Secrets of Stradivari. What explains the rich, dark, high-frequency, impossible-to-replicate sound of the peerless violin? ... more »
P. G. Wodehouse was no stranger to the joys of booze. He developed his own euphemisms -- “tanked to the uvula” -- and a taxonomy of the six varieties of hangover... more »
What would Plato tweet? Social media feels like liberation because it seems to unburden us of our shame. But a man without shame, Plato warned, is a slave to desire ... more »
Depicting the dead was a fixture of 19th-century painting. The genre is marked by skewed bodily proportions and blunt symbolism ... more »
Jonathan Swift's underwear. He anticipated anti-consumerism, anti-makeup feminism, and animal rights. He was also ahead of his time on matters of personal hygiene... more »
John Brockman's Edge question for 2017 asks scientists and other thinkers: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?... more »
John Berger, art critic, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, counterculture celebrity, cattle herder, is dead. He was 90... more »
Sometimes the point of a sentence is to jar, sting, or offend. In that case, nothing performs quite like profanity. So why use a euphemism?... more »
If Kepler, Darwin, and Einstein had not come along, would their theories have been discovered by others? Were they indispensable? An alternative history of great ideas... more »
For the past 52 years, The Economist was housed in a London tower. The height, perhaps, facilitated its handing down of Olympian judgments... more »
Alcohol has been ubiquitous in the history of war, and stimulants have fueled conflicts since World War II. Whatever the substance, war is rarely fought sober... more »
Delmore Schwartz made his debut in 1937. Ten years later, he was the most widely anthologized poet of his generation. Twenty years later, he died alone in the hallway of a sleazy New York hotel... more »
Beyond the Black Notebooks. Heidegger’s newly revealed letters expose his anti-Semitism as a scholarly and moral disaster for German intellectual history... more »
Günter Grass was a mischief maker, a master of hypocrisy as well as of metaphor. He knew that his last work wouldn’t be his finest, but he wrote it anyway... more »
We think of Beethoven as socially inept: fiercely individualistic, careless about hygiene, occasionally rude and abrupt. Yet he longed for companionship... more »
Close reading with Marlene Dietrich. She had a sexually charged, cerebral relationship with Hemingway. Her true literary love, however, was Goethe... more »
Part artist, part scientist, Andrew Solomon has written on Libya, identity, and Chinese food. His work is so wide-ranging, he seems to come from an earlier century... more »
The Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by the military government in 1976. His coping mechanism: therapeutic forgetting... more »
Cinderella meets sadomasochism. Fairy tales have always departed from conventional morality, but in fin-de-siècle France, their deviance went further... more »
The Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer smiled and said the right things, but his friends were not fooled. “You are incapable of emotion,” they told him. “Your soul is arid”... more »
The power of “yuck!” and “ew!”. Disgust, which comes from our evolutionary fear of germs, goes a surprisingly long way toward explaining our manners, morals, and religion... more »
Secrets of Stradivari. What explains the rich, dark, high-frequency, impossible-to-replicate sound of the peerless violin? ... more »
Depicting the dead was a fixture of 19th-century painting. The genre is marked by skewed bodily proportions and blunt symbolism ... more »
John Berger, art critic, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, counterculture celebrity, cattle herder, is dead. He was 90... more »
For the past 52 years, The Economist was housed in a London tower. The height, perhaps, facilitated its handing down of Olympian judgments... more »
Beyond the Black Notebooks. Heidegger’s newly revealed letters expose his anti-Semitism as a scholarly and moral disaster for German intellectual history... more »
Close reading with Marlene Dietrich. She had a sexually charged, cerebral relationship with Hemingway. Her true literary love, however, was Goethe... more »
Cinderella meets sadomasochism. Fairy tales have always departed from conventional morality, but in fin-de-siècle France, their deviance went further... more »
Karl Polanyi: Is the mid-20th-century economic theorist an example of the impracticality of left-wing thought? Or a guide for our times?... more »
Was Bach a bully? He was a teenage thug, drawing a dagger in an altercation with a bassoonist. Then there are the hints of anti-Semitism... more »
Feeling down about the state of the world? Cheer up, says Steven Pinker. Look at trend lines, not headlines, and you'll see that most long-term trends are heading in the right direction... more »
Seventy percent of museum visitors go for “a social experience” — indeed, serenity is in short supply in crowded galleries. That's why miniature exhibits matter... more »
"The most important thing for any intellectual to have is a sense of proportion," and liberal academics have lost it, says Mark Lilla. "Our campuses are not Aleppo”... more »
If someone changes drastically, does he or she become a different person? The answer to this old philosophical riddle may be in the nature of the change... more »
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan was unknown. By 1967, he was a star. How did an obscure professor from Canada transform himself from pious agrarian to media mystagogue?... more »
Fake news is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, fake news is older than real news. As facts recede, the power of concocted stories will only grow... more »
Next year, Russians will observe the centenary of the Russian Revolution. And their government will make sure they know almost nothing about it... more »
Best-selling books, it’s said, provide “a snapshot of an age.” Yet in every age, while characters and settings may have changed, the narratives are familiar... more »
Geriatric wisdom goes beyond nostalgia and mortality. It’s the humor of Beckett after slipping in the bathtub, the flair of Bellow getting out of the ICU... more »
Lügenpresse, umvolkung, völkisch, volksverräter, überfremdung: The language of Nazism is resurgent, an old lexicon for a new nationalism... more »
In 1914, Yeats and Pound held a dinner to celebrate the poet Wilfrid Blunt. Featured were roast peacock and insults galore. Passing the generational baton has never been easy... more »
Literary scholars read with vigilance, wariness, suspicion, distrust. Their criticism has a political aim. Which is to say pleasure plays no part... more »
Liszt drank a bottle of cognac a day; Brahms was boozy; Schubert was a drunk. A lot of great composers were fond of the bottle... more »
Freeman Dyson, who knew Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Feynman, thinks three qualities help make a successful scientist: ignorance, craziness, subversiveness ... more »
Combining Norse legend, Greek myth, dope fiends, Neolithic hunter-gatherers, and kimchi, Jack London tried his hand at writing science fiction... more »
P.G. Wodehouse never escaped the stain of his wartime broadcasts on German radio. Could it be that he was guilty only of stupidity?... more »
The accidental propagandist. One Hundred Years of Solitude made Gabriel García Márquez famous. It also made him an unwitting operative of the CIA... more »
Amy Cuddy's TED talk on power poses — feet apart, hands on hips, head thrown back -- has been viewed 37 million times. How did such a flimsy idea become a sensation?... more »
Literary culture won't disappear, but it will continue to shrink. "It will go back to what it was when I started out," says Martin Amis, "which is a minority interest sphere"... more »
For Schlegel, Tzara, and Schiller, art was by definition incomprehensible. Case in point: the Voynich Manuscript, which is quite possibly nonsense... more »
Boredom gets a bad rap. We need it in order to live and think well. Its defenders include Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Sontag... more »
P. G. Wodehouse was no stranger to the joys of booze. He developed his own euphemisms -- “tanked to the uvula” -- and a taxonomy of the six varieties of hangover... more »
Jonathan Swift's underwear. He anticipated anti-consumerism, anti-makeup feminism, and animal rights. He was also ahead of his time on matters of personal hygiene... more »
Sometimes the point of a sentence is to jar, sting, or offend. In that case, nothing performs quite like profanity. So why use a euphemism?... more »
Alcohol has been ubiquitous in the history of war, and stimulants have fueled conflicts since World War II. Whatever the substance, war is rarely fought sober... more »
Günter Grass was a mischief maker, a master of hypocrisy as well as of metaphor. He knew that his last work wouldn’t be his finest, but he wrote it anyway... more »
Part artist, part scientist, Andrew Solomon has written on Libya, identity, and Chinese food. His work is so wide-ranging, he seems to come from an earlier century... more »
The Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer smiled and said the right things, but his friends were not fooled. “You are incapable of emotion,” they told him. “Your soul is arid”... more »
Sensory overload. After 500 years, Bosch’s demonic art continues to confound. How to understand an oeuvre that took one observer a year to absorb?... more »
His previous novel said too much. "The true work of art is the one that says the least," he now believed; silence invites readers to imagine depth. How Camus wrote The Stranger ... more »
To consider Pablo Neruda is to raise questions about politics and poison. But, as his lost poems show, he spoke to quiet, humanistic moments as well... more »
Patrick Leigh Fermor sought both the upper crust and peasant bread. He seduced duchesses but for much of his life had no home of his own... more »
Minae Mizumura, a Japanese novelist, reflects on the possibility of sustaining literatures other than English. To work in the hegemonic language isn't always an advantage... more »
How to think about rock. Before the biographies, blogs, and building of brands, it was the music that blew our minds. Behold the manic brilliance of David Bowie... more »
What’s new in poetry? Ashbery imitations, Johnny Cash’s scraps, and data-driven drivel. In short: word soup, with a dash of originality... more »
Everything old is new again. Preservationists, as well as Ph.D.s, love recapturing neglected aesthetic styles. The latest beneficiary: Brutalism... more »
Kafka liked swimming, hiking, zooming around on a motorbike, illustrating erotic fiction, and frequenting brothels. Did any of that inform his writing?... more »
What is a longtime marriage like for the French theorists Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers? It’s an intellectual exercise, an elegant performance... more »
Shakespeare, economic theorist. His work was shaped by the market. And that work, in turn, influenced the development of economic thought... more »
The work of the dead falls on the living, especially undertakers. We can live with broken hearts and shaken faith. But we can't live with a corpse on the floor... more »
Among the reasons to admire Robert Hughes: the iconoclasm of his art criticism, the pugnacity of his prose, his unabashed elitism... more »
What accounts for the rise of the West? Not technological breakthroughs, like the steam engine, but a respect for facts and a culture of discovery... more »
In 1964, Edmund Wilson published a 6,600-word assault on Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin. Why did Wilson savage his friend?... more »
Early in life, Stéphane Mallarmé lost his parents. Late in life, he lost a son. So he built an intellectual defense against the agony of mourning... more »
Young Bram Stoker worshiped the actor Henry Irving. The feeling was not mutual. Irving’s take on Stoker’s years-in-the-making novel: “dreadful”... more »
Before there were zoos, exotic animals were kept according to aristocratic whim. Ann Boleyn had a monkey; George IV, a giraffe. What did this mean?... more »
Romain Gary had an incorrigible thirst for narrative. His carefully constructed life veered from the "dubious to the patently false and from the slapstick to the macabre"... more »
Does the “micro texture” of Shakespeare’s sonnets hold the key to a longtime literary mystery? Elaine Scarry thinks so. She might be the only one... more »
Ezra Pound called Jean Cocteau -- poet, playwright, theatre director, jeweler -- the best writer in Europe. But his life story was riches-to-rags... more »
Marx's disciples praise his conviction and his bold proclamations. In reality, however, he was a doubter, a rethinker, a worrier — the first post-Marxist... more »
What would Plato tweet? Social media feels like liberation because it seems to unburden us of our shame. But a man without shame, Plato warned, is a slave to desire ... more »
John Brockman's Edge question for 2017 asks scientists and other thinkers: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?... more »
If Kepler, Darwin, and Einstein had not come along, would their theories have been discovered by others? Were they indispensable? An alternative history of great ideas... more »
Delmore Schwartz made his debut in 1937. Ten years later, he was the most widely anthologized poet of his generation. Twenty years later, he died alone in the hallway of a sleazy New York hotel... more »
We think of Beethoven as socially inept: fiercely individualistic, careless about hygiene, occasionally rude and abrupt. Yet he longed for companionship... more »
The Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by the military government in 1976. His coping mechanism: therapeutic forgetting... more »
The power of “yuck!” and “ew!”. Disgust, which comes from our evolutionary fear of germs, goes a surprisingly long way toward explaining our manners, morals, and religion... more »
Fielding vs. Richardson, McCarthy vs. Hellman, Nabokov vs. Wilson. Literary feuds, which once raged over serious intellectual disagreements, have been ruined by tweets and TV... more »
John Stuart Mill believed that nobody can be a good economist who is just an economist. Yet most study nothing but economics. "Economists are the idiot savants of our time"... more »
At college, things should get more complicated, not less. But students today are told not to think through complex issues themselves — that's been done for them... more »
The pursuit of productivity seems to exacerbate the anxieties it's meant to allay. What if the idea of efficiency is what makes us feel inefficient?... more »
Modern sounds in classical music. Innovation used to take place within the confines of the traditional musical grammar. Now there's a radical break in symphonic sound... more »
Patrick Modiano: novelist, Nobel laureate, compulsive fabricator. Consider the sinister prank calls, swindling of booksellers, and lies about his age. Are these aesthetic deceptions?... more »
The world’s great minds have argued about the essence of time and the feeling of inhabiting it. To consider time, Augustine argued, is to glimpse the soul... more »
“Modern poetry is supposed to be difficult," said T.S. Eliot. It’s an influential view, with disastrous consequences. Christian Wiman is an antidote... more »
You are not necessarily a more intelligent reader at 65 than 25, but you are more subtle. Rereading -- a pleasure and necessity of age -- sometimes means changing your mind... more »
Evelyn Waugh was cruel and ornery through a misunderstanding. He thought his vocation was to instruct a godless world. But his true calling was as a humorist... more »
Twilight of the English major. Enrollment is down, career prospects dim, the financial outlook grim. But marginalization has its advantages... more »
What does it mean to “know” the future? The question has perplexed Aristotle, Newton, Laplace, Thomas Nagel, and quantum theorists alike. Is an answer possible?... more »
In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru. His novel about the experience, a tale of political ambition and moral decay, is art imitating life imitating art... more »
In terms of sex, we've become more permissive. But in terms of infidelity, we've become more intolerant. Esther Perel is out to change that... more »
John D'Agata is a self-appointed expert on the essay. But he doesn't know what an essay is or what it does. And he's no essayist. He's a liar... more »
Our search for rational explanations for our current political disorder is futile. To understand what's going on, we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility ... more »
The Rasputin problem. Hypnotist, rapist, cultist, charlatan, seer: What was the mad monk's actual role in the downfall of the the Romanovs? ... more »
The left's war on research. By denying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, it has done real harm to the reputation of science... more »
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