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Thursday July 23, 2015
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July 23, 2015

Articles of Note

Whether writing fiction or fact, E.L. Doctorow had a keen understanding of how the past informs the present. He's dead at 84... New York Times... The Guardian... Newsweek... Mother Jones...... more »


New Books

We picture Joan Didion as either young and nonchalant, smoking a cigarette, or elderly and grieving. Through it all she's held the world at a distance... more »


Essays & Opinions

In praise of boredom. Society worships multitasking, purposefulness, and returns on investment. Why bother with art or literature? Claire Messud explains... more »

July 22, 2015

Articles of Note

Joe Gould, author of the longest book ever or never written, was known as a delightful eccentric: harmless and even lovable. He was neither... more »


New Books

“What pleases the public is always what’s most banal,” wrote van Gogh. Does our obsession with “Sunflowers” suggest that his own work has lapsed into banality?... more »


Essays & Opinions

The belief system of Silicon Valley can't account for a plateau of progress. But expectations have outrun reality, says John Markoff. 2045 is going to look a lot like today... more »

July 21, 2015

Articles of Note

New taboos have replaced old in terms of profanity. We no longer fear the wrath of God or descriptions of sex. We fear offending groups... more »


New Books

Sir Thomas Browne, a minor writer with a major style, is credited with 784 neologisms, including "electricity,”  “hallucination,”  “ferocious,” and “swaggy.” But a model thinker for our time? Not quite... more »


Essays & Opinions

What is a book cover? A skin, a membrane, a safeguard, a translation from text to image, an anxious effort to corral the boundless contents inside... more »

July 20, 2015

Articles of Note

How to speak American: Steal words, invent new ones, turn nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. Smush words together... more »


New Books

Three lives in nine objects: How tattered love letters and a portable writing desk reveal Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë... more »


Essays & Opinions

More data have been created and stored in the past 15 years than in the previous history of humanity. To handle the information glut, read avant-garde poetry... more »

July 18, 2015

Articles of Note

Sappho. Or is it Psappho? We know so little about the poet from Lesbos, we’re even unsure of her name. Can translators convey her greatness?... more »


New Books

The unbearable maleness of the philosophy department. Blame the gladiatorial element, the misguided definition of “brilliance,” the curriculum... more »


Essays & Opinions

Handwriting is by no means obsolete in a digital age. Consider the useful alchemy in which language, the body, and our sense of identity intertwine... more »

July 17, 2015

Articles of Note

A medieval man in modern times, Léon Bloy kept a vow of poverty and suffering, cheered the sinking of the Titanic, and wrote of suicide, incest, and cannibalism... more »


New Books

When it comes to criticism, Kingsley Amis said it best: “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, there’s little point in writing.” That spirit is in far too short supply... more »


Essays & Opinions

Joseph Mitchell’s journalism didn’t stand out. Then he met the anthropologist Franz Boas. Mitchell’s reporting absorbed the ethnographic insights of social science... more »

July 16, 2015

Articles of Note

Damien Hirst has traded drinking, drugs, and showing off his foreskin for yoga and a return to art curation. Can he save his reputation?... more »


New Books

Harper Lee’s nonsensical string of clichés, Go Set a Watchman, materialized so mysteriously. A neat example of exploitative publishing... more »


Essays & Opinions

Laughter, forgetting, and French. Milan Kundera’s shoddy memory, his run-ins with history, his abandoning Czech – what did it all mean?... more »


Articles of Note

Whether writing fiction or fact, E.L. Doctorow had a keen understanding of how the past informs the present. He's dead at 84... New York Times... The Guardian... Newsweek... Mother Jones...... more »


Joe Gould, author of the longest book ever or never written, was known as a delightful eccentric: harmless and even lovable. He was neither... more »


New taboos have replaced old in terms of profanity. We no longer fear the wrath of God or descriptions of sex. We fear offending groups... more »


How to speak American: Steal words, invent new ones, turn nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. Smush words together... more »


Sappho. Or is it Psappho? We know so little about the poet from Lesbos, we’re even unsure of her name. Can translators convey her greatness?... more »


A medieval man in modern times, Léon Bloy kept a vow of poverty and suffering, cheered the sinking of the Titanic, and wrote of suicide, incest, and cannibalism... more »


Damien Hirst has traded drinking, drugs, and showing off his foreskin for yoga and a return to art curation. Can he save his reputation?... more »


From Baltimore to the Aspen Ideas Festival to Paris, Ta-Nehisi Coates has spread a message: Racial indignity is always physical... more »


To understand 20th-century economics, it helps to view the discipline as an 80-year argument between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman... more »


How did the academy end up investing so much in a nebulous, useless, and overly romantic notion like “critical thinking”?... more »


If consciousness and experience can ever be explained with  scientific precision, would we no longer see humanity through a humanistic lens?... more »


Most of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poet friends were on some drug most of the time. Not Ferlinghetti. “Somebody had to mind the shop”... more »


Entire industries once ran on intuition. Artists were signed because someone had a hunch. Now, among talent spotters, the gut has given way to the algorithm... more »


How a Rutherford, N.J. street huckster's white chickens and red wheelbarrow inspired a 16-word manifesto of American modernism... more »


Denis Diderot arrived in Paris young and obscure. Soon he was notorious and in jail. Curiosity was his lodestar... more »


Ornette Coleman was a freak – about his music, clothing, beard, philosophy. Yet his life was a conventional one, he insisted: “Born, work, sad and happy and etc.”... more »


The life of an artist isn't easels, turpentine, and raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles so much as struggle and poverty. Making art is work, not a privilege... more »


We live in the hyperpresent, obsessed by the instantaneous. So why are we enthralled with Deep History and its all-encompassing purview?... more »


When tolerance melts into indifference, and polite reserve replaces judgment, it's doom for the fine arts. Michael Lewis explains ... more »


David Foster Wallace has been canonized as self-help slacker saint, magnet for moral veneration. In short, the very thing he struggled against ... more »


Once the redoubts of abstruse and jargon-heavy monographs, university presses are now the last great hope for serious nonfiction... more »


The rise of 3-D printing will transform the future of museums into a contest between accessibility and authenticity... more »


Philip Larkin will soon have a flagstone at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, alongside the memorials to writers he did his best to avoid... more »


Inside Kevin Wheatcroft’s mazelike house is the largest collection of Nazi artifacts in the world. “Hitler’s eye for quality was just extraordinary”... more »


Why are the leaders of the New York Public Library so intent on destroying one of the world’s great repositories of knowledge?... more »


Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t take on faith everything between the covers. Behold the imperiled state of facts in book publishing... more »


Pornography is old. But our ability to track how porn affects us is relatively new. The upshot: Porn has been unfairly maligned... more »


The education of a young poet. T.S. Eliot was at Harvard from 1906 to 1914. But he had to escape to put to use what he’d learned there... more »


Nabokov in Utah. Among marmots and Mormons, the author collected butterflies, smoked five packs a day, and suffered a bad friction burn on his buttocks... more »


In the ‘20s, a female sculptor like Barbara Hepworth had three options: assimilate, decorate, or detonate. She chose the third... more »


New Books

We picture Joan Didion as either young and nonchalant, smoking a cigarette, or elderly and grieving. Through it all she's held the world at a distance... more »


“What pleases the public is always what’s most banal,” wrote van Gogh. Does our obsession with “Sunflowers” suggest that his own work has lapsed into banality?... more »


Sir Thomas Browne, a minor writer with a major style, is credited with 784 neologisms, including "electricity,”  “hallucination,”  “ferocious,” and “swaggy.” But a model thinker for our time? Not quite... more »


Three lives in nine objects: How tattered love letters and a portable writing desk reveal Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë... more »


The unbearable maleness of the philosophy department. Blame the gladiatorial element, the misguided definition of “brilliance,” the curriculum... more »


When it comes to criticism, Kingsley Amis said it best: “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, there’s little point in writing.” That spirit is in far too short supply... more »


Harper Lee’s nonsensical string of clichés, Go Set a Watchman, materialized so mysteriously. A neat example of exploitative publishing... more »


When literary society was glamorous. The historian Antonia Fraser enjoyed gardens and cricket, danced with T.S. Eliot, and was instructed by Queen Elizabeth to have a fling... more »


Moral philosophers say we’re lazy, scared, and immature. The solution? “Grow up!” Too bad the diagnosis doesn’t consider actual human beings... more »


The speechwriter. To put words in the mouth of public officials is to realize the meaninglessness of words in public life... more »


The Middle Ages are derided as a time both reprehensible and ridiculous. Nonsense! Those years were not dark but alive with technology, art, curiosity, capitalism... more »


Entrenched and unacknowledged Anglocentrism. Today’s academic debates suffer linguistically. Why? They take place in English... more »


Success for a literary magazine: longevity, influence, readership, financial stability, imitators. But they all depend on offering the strange and new... more »


Feminism has altered how we live, and those changes are joyful and terrible. Few grasp this with the unflinching wisdom of Vivian Gornick... more »


Life in a time of mass starvation. Lena Mukhina was 16 when the German army began its siege of Leningrad. She survived. Sort of... more »


To be immersed in Victorian-era politics, as was H.G. Wells, was to be engaged in a fierce debate among Darwinians, Malthusians, and eugenicists... more »


Openness and its discontents. Participation, transparency, collaboration: The great promises of the Internet aren't what they seem... more »


The midcentury male writer: angry, bighearted, loving, hungry for fame, fiercely competitive, tragic, drink-soaked. William Styron knew all too well ... more »


Over beer in an Oxford pub, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis talked torture, Tertullian, bores, odd place names, and the revitalization of Christian intellectual life... more »


One of the functions of Nazism was social advancement, and few Nazis were as opportunistic as Joseph Goebbels. He embraced barbarism, but that was hardly unusual... more »


The editorial license of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. They stripped fairy tales of cruelty, licentiousness, rococo delirium, sophisticated comic irony... more »


The essayist Max Beerbohm was always more lauded than read. Adored by the likes of Virginia Woolf, he earned a reputation that stranded him on a pedestal... more »


Challenges of a Bloomsbury childhood: growing up in a ménage à trois, being courted by a parent’s former lover, paternity secrets, emotional blackmail... more »


Max Brod was a middling, if prolific, writer. He was also, of course, a close friend of Kafka. Together they explored museums, theaters – and brothels... more »


Marriage, a fraught and mysterious institution, inspires both passion and pragmatism. Gabriel García Márquez called it “the conjugal conspiracy”... more »


Whether glass, ruby red, or furry slippers; winged boots or glowing-hot iron shoes; footwear is a recurrent fairy-tale motif. Why?... more »


Everything you know about perception is wrong – and it’s the fault of Western philosophers, starting with Descartes. Or so John Searle would have you think... more »


The first literary duel: Hector and Achilles. Among the last: Allen Tate against Karl Shapiro, in 1948. The unlikeliest weapon: unsold books... more »


In defense of pragmatic pessimism. As a corrective to the deluded optimism of the happiness industry, worrying is more essential than ever... more »


Essays & Opinions

In praise of boredom. Society worships multitasking, purposefulness, and returns on investment. Why bother with art or literature? Claire Messud explains... more »


The belief system of Silicon Valley can't account for a plateau of progress. But expectations have outrun reality, says John Markoff. 2045 is going to look a lot like today... more »


What is a book cover? A skin, a membrane, a safeguard, a translation from text to image, an anxious effort to corral the boundless contents inside... more »



More data have been created and stored in the past 15 years than in the previous history of humanity. To handle the information glut, read avant-garde poetry... more »


Handwriting is by no means obsolete in a digital age. Consider the useful alchemy in which language, the body, and our sense of identity intertwine... more »


Joseph Mitchell’s journalism didn’t stand out. Then he met the anthropologist Franz Boas. Mitchell’s reporting absorbed the ethnographic insights of social science... more »


Laughter, forgetting, and French. Milan Kundera’s shoddy memory, his run-ins with history, his abandoning Czech – what did it all mean?... more »


What good is the study of ethics if it doesn't make us more ethical? It breaks down strictures and transports us to wild, unpredictable places... more »


When your book gets a bad review, you want to lash back. It won’t turn out well. J.C. Hallman knows – but still... more »


“There is no reading,” said Nabokov, “only rereading.” Is it only on a second (or fifth) pass that a text fully opens? Tim Parks investigates... more »


Anxiety was the defining quality of postwar life. Ours is the age of creepiness and the creepy critic: fastidious, erudite, tendentious... more »


Hannah Arendt, pariah. Her life, ideas, and writings isolated her from the intellectuals of her day. They also made her uniquely cosmopolitan... more »


You gaze at length upon your bookshelves, fussing over bent pages and scuffed spines. Is your obsession a mark of culture or vain superficiality?... more »


Robert Louis Stevenson was a surpassingly odd man of charm and charisma. He was also maddeningly self-involved. Ego fueled his imagination... more »


Where morality meets rationalism. Is Peter Singer’s “effective altruism” the apotheosis of ethics, or an unempathetic, politically naive, elitist doctrine?... more »


ISIS is sadistic, but it taps an ancient fantasy: the return of a ruler who can transcend dreary, piecemeal politics and make a world without compromise... more »


The great kvetch of the English department: Enrollments are down because students care only about money. But is the problem students or their professors?... more »


Was the ancient world a hotbed of esotericism, in which philosophers self-censored, smuggling subversive ideas between the lines? Not exactly ... more »


Forget the gossip and trivia factoids — what did Susan Sontag stand for? Seriousness of purpose, patience of intellect, education of the heart... more »


To feel born too late, and to find that an ennobling failure, are very Czech emotions. And they permeate the work of a very Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal... more »


“The love song, whether from Shakespeare or his lessers, is to the currency of our feelings what the dollar bill is to our economy, the dining-room table to our family life – the necessary, inevitable thing.”... more »


Wealth, trade, technological development, the emergence of cities, more comfort and consumption: For it all, we have war to thank... more »


Once the shocks no longer shock, and the taboos are shattered, what will be left of high culture is sentimental nihilism. Popular culture is a necessary corrective.... more »


We live in technological times. Everything is optimized. It’s time to revive a humanistic tradition of robust criticism. Time to revive Arnold Toynbee... more »


John Berryman: In his youth, a splendid dancer; later, a nervous, erratic man; finally, a broken alcoholic – and brilliant poet... more »


Nota Bene

  • Editing Bellow
  • E.L. Doctorow, R.I.P.
  • Remains in Yeats's grave
  • Writers and islands
  • Hockney does LA again
  • Don't hurry greatness
  • Vidal's feuds
  • Soccer moms
  • Endurance-lit
  • Godot, Eurocrat

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New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week.

Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."



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