In the 1960s, scientists believed in a connection between psychedelics and psychosis. Is there anything to that?... more »
Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more »
Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more »
Beginning in the 13th century, a new paradigm of measurement and mathematics built the modern world... more »
“To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more »
George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more »
Stanley Fish on teaching at Florida’s newly controversial New College: “Virtue is not the business of the academy”... more »
Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more »
The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more »
Shakespeare’s first folio, in 1623, had an initial print run of 750. Today 233 copies survive, all of them unique... more »
George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more »
No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more »
“Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins”... more »
Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more »
Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more »
Generative AI has put us in a unique and unsettling headspace. Claude Shannon got there first... more »
Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more »
The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more »
For decades, Andrew Wylie was the world's most audacious broker of literary talent. Has the Wylie moment passed?... more »
John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more »
Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more »
Imagine tracking the winners and judges for top literary awards across 75 years. Now you can. Does it tell you anything? ... more »
Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more »
Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more »
The hard problem of consciousness is nowhere near an answer. Scientists and philosophers struggle on... more »
In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more »
Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more »
Why are movies getting longer? They’re not. But the ones that are longer are the ones people pay to see... more »
Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more »
Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more »
Whether you speak with a retroflex R, a bunched R, or a crispy R, it’s clear that R is the weirdest letter... more »
Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more »
In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more »
Memoir of a momentary extremist. For two years, Michael Kazin was a wannabe revolutionary. It was both thrilling and sobering... more »
“Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more »
“A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »
The electricians of the 18th century dumbfounded their audiences. They were taken to be part miracle workers, part magicians... more »
Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more »
Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more »
Secular humanist definitions of morality face a dilemma: Choose a culture-centered ethics or return to a God-centered one... more »
Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more »
Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more »
Unherd prides itself on ideological eclecticism. But just how heterodox is the ascendant publication?... more »
Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more »
Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said, “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more »
The quality of a whisper, the stress of a syllable, the pitch of a voice: Alexander John Ellis’s life as a word nerd... more »
Is indeterminacy the goal of the humanities? Or are actual political goals — organizing, coalition-building — within its remit?... more »... more »
Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more »
“Stinking fish,” “abominable wine,” “dirty taverns.” In 1783, the Continental Congress spent a rotten summer in New Jersey... more »
The thoughts and the career of Don DeLillo, an old soul from another era, prefigures our own, even now... more »
“How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more »
Academics tend to focus on enlarging the borders of their disciplines. Instead, they should think about how those disciplines come to an end... more »
Ibn Sina and Biruni were polymaths of the same time and place. But they differed in personality and perspective... more »
A student stood up and said: ‘This author is a misogynist.” Gale Walden on dating, loving, and teaching David Foster Wallace... more »
Thirty-nine place settings, most of them displaying an aestheticized vulva. “The Dinner Party” almost broke Judy Chicago... more »
“Where authors find jobs, where they go to school, how they get published: These social facts have aesthetic consequences”... more »
A good novel is a good novel, and a bad novel is a bad novel, regardless of who – or what generative AI – wrote it... more »
Musician’s dystonia. Some of the finest have suffered devastating hand spasms and shakes. Why?... more »
John le Carré's serial philandering was more than a character flaw. It was integral to his literary life... more »
Unfairly besmirched as screechy, hectoring, and juvenile, the exclamation point is in dire need of a reputation reclamation... more »
Although Louise Glück was often identified with post-confessional poetry, she was too interested in others to risk the solipsism of mere selfhood... more »
The tyranny of beauty. Empress Elisabeth of Austria washed her hair with raw egg and brandy, and sometimes she slept in a mask lined with raw veal... more »
We celebrate the humanities and we bash the humanities, but rarely do we pause to ask: What the hell are the humanities?... more »
In the 1960s, scientists believed in a connection between psychedelics and psychosis. Is there anything to that?... more »
Beginning in the 13th century, a new paradigm of measurement and mathematics built the modern world... more »
Stanley Fish on teaching at Florida’s newly controversial New College: “Virtue is not the business of the academy”... more »
Shakespeare’s first folio, in 1623, had an initial print run of 750. Today 233 copies survive, all of them unique... more »
“Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins”... more »
Generative AI has put us in a unique and unsettling headspace. Claude Shannon got there first... more »
For decades, Andrew Wylie was the world's most audacious broker of literary talent. Has the Wylie moment passed?... more »
Imagine tracking the winners and judges for top literary awards across 75 years. Now you can. Does it tell you anything? ... more »
The hard problem of consciousness is nowhere near an answer. Scientists and philosophers struggle on... more »
Why are movies getting longer? They’re not. But the ones that are longer are the ones people pay to see... more »
Whether you speak with a retroflex R, a bunched R, or a crispy R, it’s clear that R is the weirdest letter... more »
Memoir of a momentary extremist. For two years, Michael Kazin was a wannabe revolutionary. It was both thrilling and sobering... more »
The electricians of the 18th century dumbfounded their audiences. They were taken to be part miracle workers, part magicians... more »
Secular humanist definitions of morality face a dilemma: Choose a culture-centered ethics or return to a God-centered one... more »
Unherd prides itself on ideological eclecticism. But just how heterodox is the ascendant publication?... more »
The quality of a whisper, the stress of a syllable, the pitch of a voice: Alexander John Ellis’s life as a word nerd... more »
“Stinking fish,” “abominable wine,” “dirty taverns.” In 1783, the Continental Congress spent a rotten summer in New Jersey... more »
Academics tend to focus on enlarging the borders of their disciplines. Instead, they should think about how those disciplines come to an end... more »
Thirty-nine place settings, most of them displaying an aestheticized vulva. “The Dinner Party” almost broke Judy Chicago... more »
Musician’s dystonia. Some of the finest have suffered devastating hand spasms and shakes. Why?... more »
Although Louise Glück was often identified with post-confessional poetry, she was too interested in others to risk the solipsism of mere selfhood... more »
Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, in becoming the manual of magical practice, also advanced the idea that magic was a kind of philosophy... more »
The brass astrolabe, the water clock, and finally the mechanical timepiece: 14th-century Europe couldn’t get enough of clocks... more »
Mermaid books, rainbow bookmarks, and one big headache. The Scholastic Book Fair has run into culture-war controversy... more »
The American Museum of Natural History holds the remains of at least 12,000 people. Who were they?... more »
Louise Glück, whose "unmistakable poetic voice" made individual existence universal, has died. She was 80... more »
A 19-century “storm controversy.” Were North American hurricanes, blizzards, and thunderstorms rotational or centripetal in nature?... more »
Cubism, Dada, Pop, minimalism, and now “the contemporary.” Progress in art has ground to a stop... more »
Today’s AI models, flawed as they are, someday will be acknowledged as the first to have achieved artificial general intelligence... more »
“It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire.” And yet, Alexander Chee writes, Dracula remains a vital literary experience... more »
What happens when reading is governed largely by the logic of machines, rather than the inner dialogue of our own humanity? We're finding out... more »
Jon Fosse — “our age’s great writer of light and darkness” — has won the Nobel Prize in literature... WaPo... Guardian... Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov... Damion Searls... Merve Emre...... more »
Identity politics doesn’t come from postmodernism, as is commonly held. In fact, it dates back to the 18th century... more »
In 18th-century Europe, Latin was still a key part of formal education. Mastery of the language, however, was in steep decline... more »
Is Integrated Information Theory — one of the most widely discussed ways of considering consciousness — pseudoscience?... more »
Tyler Austin Harper: “White American elites … are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda”... more »
Ed Ruscha’s books were so unpopular, “so doomed to oblivion,” that documenting them is an obligation... more »
The pandemic, the Trump years, the mental-health crisis: What is driving the current return to Freud?... more »
In the early days of American English, “timber” became “lumber,” “autumn” became “fall,” and “shop” became “store”... more »
In search of fresh material to mine, AI companies are hiring poets, novelists, playwrights, writers, and Ph.D.s... more »
Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more »
“To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more »
Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more »
George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more »
Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more »
Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more »
John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more »
Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more »
In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more »
Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more »
Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more »
“Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more »
Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more »
Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more »
Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more »
Is indeterminacy the goal of the humanities? Or are actual political goals — organizing, coalition-building — within its remit?... more »... more »
The thoughts and the career of Don DeLillo, an old soul from another era, prefigures our own, even now... more »
Ibn Sina and Biruni were polymaths of the same time and place. But they differed in personality and perspective... more »
“Where authors find jobs, where they go to school, how they get published: These social facts have aesthetic consequences”... more »
John le Carré's serial philandering was more than a character flaw. It was integral to his literary life... more »
The tyranny of beauty. Empress Elisabeth of Austria washed her hair with raw egg and brandy, and sometimes she slept in a mask lined with raw veal... more »
You’ve heard it before: Digital disruption will sweep aside our staid universities. A new book asks: Has the time finally come?... more »
Lou Reed came to embody a New York that exists only in memory — a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze... more »
In 18th-century London, literary clubs offered debate and fine dining to their gentleman members. Joseph Johnson’s club was different... more »
The 19th-century British literary celebrity Michael Field was not, in fact, a brilliant young man, but rather the nom de plume of two women... more »
For Martin Jay, intellectual life has both a transcendental side and a mundane side. The two are in conflict... more »
Edith Hamilton’s books on Greek and Roman mythology, written after she retired from teaching, were a publishing phenomenon... more »
What can we learn from the Dutch master painters? That beauty is to be taken seriously... more »
Hearing Homer. A recent translation of the Iliad gives a new generation of readers a clearer understanding of the epic... more »
Visions of utopia can be grand, like the mega-city planned in the Saudi Arabian desert. Or they can be far more humble... more »
The birth of Bond. Agent 007 was forged in a crucible of Ian Fleming's marital strife and worsening health... more »
The anarcho-socialist musings of Jonathan Crary occasionally approach paranoia. That's in part why he's so interesting to read... more »
The U.S. Constitution is, “for one half of the country, a structural support, and, for the other, an imperilled instrument of the marginalized”... more »
Is Cold War liberalism the cure to the illiberal predicaments of our time? Or is it partially responsible for them?... more »
Queer Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s novel can be read as a fantasy of reproduction without women... more »
Intellectuals and the cult of seriousness. Sontag and Steiner made a performance of omniscience and moral solemnity that no one could honestly sustain... more »
To escape from boredom, we seek distraction and endless stimulation. A better path forward is leisured contemplation... more »
Progressive political thinking has fallen into the identity trap, where race, gender, and sexual orientation trump all else... more »
Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris transformed 18th-century natural science. When will the sisters get their due?... more »
Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more »
George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more »
The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more »
No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more »
Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more »
The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more »
Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more »
Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more »
Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more »
Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more »
In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more »
“A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »
Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more »
Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more »
Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said, “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more »
Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more »
“How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more »
A student stood up and said: ‘This author is a misogynist.” Gale Walden on dating, loving, and teaching David Foster Wallace... more »
A good novel is a good novel, and a bad novel is a bad novel, regardless of who – or what generative AI – wrote it... more »
Unfairly besmirched as screechy, hectoring, and juvenile, the exclamation point is in dire need of a reputation reclamation... more »
We celebrate the humanities and we bash the humanities, but rarely do we pause to ask: What the hell are the humanities?... more »
George Eliot offers us “neither a gospel, nor imitable heroines, but a kind of negative wisdom about our relations”... more »
As memoirists know, it is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. But memory is wet sand... more »
Teaching “problematic” writers is a minefield. Affronted students can generate a social-media scandal — and bad course evaluations... more »
“Restructuring your inward being … is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business”... more »
Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Evolution is not over... more »
Ben Lerner writes beautifully about meritocracy’s discontents. He has also “perfected the humblebrag as auto-fictional style”... more »
The René Girard resurgence puts envy, rivalry, and scapegoating center stage in diagnosing the modern human condition... more »
RIP, literary fiction. The genre, born in response to conglomeration in 1980, has become an anachronism... more »
The varieties of feminism can be seen in the magazines their advocates created: Ms., Bitch, Bust, Sassy, Feministing, Jezebel... more »
Christian Lorentzen on the new alienations, obsolete vanities, and petty, unfulfilled apolitical careerism of his generation... more »
Bookstores are full of tales of wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens. Who’s behind all this? Lester del Rey, inventor of fantasy... more »
Is there a greater dismissal of American literature’s achievement than the withholding of the Nobel from Don DeLillo?... more »
Alchemy, phrenology, astrology — it’s easy to know when an intellectual project fails. But how does one succeed?... more »
“Technophobia is explicit in the text and implicit in the format of Liberties; the medium and the message are perfectly aligned”... more »
“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »
The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »
“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »
“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »
Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »
Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »
Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »
In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »
“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »
“Impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” What do the clothing, decor, and stylistic choices of the Bloomsbury set mean?... more »
“If some writers are hypersensitive to critique, there must be others who are hypersensitive to praise”... more »
For Alasdair MacIntyre, doing moral philosophy from the margins is a necessary condition to seeing things clearly... more »
In today’s novel, identity can be leveraged only to confirm that fiction speaks from experience; confession trumps imagination... more »
Hunting for lost books. It’s possible to find them on the internet, of course, but that robs us of one of the things that gives life purpose... more »
Slow songs used to inspire slow dancing. Now they are more commonly the soundtrack for the sad and lonely... more »
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