David Attenborough: He is an advocate — and practitioner — of a special way of seeing ... more »
A taxonomy of Wagnerian performances reveals that while you don’t have to be mad to enjoy Wagner, it helps ... more »
Nietzsche knew that the lesson of history is that there are no lessons, save for the ones we ourselves must create ... more »
Ottessa Moshfegh “has dedicated her career to writing about assholes: cruel, pathetic people who do cruel, pathetic things” ... more »
“Know thyself," commanded the oracle at Delphi. Is any meaningful self-knowledge revealed by a Fitbit?... more »
Magritte, often strapped for cash, dabbled in forgery. Necessity was the spur for trickery... more »
“We’re trying things out with words, and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t, but the enjoyment is in the trying” ... more »
What is the art world and why does it exist? At the most basic level, to answer the question: Is it art? ... more »
“Words are the chesspieces by which the powers that be will play their games with our lives” ... more »
Critics of deconstruction have damned Derrida and de Man without engaging their ideas. That argumentation by association leads nowhere ... more »
At least since Melville, Americans have been enthralled by scammer narratives. Does gullibility ever get old? ... more »
“I love my rejection slips," said Sylvia Plath. Even brilliant writers are inevitably on the receiving end of a few... more »
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