Why is it that a clock has 12 hours, an hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds?... more »
Don DeLillo, long hailed as a prophet, is surely “anticipating the involuntary mutations that await the posthumous... more »
What are the responsibilities of art criticism? Is it directed at social justice, at enriching one’s sense of identity, at surrendering to the mysticism of art?... more »
EP Thompson’s brother was executed for his dealings with Bulgarian anti-fascists. There was more to the story than a hero’s death... more »
Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, 20th-century Oxford: Why do certain places and times produce a clustering of philosophical genius?... more »
Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe for liberalism, and yet its cause is championed again and again... more »
Ever notice that your tongue tends to stick out when you’re focusing intently? Here’s why... more »
Kafka’s notebooks contain homoerotic passages, dreams of sausages, and his repeated self-flagellation: “Wrote nothing”... more »
In a culture devoted to work, leisure is a lofty, slippery goal. Its fulfillment requires the cultivation of habits... more »
What’s behind the blurb arms race? And can anything arrest publishings deepening dependence on inane, over-the-top praise?... more »
Is authoritative criticism a problem? No, criticism is not a passive medium of arbitration. It is an act of creation... more »
“We are keen to nestle into a nice category,” says Matt Feeney. “This is a lot of things besides funny, but it’s also funny”... more »
Radical mycology. Mushrooms have real ecological promise. But they also offer themselves as a medium of mythic truth... more »
In combating fascism, 20th-century theologians like Oskar Goldberg strove for a “politics of immortality” ... more »
“ChatGPT and identity politics are two sides of the same coin — both represent bankrupt versions of what literature is and is meant to do”... more »
We think of atoms as mostly empty space. But protons' and neutrons’ interior is likely the most complex place in the universe... more »
Forgiveness, messy and ambiguous, encourages an expansive moral imagination. To understand it, turn to literature... more »
Iris Murdoch on Simone Weil’s notebooks: “To read her is to be reminded of a standard”... more »
A museum at Emory University wanted only the finest antiquities. Many of them, it turns out, may have been looted... more »
Chasing Agnes Martin. The painter declared that “artists must of necessity be alone” — but also that “asceticism is a mistake”... more »
Flaubert, the ultimate perfectionist, wrote at five words per hour, the legend goes. Perhaps he was just prone to distraction... more »
The works of Murakami, Ferrante, and Atwood are being used to train AI models without permission. Is that a problem?... more »
“The basic error of liberalism, according to the post-liberals, is its conflation of freedom with the absence of limitation or constraint”... more »
Why do we turn to psychoanalysis? For Adam Phillips, “the patient goes to an analyst to find out why he has gone to an analyst”... more »
Toni Morrison knew the monumental worth of her work and was unembarrassed to be honored for it... more »
“Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity”... more »
Covid, climate change, geopolitical drama — we’re living in a “polycrisis,” we’re told. But is that just short for “history happening”?... more »
European identity conveys a sense of cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, and cooperation. But darker forces underlie all that... more »
In 1450, an Italian monk began work on a map that took several years to complete. It was the most accurate map of the known world... more »
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine lamented having not enough time to figure out how to live. He, like us, is of two minds about leisure... more »
Hollywood shows the "Mona Lisa" in flames, the Guggenheim in ruins. What’s behind our cinematic appetite for artpocalypse?... more »
August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences was his most financially successful. It was also his least favorite... more »
“Gen Z-ification,” “S.U.V.-ification,” “old man-ification” — we live in convoluted times, beset by the “-ification” of everything... more »
The punk scene has never suffered a dearth of jerks. Yet even in that caustic, self-righteous milieu, Steve Albini stood out... more »
Was it Orwell’s wife, Eileen, who persuaded him to turn an anti-Stalinist essay into an allegory?... more »
A tale of two Naomis — Klein and Wolf. The appearance of one’s double is paranoia-inducing. Especially when she's paranoid... more »
“Where once it was occasionally possible to opt out of ‘reality’ (by taking drugs, say), it is now increasingly necessary to think about how to opt in to it" ... more »
Is Jonathan Israel's decadeas-long argument for the importance of Spinoza the work of a prophet or a zealot?... more »
The impoverishment of our interracial imagination: Social events are now marred by white anti-racists seeking “uncomfortable conversations”... more »
If categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy?... more »
Kierkegaard’s engagement crisis. His philosophical career began when he broke up with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, in 1841... more »
The twin pillars of Gen X identity are authenticity and irony, accompanied by the belief that rock and roll will never die... more »
A rich history of extravagance sustains lyric poetry. But new poets explore themes that are muted, withdrawn, and inscrutable... more »
How Harry Smith, a gnome-like polymath with a compulsive urge to document, mined his collection of folk-music records to feed the imagination of a generation... more »
Dissident scientists historically have faced ostracism, censorship, and worse. As the Covid lab leak saga shows, little has changed... more »
In debates over the restitution of cultural objects, the modern left stands in support of individual property rights, and against its own past values... more »
If marriages are "hideously private," as Iris Murdoch said, can the study of one relationship reveal a grand theory of intimacy?... more »
From “A Crop of Cocks” to tales of defecation, bestiality, incest, and cuckoldry, obscene folktales thrived in Russia... more »
Walter Benjamin's radio tales. He was dismissive of his work as a broadcaster. But the transcripts are more than mere ephemera... more »
“On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun”... more »
The subject of all great literature is either redemption or its loss, says Ed Simon. That’s also the story of his own sobriety... more »
Is one future of journalism a 20-page, print-only broadsheet that appears six times per year and is powered by a 19th-century business model?... more »
From writers like Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh, sad-girl literature presents a smorgasbord of unlikable protagonists... more »
The libraries of imperial Rome were awe-inspiring and open to all. They were also distinctly autocratic... more »
Bessel van der Kolk, former Harvard “traumatologist,” is adamant: He is not to be held responsible for how his work on trauma therapy is used... more »
Who was Homer? How was the Iliad composed? Robin Lane Fox has answers, though not always convincing ones... more »
The literary marriage: Can one find a better example of the tension between larger-than-life aspirations and the banalities of everyday existence?... more »
James Longenbach, who died last year, told elegant tales of discovery, experimentation, and transformation in 20th-century poetry... more »
Christopher Rufo is leading Florida’s right-wing attack on universities. Is he also, as he aspires, an intellectual historian? Not quite... more »
George Orwell’s private mores are of his time. His dedication to truthfulness and public writing is eternal... more »
With chronodesign, chronotherapy, and chronoethics, our interest in circadian rhythm has reached new heights. What’s next?... more »
Real conversation is characterized by serendipity, spontaneity, and disagreement. It is harder and harder to come by... more »
John Milton seems the oldest, deadest, and whitest of old, dead, white authors. Yet his radical, lyrical beauty will blow you away... more »
Why is it that a clock has 12 hours, an hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds?... more »
EP Thompson’s brother was executed for his dealings with Bulgarian anti-fascists. There was more to the story than a hero’s death... more »
Ever notice that your tongue tends to stick out when you’re focusing intently? Here’s why... more »
What’s behind the blurb arms race? And can anything arrest publishings deepening dependence on inane, over-the-top praise?... more »
Radical mycology. Mushrooms have real ecological promise. But they also offer themselves as a medium of mythic truth... more »
We think of atoms as mostly empty space. But protons' and neutrons’ interior is likely the most complex place in the universe... more »
A museum at Emory University wanted only the finest antiquities. Many of them, it turns out, may have been looted... more »
The works of Murakami, Ferrante, and Atwood are being used to train AI models without permission. Is that a problem?... more »
Toni Morrison knew the monumental worth of her work and was unembarrassed to be honored for it... more »
European identity conveys a sense of cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, and cooperation. But darker forces underlie all that... more »
Hollywood shows the "Mona Lisa" in flames, the Guggenheim in ruins. What’s behind our cinematic appetite for artpocalypse?... more »
The punk scene has never suffered a dearth of jerks. Yet even in that caustic, self-righteous milieu, Steve Albini stood out... more »
“Where once it was occasionally possible to opt out of ‘reality’ (by taking drugs, say), it is now increasingly necessary to think about how to opt in to it" ... more »
If categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy?... more »
A rich history of extravagance sustains lyric poetry. But new poets explore themes that are muted, withdrawn, and inscrutable... more »
In debates over the restitution of cultural objects, the modern left stands in support of individual property rights, and against its own past values... more »
Walter Benjamin's radio tales. He was dismissive of his work as a broadcaster. But the transcripts are more than mere ephemera... more »
Is one future of journalism a 20-page, print-only broadsheet that appears six times per year and is powered by a 19th-century business model?... more »
Bessel van der Kolk, former Harvard “traumatologist,” is adamant: He is not to be held responsible for how his work on trauma therapy is used... more »
James Longenbach, who died last year, told elegant tales of discovery, experimentation, and transformation in 20th-century poetry... more »
With chronodesign, chronotherapy, and chronoethics, our interest in circadian rhythm has reached new heights. What’s next?... more »
Evelyn Waugh wrote two kinds of books: the good ones, which are funny, and the bad ones, which are pious... more »
Borges’s second wife, María Kodama, was a prickly and litigious executor of his literary estate. It would have been comic, if not for the human costs incurred... more »
Every American is “a torn divided monster,” wrote D.H. Lawrence. “America has never been easy, and is not easy today”... more »
Meet Eliza, the world's first chatbot, who's now 57. Her creator turned against her. His views are urgently relevant now... more »
“Dear Abby” and “Ask Ann Landers” were written by twin sisters who feuded and sought relentlessly to dominate the advice business... more »
Simone de Beauvoir, one way or another, is always contentious and relevant. “Good,” writes Ali Smith. “Let her disturb you”... more »
For Robert Bellah, secularism is impossible, individualism is an illusion, religious worship is inescapable... more »
“Can you read anything at all from start to finish, i.e. an essay or a short story, without your mind being sliced apart by some digital switchblade?”... more »
Born to kvetch. Norman Mailer was heedless and shameless and clownish. He was also impossible to ignore -- and still is... more »
Can AI make reading 10 times more engaging? Tech entrepreneurs have lots of proposals to “fix” books. But books aren’t broken... more »
Triumph of the small publisher. At the big houses, caution and groupthink reign. It's the little shops that are taking risks and exciting readers... more »
When Borges went blind, he decided to learn Old English. “Each one of the words stood out as though it had been carved, as though it were a talisman”... more »
Lewis Carroll, photographer. He produced around 3,000 images. Fourteen of them depicted little Alice Liddell, a kind of enduring photographic fantasy... more »
The English novelist Marie Corelli hated the vulgar theatrics of spiritualism. Her supernatural vision was based on science — and electricity... more »
Pocket watches, snuff boxes, nutmeg graters: How Adam Smith's analysis of "trinkets of frivolous utility" blossomed into The Theory of Moral Sentiments... more »
Milan Kundera, whose goal was to unite the deepest questions with “the utmost lightness of form,” is dead. He was 94... more »
What makes opinion journalism independent? A dedication to argument and analysis, not political outcome... more »
What distinguishes a pop-music producer right now? The ability to create stylishly forgettable content. Jack Antonoff is a master... more »
What is lost when a small, idiosyncratic art disappears? At West Virginia University. a puppetry program struggles to survive... more »
Don DeLillo, long hailed as a prophet, is surely “anticipating the involuntary mutations that await the posthumous... more »
Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, 20th-century Oxford: Why do certain places and times produce a clustering of philosophical genius?... more »
Kafka’s notebooks contain homoerotic passages, dreams of sausages, and his repeated self-flagellation: “Wrote nothing”... more »
Is authoritative criticism a problem? No, criticism is not a passive medium of arbitration. It is an act of creation... more »
In combating fascism, 20th-century theologians like Oskar Goldberg strove for a “politics of immortality” ... more »
Forgiveness, messy and ambiguous, encourages an expansive moral imagination. To understand it, turn to literature... more »
Chasing Agnes Martin. The painter declared that “artists must of necessity be alone” — but also that “asceticism is a mistake”... more »
“The basic error of liberalism, according to the post-liberals, is its conflation of freedom with the absence of limitation or constraint”... more »
“Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity”... more »
In 1450, an Italian monk began work on a map that took several years to complete. It was the most accurate map of the known world... more »
August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences was his most financially successful. It was also his least favorite... more »
Was it Orwell’s wife, Eileen, who persuaded him to turn an anti-Stalinist essay into an allegory?... more »
Is Jonathan Israel's decadeas-long argument for the importance of Spinoza the work of a prophet or a zealot?... more »
Kierkegaard’s engagement crisis. His philosophical career began when he broke up with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, in 1841... more »
How Harry Smith, a gnome-like polymath with a compulsive urge to document, mined his collection of folk-music records to feed the imagination of a generation... more »
If marriages are "hideously private," as Iris Murdoch said, can the study of one relationship reveal a grand theory of intimacy?... more »
“On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun”... more »
From writers like Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh, sad-girl literature presents a smorgasbord of unlikable protagonists... more »
Who was Homer? How was the Iliad composed? Robin Lane Fox has answers, though not always convincing ones... more »
Christopher Rufo is leading Florida’s right-wing attack on universities. Is he also, as he aspires, an intellectual historian? Not quite... more »
Real conversation is characterized by serendipity, spontaneity, and disagreement. It is harder and harder to come by... more »
The political scientist Patrick J. Deneen wants conservatives to wield raw political power and the “force of a threat” to topple the liberal order... more »
As cathartic as venting one’s rage may be, moral grandstanding accomplishes little beyond that fleeting satisfaction... more »
Beautiful and rich, Marguerite Harrison could have lived a quiet life in Baltimore. Instead she became a spy... more »
Post-liberals and their ascendant ideas are as much a threat to conservatives as they are to liberals ... more »
We've entered the age of the physics beach read, alternately profound and whimsical strolls through the science, says Sam Kean. Results are mixed... more »
Creativity used to be the work of gods. Then poets and artists. Then all of us. The concept has been democratized, but it's also done real harm ... more »
Can plants lie, as a new book claims? Or is a nervous system a precondition for the ability to deceive?... more »
John Rawls offers a rich range of rules for thinking. But apply his thinking to a political or practical scheme? That’s trickier... more »
The New Hellenism: Philosophers like Agnes Callard and Clancy Martin are bringing back the confessional mode... more »
Rationalization, speculation, subjugation. Stanford University played a key role in the global expansion of capitalism... more »
Does history move in cycles? That's the contention of Peter Turchin and Neil Howe. If it all sounds too neat, it is... more »
Who needs the novel? asks the critic Joseph Epstein. Then he goes small, critiquing “dopey ideas” and “passing fancies”... more »
A succinct history of the 13th century Mongol invasion: “They came, they uprooted, they burned, they killed, they looted, and they left”... more »
The man who named everything. It fell to the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné to attempt to impose order on nature's chaos, one classification at a time... more »
“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings”... more »
John McPhee’s false starts. In the life of a writer, especially one at work for decades, a lot of projects don’t make it... more »
Before obtaining a measure of renown during Occupy Wall Street, David Graeber researched the enlightenment of pirates in Madagascar... more »
The recipe wars. Is following a recipe, as some have held, really a pitiful act, the antithesis of living creatively?... more »
What are the responsibilities of art criticism? Is it directed at social justice, at enriching one’s sense of identity, at surrendering to the mysticism of art?... more »
Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe for liberalism, and yet its cause is championed again and again... more »
In a culture devoted to work, leisure is a lofty, slippery goal. Its fulfillment requires the cultivation of habits... more »
“We are keen to nestle into a nice category,” says Matt Feeney. “This is a lot of things besides funny, but it’s also funny”... more »
“ChatGPT and identity politics are two sides of the same coin — both represent bankrupt versions of what literature is and is meant to do”... more »
Iris Murdoch on Simone Weil’s notebooks: “To read her is to be reminded of a standard”... more »
Flaubert, the ultimate perfectionist, wrote at five words per hour, the legend goes. Perhaps he was just prone to distraction... more »
Why do we turn to psychoanalysis? For Adam Phillips, “the patient goes to an analyst to find out why he has gone to an analyst”... more »
Covid, climate change, geopolitical drama — we’re living in a “polycrisis,” we’re told. But is that just short for “history happening”?... more »
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine lamented having not enough time to figure out how to live. He, like us, is of two minds about leisure... more »
“Gen Z-ification,” “S.U.V.-ification,” “old man-ification” — we live in convoluted times, beset by the “-ification” of everything... more »
A tale of two Naomis — Klein and Wolf. The appearance of one’s double is paranoia-inducing. Especially when she's paranoid... more »
The impoverishment of our interracial imagination: Social events are now marred by white anti-racists seeking “uncomfortable conversations”... more »
The twin pillars of Gen X identity are authenticity and irony, accompanied by the belief that rock and roll will never die... more »
Dissident scientists historically have faced ostracism, censorship, and worse. As the Covid lab leak saga shows, little has changed... more »
From “A Crop of Cocks” to tales of defecation, bestiality, incest, and cuckoldry, obscene folktales thrived in Russia... more »
The subject of all great literature is either redemption or its loss, says Ed Simon. That’s also the story of his own sobriety... more »
The libraries of imperial Rome were awe-inspiring and open to all. They were also distinctly autocratic... more »
The literary marriage: Can one find a better example of the tension between larger-than-life aspirations and the banalities of everyday existence?... more »
George Orwell’s private mores are of his time. His dedication to truthfulness and public writing is eternal... more »
John Milton seems the oldest, deadest, and whitest of old, dead, white authors. Yet his radical, lyrical beauty will blow you away... more »
The new historical divide is neither academic vs. popular nor scholarly vs. presentist. It’s hagiography vs. iconoclasm... more »
Why was the pioneering analytic philosopher E.E. Constance Jones forgotten? It didn’t help that Bertrand Russell demeaned her as "motherly" and "prissy"... more »
Does Barbie’s existential crisis disrupt her brand or simply consolidate it? Leslie Jamison makes the case for the latter... more »
Milan Kundera and the dream of absolute authorship. He worked obsessively to control his writing, and to distinguish between the work and the person ... more »
How did Ian McEwan go from being a risk-taking enfant terrible to the grandfather of the well-plotted English literary novel... more »
Part sex cult, part art world coterie, the Sullivanian Institute “combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis and the musical theatre”... more »
We ought to disagree about books. We ought even to get in heated fights about books! And now we have a venue to do that: Goodreads... more »
Is beauty an achievement or a natural endowment? If we are responsible for our own beauty, what obligations does that impose? Becca Rothfeld investigates... more »
“No class has ever shown more deference to official qualifications and the authority of credentials than modern progressives”... more »
The anxiety of Cormac McCarthy's influence. “Books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written”... more »
The literary-critical establishment is tired of moralizing and self-righteousness. And so, it’s time for a turn to aesthetics... more »
There is a tremendous critical pleasure in reviving a forgotten book by an unjustly ignored author. The latest: Susan Taubes... more »
Academic historians have shied away from writing big, popular books for too long. They should embrace their inner Howard Zinn... more »
"Affirmation is available everywhere. Why look for it in art, when what the most valuable works offer up exists nowhere else?"... more »
Because film studios, book publishers, and record labels dominate, the arts suffer. What happened to the avant-garde?... more »
Johnny Cash’s hardscrabble world. He grew up in the Arkansas Delta, in a community built on government-granted land... more »
Transference began as a theory of love, or, rather, of love’s inadequacy. Now it's turned college classrooms into arenas of discontent... more »
Modern feminism is turning back to thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag. But 50-year-old theses can take one only so far... more »
"It should give historians pause when the common sense of ordinary American people shows more appreciation for historical complexity than trained experts"... more »
“Things could be worse may be one of those lies that allows us to live, obscuring the truer truth: Things will be worse”... more »
Evolution of a scene. The Iliad has been fully translated into English 100 times, reflecting a wide interpretive range... more »
“Great” was a word Robert Gottlieb applied to art of high refinement and utter kitsch. Eclecticism was the hallmark of his taste... more »
Stories lull. Stories entice. Stories seduce. Stories mislead. But stories are inescapable. Parul Sehgal explains... more »
Tyler Cowen sits down with Noam Chomsky and gets to the bottom of a longstanding mystery: "Why do you answer every email?"... more »
“War may be less contentious.” The one constant in marriage, a new book suggests: it plays host to contradictions... more »
True Grit was so successful, it overshadowed everything else its author, Charles Portis, wrote. That’s a shame... more »
Weaponized feces in Gulliver’s Travels, masterful flatulence in Chaucer — Dwight Garner praises excretory adventures in literature... more »
In 1998, the neuroscientist Christof Koch bet the philosopher David Chalmers that the mystery of consciousness would be solved within 25 years. Chalmers just won. His prize: a case of wine... more »
Being friends with a genius isn’t easy. Sometimes you are loved, sometimes you are loathed... more »
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