The dictionary people. Who were the tweedy, eccentric amateur lexicographers that made the Oxford English Dictionary possible
... more »Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas and stylistic assurance. That has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »
The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly passing for years... more »
Since 1739, 130 Roman dodecahedrons have been discovered by archaeologists. But a mystery endures: What were they used for?... more »
Saskia Hamilton's parting gift. The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more »
We think we remember works of art rather well, says Julian Barnes. But we often don't, and that's not a bad thing ... more »
The Argentine writer and perennial Nobel candidate César Aira writes for hours before revising. The result is an obscene number of books... more »
The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »
“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more »
Derek Parfit set out to that prove progress in moral philosophy is possible. He failed, but in so doing salvaged the study of ethics... more »
Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. “The message is the message”... more »
The Order of the Third Bird is a somewhat secret society of artists and avant-gardists who congregate suddenly at museums, then vanish... more »
People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases?... more »
I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more »
"Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth... more »
Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »
Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »
Penelope Fitzgerald, long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more »
Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »
As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »
“A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute?... more »
Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »
In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »
When did it become embarrassing to like classical music? When it became thought of as an elite art... more »
A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »
Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »
Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more »
“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »
Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »
A homogeneous Harlem Renaissance? The period’s art depicts pool halls, jazz clubs, formal dinners, and social groups at odds with one another... more »
A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »
“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »
We read the classics but ignore much of what readers once enjoyed: forgeries, pseudotranslations, and other ephemera from the dustbin of literary history... more »
For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »
“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »
“The Recluse of Amherst.” Emily Dickinson’s life, it turns out, was full of baking, corresponding, and humor... more »
Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »
How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »
Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »
AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »
In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »
Is Glenn Loury’s new memoir a brave act of self-reckoning or a reckless act of self-sabotage?... more »
Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »
“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »
“That is right,” Joseph Priestley said when he completed editing the manuscript. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was dead... more »
A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »
“I will dedicate all my work to her, forever.” The novelist Carson McCullers had a habit of overdoing her romantic pronouncements... more »
Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »
Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »
George Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and 1984 a weirder novel, than we’ve appreciated... more »
“[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »
The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »
How do artists think? Where do they begin? How do they know when they’re done? Adam Moss looks for answers... more »
Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »
What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »
In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton audited a course given by Robert Lowell. They were forever changed as poets... more »
Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »
Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »
“It was easy for people to just remember and regurgitate ‘r > g.’” Thomas Piketty reflects on his best seller a decade after its publication... more »
Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »
Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »
John Barth, who believed the old conventions of literary expression were “used up,” is dead. He was 93... more »
Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »
What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »
Contemporary writing on liberalism consists of two types: autopsies and demonologies... more »
The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »
We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »
Long a widely shared ideal, “equality” is now seen as promoting a specious universalism. A new virtue has replaced it: “equity”... more »
Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »
Jamaicans are ready to embrace Tacky’s Revolt, an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island in 1760. For a pioneering historian, that’s complicated... more »
Classics in crisis. What the field needs is a sweeping history of Roman emperors and their influence beyond Europe... more »
"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »
H.P. Lovecraft, philosopher. His fiction blended materialism, determinism, and atheism into a new school of thought: “cosmic indifferentism”... more »
Contemporary Stoicism is all aphorism and motivational cliche. It is toothless — practically to the point of meaninglessness... more »
Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... more »
Daniel Kahneman, who marveled at “endlessly complicated” human psychology, is dead. He was 90... NYT... Daniel Engber... more »
By the 19th century, educated elites had little time for ghosts, demons, and other apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research, on the other hand... more »
As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »
Caravaggio’s final crimes: carrying a sword without a permit, smearing excrement on a house, smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter... more »
For women among the New York Intellectuals, men wanted to sleep with you or write like you. Or both... more »
Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »
Joseph Epstein, with scores to settle, wrote a memoir. Why was he fired as editor of The American Scholar?... more »
“Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Paradoxes sound absurd, but they can be logically sustained... more »
Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »
The physical world is full of inefficiencies. Cue the “digital twin,” where they can be ironed out virtually then reflected back into reality... more »
Jesus, and other magi. Early variants of Christianity championed Pontius Pilate, Apollonius, and a holy snake... more »
“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »