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Articles of NoteSecret of Playboy’s success: “It was a Midwestern magazine, designed for people there.” But now, old dear, it’s off to the Coast...more» Mixing perfumes, or “layering” them, as it’s said, is like going crazy with pizza toppings–you, of course, being the pizza...more» Carlos Fuentes, prolific Mexican novelist, polemicist, diplomat, is dead at 83... NY Times... Wash Post... LA Times... NPR... Telegraph... Guardian... WSJ... Independent... Daily Beast... BBC... Chron of Higher Ed... Financial Times... Mexican food has become a better metaphor for America than the melting pot. Want Tater Tots in that burrito?... more» Young “knowledge economy” workers moving to Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit. It’s not just the cheap housing. It’s a demand for decay... more» Willy Loman couldn’t afford a ticket to today’s Death of a Salesman, where audiences gaze upon the middle class at a smug distance... more» We shape thoughts with our hands as well as our words. But don’t give the thumbs up in Iran unless you mean “up yours”... more» The menhaden, a small fish, is big business in the Atlantic, where predation involves not just ecology, but also economics and politics... more» Judging restaurants by what comes out of the kitchen: 50 years ago it was a novelty, initiated by Craig Claiborne, the first foodie... more» Because good theology makes for good humor, The Daily Show has more fun with exegetics than any other show on television... more» Cornel West, that defiantly public intellectual, is leaving Princeton University to express his “own prophetic Christian identity.”... more» If we are governed mostly by unconscious urges, then brain science might demystify the human condition. Are we automatons?... more» What was the telephone call? Yes, “was.” Talking on the phone is so passé. You have to do that whole chit-chat thing... more» The storytelling animal. Fiction is no mere escapist fantasy. Something about pages and print actually makes us better people... more» What becomes of a man who sacrifices credibility for political gain? He ends up marooned with a wife, five chihuahuas, and no influence... more» When it comes to making big bucks on the black market, drugs, firearms, and money laundering are sure things. Almost as lucrative: stolen art... more» They look innocuous, even inviting, especially the big, leathery, cushy ones. But don’t be fooled: Chairs are dangerous. Very dangerous... more» Percy Bysshe Shelley had good looks and a belief in his own genius. He also had a knack for inspiring suicide among the women in his life... more» Qaddafi was defeated with Libyan blood and NATO brawn. But it also took info warriors – like a mom in Paris – to depose the tyrant ... more» What do Japanese tea ceremonies and Ponzi schemes have in common? Although social phenomena, they behave like biological cells... more» Northrop Frye knew scholars more intelligent or better trained than he was. But he had something else. “I had genius. No one else had that”... more» Mullahs and masturbation. When clerics turn sexologists, the results tend to be strange. Look no further than Iran, where all sex is political... more» Nica de Koenigswarter, the Peggy Guggenheim of jazz, devoted her life to Thelonious Monk. Was she using him? Was he using her?... more» Susan Gubar knows about suicide. Three grandparents killed themselves. Her father did, too. Hollowed out by cancer, she’s been tempted... more» Art and science. We can’t understand the humanities without understanding the cognitive processes that make them possible, says E.O. Wilson... more» God created dinosaurs and humans, and they walked together. The evidence might be weak. But in Glen Rose, Texas, the conviction is strong... more» Darwin thought sexual selection shaped our taste and talent for music. So did bone flutists live the lives of prehistoric rock stars?... more» Who is Robert Shiller? A Cassandra on high alert for economic bubbles? Or a hopeless utopian who believes that finance is a force for good?... more» So you’ve reached middle age. You’re wrinkly and thick around the middle. Think of it this way: You’re not declining, you’re developing... more» We are living a contradiction: In an age of instant communication, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. Is Facebook making us lonely?... more» Afterlife of an artist. When a genius dies, trouble ensues. Those charged with protecting the maestro’s legacy so very often screw it up... more» Pencil-stained perfectionist. Robert Caro’s is a wonderful mania, his epic biographies a window into how publishing used to work... more» Fifty years from now, there will be only 10 universities in the world delivering higher education. Sebastian Thrun explains... more» The Titanic is about more than morbid fascination: technological hubris, race, class, gender. Our obsessions were in place long before she set sail... more» Primal politics. Want to understand the link between evolution and ideology? Forget taxes or guns; focus on jazz, masturbation, and gardening... more» Have fiction and philosophy parted ways? Novelists used to take abstract questions and make them real. Now, it seems, writers don’t even try... more» Physics has undermined logic. Even nothingness is not what it seemed. The universe is devoid of meaning. That’s not such a bad thing... more»... more» Intoxication is making a comeback. Ecstasy and LSD treat PTSD. Pot shrinks tumors. Mushrooms relieve depression. Why the change?... more» A home-goods behemoth with a knack for social order buys acres of urban blight, turning it into a chic address. Ikea is building a city... more» Pairing up Picasso. She was the perfect mistress, John Richardson thought. “Big breasts, big buttocks, not much in between, that’s what he liked”... more» From psychoanalysis to neuroscience, Eric Kandel has been driven to ask: How could people listen to Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?... more» Can punk aerobics, speed dating, and “edgy” book clubs save libraries? Not likely. But these days no gambit seems too unseemly or too desperate... more» Dartmouth Man is a boorish lout who imagines himself as rough-edged but charming – not, in short, a “douchey, superpolished Yalie”... more» From “Aaron’s rod” to “zydeco,” the DARE is a monument to a man who had the temerity to undertake a gigantic task – and not worry why... more» Have you ever thought of humanity as a cowering infant with only a faint sense of what’s possible? Nick Bostrom has... more» Hilton Kramer didn’t fear making enemies. The champion of high culture, an implacable foe of the trendy and the fashionable, is dead at 84… NY Times... City Journal... New Criterion... LA Times... Wash Post... WSJ... NY Observer... Deborah Solomon... Laurie Fendrich... John Podhoretz... Guardian Eugene O’Neill never staged Long Day’s Journey during his lifetime. It was too painful. Rarely has a playwright stripped himself so bare. more» In Shanghai, Richard Wolin asks a guide about life on the weekend. “We don’t have weekends,” she says. The will to modernize never rests... more» The swaggering, gnomic Hemingway of lore is due for a reappraisal. Papa’s prose was best before it congealed into biblically stylized patter... more» No mere cad, Casanova was a spy, astrologer, friend of Voltaire. History’s greatest lover? Maybe. Enlightenment polymath? Definitely... more» The thesaurus has been derided as “a calculator for the lexically lazy.” Yet Plath treasured hers. Dylan Thomas, too. Best keep it on a high shelf... more» Is Chomsky’s half-century reign over linguistics at an end? The wily octogenarian has a knack for outmaneuvering adversaries... more» Menand, Mendelsohn, Buruma, maybe Alex Star. Who will take over The New York Review of Books when Robert Silvers puts down his red pen?... more» Conversation is performance art. Raconteurs are erudite entertainers, quoting Yeats and quaffing Scotch. Can that be taught?... more» One day an ebullient and prolific hacker vanished from the Web. Blog, Twitter feed, open-source code: gone. It’s called infosuicide... more» What does Eric Kandel, who’s spent the bulk of his remarkable career fixated on sea-snail neurons, know about art and aesthetics? A lot... more» Everything can be bought and sold. As a result, society is more affluent – and more debased, says Michael Sandel... more» Every week, Martin Kemp hears from people convinced they’ve found a lost Leonardo. One day someone really did. “I experienced a frisson”... more» Poe is often regarded with at least a hint of condescension. So here goes: He is the worst writer ever to have a claim to greatness... more» “Am I or am I not going to have a martini?” Charles Murray will have a martini. Wine, too. Why not? Sobriety isn’t a “founding virtue”... more» Sotheby’s is a world unto itself. Marble floors; inflated egos; shellacked, graying hair; and propositioning of female employees... more» Big computers and complex algorithms battered financial markets. Now the quants behind that debacle are turning to the social sciences... more» Our mental lives depend on the brain, says Anthony Gottlieb, but our behavior is not best understood by looking inside it... more» From cutting-edge venture to quaint gimmick: Hypertext splintered the idea of narrative linearity, then made itself irrelevant... more» Want to understand the states of the former Soviet Union? Scrap political science and get acquainted with Gogol, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky... more» James Q. Wilson, political scientist, “broken-windows” theorist, “the smartest man in America,” is dead at 80... Boston Globe... NY Times... LA Times... WSJ... Chron of Higher Ed... Arthur Brooks... George Will... Alan Wolfe... Harvey Mansfield... Mark Kleiman... Roger Kimball... Heather Mac Donald... Kay Hymowitz... Jeremy Rabkin... Steven Teles... Christopher DeMuth... Francis Fukuyama Math reduces pretty things like the moon to ugly things like orbital periods. Yet a concise equation can reveal the magic of pure thought... more» The Anglosphere in decline? Nonsense. Talk of a debt-saddled, graying, decadent West sliding toward a cliff is exaggerated – wildly... more» The killing graph. A 46-year old statistician’s ability to quantify mass atrocities has launched a data revolution in the human-rights world... more» Power, money, expertise: The air at Davos is thick with self-regard, but also self-doubt. The Economic Forum is a minuet of status distinctions... more» Intellectual life in the Internet age. How to explain TED? It’s where the smart and the rich pretend they have something in common... more» Henry Markram is building a supercomputer simulation of the brain, integrating all of neuroscience. Brilliant or boondoggle?... more» The Hebrew University’s Talmud department is full of methodical types parsing footnotes on footnotes. What drives them: truth or vanity?... more» You talk to God, you’re praying; God talks to you, you’re nuts. Jerusalem has a lot of nuts. Pesach Lichtenberg meets most of them... more» Errol Morris believes there are no relative truths, only true truths. Maybe that’s why the postmodernist Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at him... more» The brain science of bizarre behavior. If someone wants to, say, amputate his perfectly healthy arm, the call goes out to V.S. Ramachandran... more» What does it mean when a day goes missing from history? It happened on Samoa, where the arrow of time was arbitrarily bent... more» Extracanonical oddity: Invasion of the Space Invaders, the much-discussed but rarely seen madwoman of a book in Martin Amis’s attic...more» The plans for Germania, the Nazi dream city, ignored humans. Hitler was interested only in buildings, not the people who might inhabit them... more» Bikinis and burkas. Marseille may become the first Muslim-majority city in Western Europe. Can it remain a beacon of cosmopolitan harmony?... more» The Black-Scholes equation was the financial sector’s Midas formula: It turned everything into gold. Until it didn’t, sending markets into a tailspin... more» Armed with expertise from writing two books on the Haymarket riot, a scholar went toe-to-toe with Wikipedia. He lost, badly... more» The Santa Fe Institute is a refuge for scientists frustrated by academe’s narrowness. Now come the humanists. What would C.P. Snow think?... more» The warrior hypothesis. Men commit 90 percent of murders. The brutality is biological, in part. But power, not gender, determines belligerence... more» Innovation stagnation. Enough with peer review and grant proposals, says Peter Thiel. Let’s just write checks to the smartest scientists... more» Social-science pugilist. The proudly politically incorrect Charles Murray is back, and he still can’t resist the urge to provoke. Cue the scholarly outrage... more» As a teenager, Richard Handl mixed explosives in his garden. As an adult, he tried to split the atom in his kitchen. Be glad he’s not your neighbor... more» Wallace Stevens sold insurance, William Carlos Williams was a physician, T.S. Eliot was a banker. To hell with starving for your art... more» His name is synonymous with brutality, and he had a penchant for rape and pillage, but is Attila the Hun unfairly maligned?... more» At home with mass murderers. The private photo albums of Himmler and Streicher are simultaneously bizarre and disconcertingly normal... more» In Brazil, every student studies philosophy – Plato, ethics, the will of the gods. Impressive, right? Academic philosophers don’t think so... more» Artists in the Arab world tend to be politically engaged, says Adonis, who is no exception. But has the Arab Spring made him irrelevant?... more» Few questions divide the classical-music world as starkly as this: Philip Glass – mind-numbing bore or bliss-inducing genius?... more» The adolescent brain. Children are reaching puberty earlier and entering adulthood later. The result: Considerable weirdness... more» Liberals are a cloistered moral tribe, deaf to outside arguments, says Jonathan Haidt. Maybe. Where’s the biological proof?... more» Only dalits handle waste disposal in India. Their ostracization is harsh, but their hold on the housecleaning market is absolute... more» The bourgeois bargain – creative destruction in exchange for shared prosperity – is crumbling. Can entrepreneurship survive?... more» Should philosophy ask questions but not give answers? “No. It can’t be!” says Alain de Botton. “Civilization should transmit the best ideas”... more» The other Vitruvian Man. The image of a man inside a circle and a square was thought to be the work of Leonardo. But the genius had company... more» It’s been said that a biographer is a novelist under oath. A life story cannot be told with facts alone. It must be marshaled to maximum literary effect... more» Prisons and profits. Is there any greater disconnect between public good and private interests than the rise of corporate-owned jails?... more» Fierce and magnetic, Lucian Freud seduced his models into the ordeal of posing. “Those eyes would be peering in: peering and piercing”... more» The danger facing America isn’t imperial overstretch, it’s the idea that decline is inevitable. Decline is a choice. Robert Kagan explains... more» Freud today is disparaged, even condemned. And no wonder: He didn’t indulge our taste for self-help platitudes... more» Who is Vladimir Putin? A master of persuasion, not coercion. No ordinary KGB-trained thug, he doesn’t destroy enemies. He manipulates them... more» On the island of Lampedusa, Africa is cast upon the shore of Europe. It isn’t pretty. “I watched mothers throw their babies into the sea”... more» Cremation is in, metal coffins are out. On the agenda: How to manage mass fatalities. Welcome to the National Funeral Directors Conference... more» Master of understatement. Darwin’s only mention of humans in Origin is on page 488. “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man.” Indeed... more» A world without war. What a bunch of naive, hippie hogwash, right? Don’t snicker, says John Horgan: The end of violence is possible... more» Cities used to accommodate people. Now they’re built around parking. The result in Los Angeles is collective irrational behavior... more» Where have all the brides gone? Parents’ preference for boys might turn China into a nation of bachelors... more» In 1976, Ray Bradbury had an epiphany: “I don’t want to be accepted by certain intellectuals. If Mailer likes me, I’ll kill myself.”... more» When selling anything, even Communion wafers, brand matters. “We’re proud to put our name on what’ll be the body of Jesus”... more» Is the Arab Spring a revolution or a palace coup? Will there be wholesale political change, or will one ruling clique merely replace another?... more» Present at the creation. In 1604 scholars began to rethink the Bible. Their work wasn’t a miracle, but it’s a masterpiece, if a flawed one... more» The maestro. Gesticulating, pointing, urging, cajoling – conducting an orchestra can feel ridiculous. “You’re not showing that pizzicato!”... more» Mengele’s skull. He lived out his life on the lam, evading capture. But his bones reveal the value of forensic anthropology to human rights... more» From Wittenberg to Facebook. Martin Luther was the original social-media revolutionary. Via pamphlet and song, the Reformation went viral... more» Authors’ ability to endlessly edit their digital work will overturn publishing. Maybe books will improve, but movable type is easily abused... more» Socrates and Plato bickering in Athens, Irving Howe and Irving Kristol sparring in New York: cities always give rise to new ideas... more» There’s a disconnect between how the world works and how we perceive it. The result: The more we know, the less we understand... more» Mainstream economics is vulnerable. Disillusion is rife. Here come the fringy thinkers with big ideas born on blogs... more» Helen Frankenthaler is dead. She rescued abstract art from its excesses, but her legacy is already in peril. Greatness abhors a vacuum... more» What explains high-energy cosmic rays? A trailer-park owner has an answer, but no Ph.D. Yes, he’s a crank, but he knows something about physics... more» Heroism and egotism. The war in Libya was launched by statesmen like Hillary Clinton and Sarkozy. Oh, and don't forget Bernard-Henri Lévy... more» Once hailed as a pioneer in the study of cognition, Marc Hauser has now joined a long line of scientific hoaxsters, forgers, and data-cookers... more» Fame is fickle, as Marie Tussaud knew. But as the bar to becoming a celebrity drops, why does the attraction to her waxworks grow?... more» How to rebuild a city? Lure the “creative class” with cosmopolitan amenities. Makes sense. Too bad it doesn’t work... more» The ethical eater. The best way to save animals and protect the environment is to not eat meat, right? Wrong... more» The multiverse idea. Let’s face it, says Alan Lightman, physics has hit a dead end. We are living in a universe incalculable by science... more» China might be ascendant, but it remains terrible at soccer. Players are too incompetent not only to win matches, but even to rig them... more» Vaclav Havel is dead. The Czech president, dissident, and playwright believed in the power of the powerless. He was 75... NY Times... Wash Post... Telegraph... LA Times... Guardian... Bloomberg... Independent... NY Sun... Economist... Max Fisher... David Remnick... Timothy Garton Ash... Michael Weiss |
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New BooksNations are rich or poor because of government and social institutions. But the decay rate of organic matter plays a part, too... more» An absence of polish is what leaves the sense that Susan Sontag was not so much writing a journal as observing herself writing a journal... more» For Leo Strauss and his acolytes among political theorists, it is always September 1938, and we are always in Munich... more» The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is to be taken literally as well as figuratively, which says far more about the author than about the subject... more» Bernard Lewis has long been determined to learn “the history of the other side,” and to bring it swarming to life... more» Jean Jaurès, left-wing hero in France, was killed by a madman. Now his latter-day confreres fight for ownership of his memory... more» In a bottom-line world, what’s the problem with, say, a market in licenses to hunt down convicted murderers in the woods?... more» Welcome to Orwell in reverse: The state, rather than elevate war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself... more» Ah, the battles over proper language. Delight in pedantry, it seems, is nine-tenths of the charm of English grammar... more» “The Van Gogh religion” grew when the artist’s self-doubt became symptomatic of the culture. Now doubts plague the works themselves... more» Lillian Hellman may well prove more important as a figure of her time than as a writer. In any event, her time is long past... more» Musicologists tend to discuss harmony in technical terms. So they write knowingly about Duke Ellington and miss the central mystery of the music... more» What meritocracy? Higher education perpetuates privilege and inequality, says Richard Wolin, and it’s a distinctly American badge of shame... more» Mark Levin read the classic works – Plato, Hobbes, Marx – to diagnose what ails America. The result is a best seller. How can so bad a book sell so well?... more» Scientism is folly. This has been shown time and time again. And yet, says John Gray, it is another folly to think that scientism will go away... more» “What is time?” Augustine asked in his Confessions. Fifteen hundred years later, we’re still confused. So what makes us tick? Biology and culture... more» Psychology is too inward-looking – genes, brains, pharmaceuticals – for answers to our problems. But what about clues to culture and class?... more» Trollope and Dickens mocked America, but Tocqueville didn’t. It helped that America’s interpreter couldn’t register nuances in English... more» Masculinity has always been Martin Amis’s great subject. No other male writer has so mercilessly skewered the delusions of male grandeur... more» Just as vexing as the question of why Rome failed is how it managed to survive for so long. We still don’t have a convincing answer... more» When it came to plundering the treasures of the Americas, Europeans had help. American Indians had their own way of exploiting the environment... more» Jean-François Champollion, father of Egyptology, was a radical revolutionary with a taste for trashy novels. Overwork killed him at the age of 41... more» Eugene O’Neill was the laureate of eloquent losers: prostitutes, deadbeats, fringe-dwellers. A morose alcoholic himself, he knew misery... more» Lillian Hellman was a “bitch with balls,” said Elia Kazan. That’s unfair. She was slippery, acerbic, and politically naive, but not a cartoon villain... more» Parking has been a problem ever since Julius Caesar banned chariots from downtown Rome. Our solution – surface lots – is a design disaster... more» Ever hummed “Moon River” or had the theme of The Pink Panther lodged in your head? If so, you’ve been grabbed by the Henry Mancini groove... more» Is Caligula’s reputation as a vicious megalomaniac a bum rap? Not entirely. His behavior served a purpose: satirizing the Roman elite... more» “The best allies of men’s dominance have been, quite unwittingly, innocent infants.” Does that make any sense? It does to a French feminist... more» To understand Vladimir Putin, you need to understand his idol, Yuri Andropov. To both men, opponents are not mere rivals but enemies of the state... more» What does it mean that a piece of writing is “literary”? What quality connects Hume and Chekhov, Bataille and Cicero? Terry Eagleton has an answer... more» The closer one looks at the age of the avant-garde, the more confounding it becomes. How did people so maladroit change the world’s imagination?... more» Dwight Macdonald’s antitotalitarianism did him credit, but it can’t explain his eminence. What does: He was incapable of writing a dull sentence... more» The very same qualities that made Pauline Kael a difficult person – lack of introspection, of self-awareness, and of restraint – liberated her as a critic... more» Anti-foodie foodie. No organic arugula for Tyler Cowen, just genetically modified meat and strip-mall ethnic eateries. Unpretentious, huh? Maybe not... more» Franco, Hitler, and Stalin pursued a common goal: Destroy Europe’s political elite, and tilt the continent’s focus from colonization to self-colonization... more» E.O. Wilson has always relished a good fight. Now he’s turned on the ideas about human nature that made him famous. Here comes the backlash... more» You Americans are so serious, Stuart Hampshire told Susan Sontag. It wasn’t meant as a compliment. But she wore it like a badge of honor... more» Health and the humanities. A new field says literature is good medicine. That is surely true, and well and good, but it is not the point of literature... more» Cubism, pointillism, synchromism: Thomas Hart Benton “wallowed in every cockeyed ism that came along” before finding realism... more» When it came to critical judgments, Philip Larkin had one question: “As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?”... more» Few accused Susan Sontag of a light touch. Yet she implored herself: smile less, be serious. “I dread that my sufferings will not be worthy of me”... more» When David Koker was arrested, in 1943, he started a diary. It survives as perhaps the most nonchalant but complex portrait of life in a concentration camp... more» There are anthropologists – dispassionate sorts squeezing meaning from survey data – then there’s Michael Taussig, the field’s shaman-like oddball... more» “Style is substance,” says George Steiner. But style can overwhelm substance, and poetry can inhibit thought. As for Steiner’s style: High art needs high priests... more» Chastity and lechery, purity and debauchery – attitudes about sex do change. What didn’t change for centuries was the role of women... more» Date night with God. What if the Almighty isn’t a distant, foreboding figure of judgment, but a regular guy who enjoys quiet dinners and cuddling?... more» At the far end of theoretical physics, truth and fantasy blur. The glory of science, says Freeman Dyson, is to imagine more than we can prove... more» Stanley Hauerwas fancies himself a realist. But his theology of nonwar is a morally perverse creed of eschatological madness... more» Homework and guesswork, reconstruction and speculation: That’s always been the stuff of biographies. Still is. Don’t be fooled by newfangled methods... more» What’s got Leon Wieseltier in a sour mood? The much-touted New American Haggadah, an incompetent work devoid of spiritual and intellectual ambition... more» Jonah Lehrer is the precocious wunderkind of popular science. He’s an affable, Gladwellian liaison to the world of fMRI’s. But is he credible?... more» “Becoming a member of the Communist Party nullifies all trace of intelligence,” Dali warned Buñuel, who clung to two ideals: Stalinism and Surrealism... more» Freud’s ideas were unfalsifiable; he exaggerated his own originality; he suppressed criticism. It’s his faults that make him an interesting thinker... more» “I am happy,” wrote Leonardo, a young Etruscan from tiny Vinci. It was fleeting. His were the insecurities of a spotty education and an illegitimate birth... more» For a moment, film criticism excited, surprised, and astonished. Think Ebert and Kael, both learned, literate, and smart, but never academic... more» A celebrated author tackles a big subject. Promising, right? Too bad A.N. Wilson’s biography of Hitler is an error-filled, cliché-ridden mess... more» Sex is a force with a will of its own. For those who hoped to reform the human heart, reality has been a harsh teacher. Pascal Bruckner explains... more» Freud and friends. The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society was a fraternity – albeit a dysfunctional one, which reeked like a cult... more» So you want be a historian and reach a wide audience? Be like Barbara Tuchman and skip grad school–which would ruin you as a writer... more» “Quelle catastrophe!,” Beckett’s wife exclaimed when she learned that her husband had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She knew her man... more» Jonathan Haidt delights in showing how philosophers get it wrong. Funny that his work is a rehash of moral philosophy, served up as science... more» How does a fatalistic, damaged man cope after surviving a massacre? By embracing satire, and flashing a smirk at the absurd... more» The moral significance of people eating people. Cannibals are mental deviants, revolting curiosities. But they were once central to views of human nature... more» The history of life around the Mediterranean is a tale of technology, from chariots and warships to cheap air travel and the bikini... more» The locavore life. Food is now a lesson, and taste a moral test. The narcissism of ethical consumption has debased eating into an act of penance... more» As a student, Milton Friedman took 87 pages of notes on Keynes’s Treatise on Money. “General framework will endure longer than details.” Indeed... more» Listening to lithium. In 1974, a groggy Philip K. Dick became convinced that the IRS, FBI, left-wing academics, and Richard Nixon were all after him... more» A combative Buddhist, Steve Jobs lived a life of paradoxes. Here’s one more. Apple is suffocating the Internet... more» Writers are “dildos for rent”; punk rock was a time before the “furry testicles of disco descended”: Has James Wolcott met a sexual allusion he doesn’t like?... more» Philosopher on the throne. Catherine the Great, friend of Voltaire, transformed Russia by dint of her implacable will and insatiable sexual appetite... more» Bombastic and narcissistic. Woe to those on Conrad Black’s bad side, like the “sociopathic” Richard Posner, “a dreary, unreasoning pustule of animus”... more» Pear of Anguish, Heretic’s Fork, Spanish Tickler: Names of pubs? Microbrews? Brands of condoms? No, instruments of torture... more» Rise of the technocrats. Economic equations and graphs have their place, but they are no substitute for political debates about how to run society... more» Joseph Roth’s letters are harrowing. A destitute drunk with an ailing wife, he knew what was in store for Europe, unlike his friend Stefan Zweig... more» New drugs make us smarter, stronger, and longer-lived. Do they also threaten human dignity? It depends. Is death central to a meaningful life?... more» Cardinal Richelieu’s mastery of 17th-century court politics is by no means archaic. He knew something about divided, indebted superpowers... more» Those who believe that religious thinkers lack intellectual vitality are better left alone with their childish certainties, says John Gray... more» Surfing the Internet, says William Gibson, is like “rummaging in the collective global mind. Somewhere there must be a site that contains everything we’ve lost”... more» Philosophy is in a bad way. In search of something new, scholars are venturing down back alleys of thought. Do we need 60 pages on snobbery?... more» Ben Jonson was always getting into difficult positions – with colleagues, friends, the law. So it’s fitting that he was buried vertically: head down, feet up... more» What’s the difference between story-truth and happening-truth? Where’s the line in nonfiction between cheating and distilling, artfulness and fabrication?... more» String theory is dazzling but unverified. There’s zero proof that it's true. Yet, like fringe cranks, string theorists labor away, unencumbered by reality... more» “Crazy, debauched, metropolitan, anonymous, gargantuan, futuristic – an infernal cesspool and paradise in one.” Ah, to be in Berlin in the 1920s... more» The Bible, said Thomas Paine, has corrupted mankind. But the good book’s genocidal passages weren’t always used as a bludgeon against religion... more» The life of Martin. From teenage yob to shameless swot, Amis was never one for earnest political causes, or the tedium of bien-pensant fashion... more» Books about poverty typically propose solutions or decry the problem. Katherine Boo is up to something else. She shows how poverty is lived... more» What’s the meaning of monsters? They’re a moral compass: testing our ethics, shaping our politics, spurring science, and piquing our curiosity... more» “She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the drawer and bullets in a tin of Pledge.” And you thought you had mommy issues... more» The Victorian public could tolerate tawdriness in an artist as long as he behaved with discretion. That was not Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s way... more» In the 1920s, a dealer selling forged Van Goghs dazzled the German art scene. Was this an early symptom of Weimar’s impending collapse?... more» “Intellectuals with job security in a university carry a responsibility in troubled times,” argued Tony Judt. And so he was outspoken, sometimes to a fault... more» Criticism is secondary to writing novels, said Lionel Trilling, who published just one work of fiction. It wasn’t great, and he couldn’t settle for merely good... more» What happened to Sinology? Recent books, scholarly and popular, suggest a turn toward rank boosterism, historical whitewashing, and hagiography... more» Film schools are trade schools playacting as art schools and moonlighting in business courses. Their value is dubious, but the demand is insatiable... more» The wages of modernism. Its inheritance has been enriching or impoverishing or even deadly, but don't look to the academy for a clear-eyed assessment... more» Nietzsche is put to use by his American advocates as a crusader for truth, a debunker of superstition. But what about his penchant for cruelty?... more» So you’re trilingual. Big deal. Harold Williams spoke every language at the League of Nations; Kenneth Hale learned Finnish on a flight to Helsinki... more» Miscarriages of justice almost always suit somebody. That was the case in France in the 1890s. Many had a lot to gain from Alfred Dreyfus’s conviction... more» Only at Vauxhall Gardens, a pioneer of mass entertainment, could Handel perform for an 18th-century Londoner being serviced by a sex worker... more» Despised and adored, Nietzsche was the original culture warrior. Though he was read by an eccentric few, we still live in his intellectual shadow... more» What happened to Caitlin Flanagan? The once-feisty contrarian who urged wives to nag less and put out more has turned painfully tame... more» Man of ideas. Facing death, Tony Judt took on the air of a cuddly social democrat. He wasn’t. Temperamentally and intellectually, he was a bruiser... more» Joseph Roth’s novels were melancholic but tempered with joy. In his letters, however, his unsparing misanthropy found free expression... more» How to invent a religion: Avoid precise terms, like “brain”; use fuzzier words, like “soul.” Create a mythology. Sell it hard. That’s the L. Ron Hubbard way... more» How to invent a religion: Avoid precise terms, like “brain”; use fuzzier words, like “soul.” Create a mythology. Sell it hard. That’s the L. Ron Hubbard way... more» More Persian and Indian than Arab, The Arabian Nights is the stuff of Occidental fantasy. What explains Scheherazade’s enduring allure?... more» Nine books in 13 years, two appointments at Harvard – Niall Ferguson is busy. Perhaps that explains why his new book is a rambling mess... more» The myth of the guru. Derek Parfit commands respect. But his masterwork is a grand attempt to elaborate a misguided perspective... more» Saint or crank? By turns a pleasure-seeking aristocrat and a peasant guru of antimaterialism, Tolstoy was both monstrous and moral... more» Stephen Hawking is brilliant. And his paralysis makes him a symbol of the unfettered mind. His real genius, however, is for self-promotion... more» Other people’s beliefs. Religion is useful hokum, says Alain de Botton, because it keeps the masses in line. True? Perhaps. Patronizing? Definitely... more» Attention, novelty junkies: New is not always improved. Ideas that succeed are those that stick around long enough to become old... more» The Oxbridge don Hugh Trevor-Roper was a merciless polemicist. Then the man who reveled in destroying others’ careers destroyed his own... more» What does a philosopher look like? Handsome like Wittgenstein? Elegant like Beauvoir? Not exactly. Truth be told, philosophers look weird... more» Carrie Nation is dead, but prohibitionism lives on, despite a history of hypocrisy and failure. Self-righteousness, it seems, never goes out of style... more» Churchill wasn’t a beer man. French wine and champagne were more to his taste. But it was whiskey, above all, that “quickened his intellect”... more» Humans are master dissemblers. Before we can speak, we cry to manipulate our parents. We know why we fool others, but why do we fool ourselves?... more» To Wilhelm Reich, sexual repression was self-abuse. So unleash your inner “genital man” by jumping in an orgone box... more» Has the Internet altered our understanding of truth? So argues David Weinberger. It’s an ambitious thesis. Too bad it’s dubious and unoriginal... more» There is no God and no free will. Right and wrong don’t exist. Nor does love. There is, in fact, nothing Alex Rosenberg is unsure about... more»... more» Between 1915 and 1946, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe exchanged 25,000 pages of letters. They were never closer than when they were apart... more» Liu Xiaobo is charged by the Chinese government with the “crime of incitement to subvert state power.” He has the honor of being guilty... more» You wrote stories but destroyed people, Hemingway’s son told him. “Which is most important, your self-centered shit, the stories or the people?”... more» Roger Scruton doesn’t do ambiguity. He’s right, you’re wrong. And he can be a bully. But is he also one of the best philosophers of our time?... more» | |
Essays and OpinionBy speeding the change in middle-class courtship from parlor to public dating, the automobile did women no favor in the 1920s...more» Abstruse paper is published in scholarly journal. PR guy runs headlong with one conjecture. Journalists tart it up as “claim.” Result: Intelligent dinosaurs rule alien worlds!... more» A scientist suffused with a sense of wonder is one motivated researcher. That entirely human feeling merits being at the very inception of scientific inquiry... more» If death is bad for you, when is that so? Not now – you’re not dead. And when you are dead, you’re beyond all that. Consider Shelly Kagan’s analysis, while you can... more» James Q. Wilson: Witty, generous with his time, fair-minded, decent, and enormously damaging to the quality of American democracy... more» Accomplished as they are, the natural sciences are regarded as the gold standard of knowledge. But good science depends on the humanities – even philosophy... more» On a patrol in Afghanistan, house searches become demolition parties. “Cows: Taliban food. Sheep: Taliban food. Donkeys: Taliban transportation. Kill everything”... more» There’s a back story to The Avengers. It’s a story of loss, of a man Marvel Comics left behind as it grew from comic books to Hollywood blockbusters... more» A certain strain of development economics links nations’ wealth to IQ. Problem is, the data for such a premise are either sparse or phony... more» At his candy store in Bayonne, N.J., Herschel Silverman made milkshakes for Allen Ginsberg and wrote poetry of his own. “Cut the beatnik schmaltz,” the author of Howl told him... more» In rap artists’ furious response to the L.A. riots, neoliberals grasped the value of multiculturalism. Here was capitalist realism finding a market... more» The kids are definitely not all right. Want proof? Ask them how often they communicate with their parents. Terry Castle did. She was stunned, aghast, dumbfounded by what she learned... more» What conditions give rise to great artistic achievements? Wealth, urban centers, belief in God. Wait: What? Secularism is incompatible with creativity?... more» The blues were born out of victimhood, racism, and the search for solace. Well, yes, sort of. But the music also came from the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalog... more» Communism is dead, of course. So why are prominent intellectuals trying – successfully – to transform a blood-stained movement into a beautiful idea?... more» The culture of prizes, professorships, and political correctness is ruining poetry, says Marjorie Perloff. Will plagiarism come to the rescue?... more» Go ahead, call Will Self sesquipedalian. He’s proud of his affinity for obscure words, and dismayed at the decline of intellectually difficult art... more» “Before the crisis, I would have been very pleased to see that academics had a big impact on policy,” says Joseph Stiglitz. “But unfortunately that was bad for the world”... more» 1950’s America wasn’t an era of trivial, middlebrow taste. In fact, more people than ever were watching Shakespeare and reading Plato. Then the highbrows killed culture... more» Thomas Kuhn had a magnificent insight into how knowledge accumulates. Popular culture has made muck of his big idea. What’s left of Kuhn’s paradigm?... more» More and more, physics is encroaching on philosophy. No surprise that philosophers feel threatened. They should, says Lawrence Krauss. Science progresses, and philosophy doesn’t... more» Gertrude Stein: playful, radical, pre-postmodern, Jewish, lesbian. In short, a target in German-occupied France. But Stein survived just fine. How? She had a soft spot for fascism... more» Crisis of big science. The expansion of the universe is accelerating. Cosmologists have theories but little evidence. New satellites are needed. But who will pay for them?... more» William Empson was well known as an eccentric. It’s a tough reputation to live up to. But one night, he soared off the scale of weirdness. Clive James was there... more» Inequality is on the rise in America. That’s occasioned a lot of populist rhetoric but not much to show for it. Is 99 percent too big a category to be an effective political force?... more» Catastrophic thinking is on the rise. And why not? The economy is frail, the earth is overcrowded, the specter of war looms. But Pascal Bruckner is here to calm your nerves... more» Bad taste is good business in the art world. Offending propriety is the easiest way to attract notice. The more repulsive, the bigger the profits... more» Locke, Tocqueville, and Burke invoked the idea of civil society. So did Nathan Glazer and Robert Putnam. All of that is admirable, but also cause for suspicion... more» Death by treacle. The culture is awash in transparency, audacious disclosure, and candor. Why is it now assumed that private feelings are always relevant to public discourse?... more» “We shape our buildings,” Churchill said, “and afterwards our buildings shape us.” He might also have said: We shape our technologies, and afterwards our technologies shape us... more» Günter Grass has put his bitter criticism of Israel to verse. It’s not particularly remarkable as poetry. But as a lens into Grass’s mind, it’s fascinating... more» Rise of the gutless novelists. Where is today’s Tagore or Orwell? Wedged too tightly behind their laptops, have literary writers given up on politics?... more» Leaves of Grass confounded early reviewers. Whitman, it was said, mixed “Yankee transcendentalism and New York rowdyism.” The critic was wrong, but full of insight... more» Great art isn’t about skill, and Damien Hirst has little of that. Yet he does have a knack for finding beauty and charisma in the ordinary and familiar... more» How could an all-powerful, loving God permit the Holocaust? It’s a mystery, say some believers. That’s obscene, says Ron Rosenbaum. Such talk is the last refuge of theological scoundrels... more» Margaret Fuller was brilliant and obsessive and dreadful company. “The upper lip habitually uplifts itself,” Edgar Allan Poe said of her, “conveying the impression of a sneer”... more» Reading Adrienne Rich – poet, polemicist, revolutionary – is both a cerebral and a visceral experience, and an education in what it means to be a woman... more» Maureen Tkacik has a theory: The Atlantic is a “turgid mouthpiece for the plutocracy” and a “repository of shallow, lazy spin.” But a CIA front? Really?... more» Scientism is back. But the extravagant claims of the neuroutopians are premature at best. Good science ought to make us cautious; it tends to reveal complexity... more» The Closing of the American Mind has been called the “first shot in the culture wars.” True or not, it made Allan Bloom a pariah – a wealthy, jaunty, cheerful pariah... more» Here are the salient facts: The boy is a charming, flying, fearless adventurer who lives on an island. He’s immature, sure, but he’s immensely entertaining company... more» Criticism of a book is criticism of its author. The sting can linger for years. Kingsley Amis, however, took it in stride. A bad review could spoil breakfast, he said, but not lunch... more» The world’s most typical person is a 28-year old Han Chinese man with no bank account who earns less than $13,000 a year. Marx would not be surprised. About much else, he’d be shocked... more» Some things are too complicated to study. When a question stumps the physicists, chemists, biologists, and psychologists, says Noam Chomsky, it ends up with the novelists... more» Consciousness is seen no longer as the work of the soul, but of the brain. Now that philosophy has become a scientific pursuit, why not the rest of the humanities?... more» To be first is everything in science and art. Immortality is at stake. Nobel Prizes, too. Originality is a grand, ignoble, fruitless pursuit... more» An overmodest timidity has taken hold among high-style, personality-driven essayists like John Jeremiah Sullivan, who plays the doofus on the page. Why? It sells... more» Will science ever answer all the Big Questions? It’s premature to think so. Physics, neuroscience, and evolutionary psychology won’t explain everything. Philip Kitcher explains... more» The petulant and sometimes maladroit Václav Havel never became a shrewd politician, but he managed to remain a moral one. His example is more relevant than ever... more» Scholars in China used to be specialists and public intellectuals. Then the Communists took over. Now the specialists publish rubbish, and the public intellectuals aren’t public... more» Prada’s paradoxes. The mercurial doyenne of high-fashion is a droll contrarian. “To be a fashion designer, you must give up your brain”... more» Some concepts persist only because no one stops to consider that they’re meaningless, like “literary establishment.” There is no such thing. Geoff Dyer would know. He’s a member... more» Pity the liberals of the Muslim world. Extreme and perverse ideologues now hold sway. Their goal: narrow the limits of what everybody else is allowed to think... more» Museums were once tangible manifestations of idealism. But creeping professionalism and a bottom-line sensibility have taken a toll. What remains? A cafe with art... more» The debate about promoting democracy should be a practical one, so here’s the practical reality: Policy makers and scholars don’t know what they’re doing... more» Jeanne Proust was a nice lady, polite to her son. But she could also be niggling, infantilizing, and passive-aggressive. Yes, Marcel had mommy issues... more» Upon death, Christopher Hitchens was greeted by Orwell. Hitchens didn’t believe his eyes. “This is all a delusion, my dear boy,” Orwell told him, “but enjoy it while you can”... more» For Frank Kermode, who traveled among schools of literary criticism, poststructuralism was a country he visited from time to time, but where he never felt at home... more» Claude Lanzmann has for decades been a Zelig-like presence amid the Parisian intellectual bustle, Proust and Malraux rolled into one. Oh, and he bedded Beauvoir... more» War is meaningless brutality, without virtue or purpose. So goes the de rigueur view of right-thinking denizens of high culture. It’s the new old lie... more» The value of vice. Speaking ill of someone behind his back is unavoidable, even beneficial. And besides, it’s fun. There’s nothing so deeply human as gossip... more» Lauded for their “heroic self-awareness” and lambasted for an “indecent invasion of his own privacy,” the “Crack-Up” essays of F. Scott Fitzgerald marked the dawn of America’s confessional culture... more» The wisest fool. The much-feted postmodern semiotician Umberto Eco is never less than pleased with himself. Did you know that he has 50,000 books “in my various homes”?... more» Is atheism futile? Probably. Faith is a natural response to human ignorance. Besides, the history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses... more» Alan Turing at 100. What would the wartime code-breaker, who died in 1954, make of the neuroscience revolution? Maybe that the brain isn’t a computer after all... more» Anxiety, desire, fear, benevolence, greed, moral virtue, race, eugenics, xenophobia, women’s rights: What explains the many meanings of white bread?... more» Who but Elaine Pagels can drain the melodrama from the Book of Revelation, turning the climactic confrontation between good and evil into an anti-Christian polemic?... more» Classical conservatism is a theologically inflected, anti-egalitarian, reactionary ideology. What does that have to do with the conservative movement in America? Not much... more» “I will hate you till the day I die,” the thin-skinned Alain de Botton once told a reviewer. Now things are looking up. His self-help philosophy is catnip for the well-heeled in search of meaning... more» Has ever a fictional character so laid bare the horror of mortality as Ivan Ilych? Tolstoy was preoccupied with death – and his insights are now cropping up in medical journals... more» Why college matters. The view of higher education as an economic driver is a limited one, and one that endangers the future of liberal thought, says Andrew Delbanco... more» Are you a mysterian? The more we know about the brain, the less we understand how it creates consciousness, says Colin McGinn. Maybe the mind is a puzzle that can’t be solved... more» “Many books are read but some books are lived, so that words and ideas lose their ethereality and become experiences,” says Leon Wieseltier. “One’s books are one’s biography”... more» Want to understand women better? Simone de Beauvoir is of no help at all. Instead, pick up a real feminist document: a romance novel... more» In our immediate-gratification culture, which confuses information with knowledge, fiction has a receding claim on our attention. Is the novel’s heyday past?... more» Anxiety and influence. Amitava Kumar used to be enthralled by Salman Rushdie’s engaged, worldly prose. Then Kumar grew up and found that adulation had given way to disappointment... more» Homer goes global. From Cairo to Shanghai, Tokyo to Moscow, translations of The Iliad grow from a trickle to a flood. “The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music”... more» Galileo founded experimental physics and recast the relationship between science and faith. Not bad for a schlubby, sarcastic, wisecracking college dropout... more» An undergraduate at the time, Robert Coles mailed off a paper about William Carlos Williams to the man himself. The reply came scribbled on a prescription pad: “Not bad for a Harvard student”... more» The creamy expanse of a woman’s thigh, a lumpy sausage of a foot, a velvety patch of dog fur – in Lucian Freud’s paintings, the idiosyncrasies convey everything... more» We speak the “us against them” language of solidarity. But we’re social animals, says Richard Sennett, capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions... more» The magical incubator. How did a dim, poorly ventilated, absestos-ridden building at MIT become a hub of groundbreaking innovation?... more» Ireland took to it; Italy, too; but not England. The short story, after all, was no match for the Victorian novel. That is, until, the form founds its master, V.S. Pritchett... more» A born freelance. John Leonard’s prose--breezy, pun-filled, playful--was never ponderous or self-important. No one wrote cultural journalism quite like him... more» Elderschadenfreude, explains Sandra Tsing Loh, is the secret pleasure of hearing about aging parents who are even more impossible than yours. Prepare to experience it... more» The brain and the machine. The Enlightenment’s quest for mechanical life led not only to a new view of human nature, but also to the creation of a metal duck that could eat, digest, and defecate... more» The new censorship. Editors are no longer frightened of politicians but of Islamist violence, oligarchs, and CEO’s, says Nick Cohen. Ours is the age of bound and gagged journalism... more» There was a time when practically every Jewish kid wanted to play the violin, says the violinist Joshua Bell. Today the future of symphony orchestras rests on another group: Asians... more» Demagogic politicians, uncaring business titans, cunning union leaders, persistent unemployment: What would Dickens, poet of poverty, make of our own hard times?... more» How does a poet of despair survive in rock ʻn’ roll? Ideas are the engine of Leonard Cohen’s success. His ideas are old and radical and, on occasion, surprisingly persuasive... more» Touring the Wild West, Oscar Wilde was delighted by a sign on the wall of a saloon, “Don’t shoot the piano player, he’s doing his best.” Alas, far too many pianos now go unplayed... more» Orwell called them “disgusting tripe,” Camille Paglia considers them a “corrupt practice,” Stephen King winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” – Book blurbs have been a scandal since antiquity... more» The intellectual glitterati are at it again, pontificating on “G-Zero World” and the “Rise of Regions” (whatever that means) from an otherwise obscure Swiss village. Welcome to Davos... more» Publishing with Oxford University Press has been likened to marrying royalty—the honor is greater than the pleasure. In India, OUP was revered. Then it started caving to Hindu extremists... more» Even if we accept the claims of evolutionary psychology, says Roger Scruton, the mystery of the human condition remains. How can we be explained as animals but understood as persons?... more» Vaclav Havel was keen to the limits of rationalism, and insistent that something stands above us, beyond our understanding, says Paul Berman... more» Persecution and civilization. Police states, dirty wars, ethnic cleansing, renditions, fatwas, surveillance: The Inquisition built the modern world... more» And so it goes. Kurt Vonnegut was “born into prosperity, raised in austerity, and redeemed by posterity.” The last laugh is his... more» Girly, but never frail; sexy, but never feminine; worldly, but never cynical – Patti Smith always knew her place: “I’m one of the best poets in rock ʻn’ roll”... more» The liberated libido. In the West, a dalliance is no longer punished by death. The ideal of sexual freedom is powerful – but, unfortunately, far from universal... more» A member of the Roman elite, Petronius knew that in times of abundance, hedonism is cheap. But our capacity for pleasure, including that for information, is finite... more» Philip Larkin presented himself as a librarian who liked to dabble in poetry. His private papers tell a different story. Writing was at the core of his identity... more» William Shirer devoted 1,250 pages and 25 years to understanding the Third Reich. He didn’t pretend to have all the answers. Some things are inexplicable... more» The accursed poets. Name the malady, Baudelaire, Verlaine, or Rimbaud suffered from it: arthritis, diabetes, alcoholism, syphilis. Each relished his own martyrdom, even flaunted it... more» Capitalism produces unemployment. What should be a blessing – more leisure – has become a curse. Or as Slavoj Žižek puts it: Being exploited in a job is now considered a privilege... more» Plato was right: Some of us long to be warriors. Brutality will always have its moment. But do sports keep aggression in check or encourage violence?... more» A beautiful theory is a simple idea that explains a complicated phenomenon. Think Kepler on planetary motion, Einstein on relativity. What’s your favorite elegant explanation? Edge wants to know... more» The end of honesty. Deceit is as old as time, but now there is no longer even an assumption that people are telling the truth. Have we reached a tipping point of dysfunction?... more» Lionel Trilling described conservatism as “mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” That’s not fair. The conservative imagination is animated with big ideas about rigid social hierarchies... more» On the Internet, expertise is pooled, intelligence is collective, and discovery is being reinvented. Welcome to the era of open-source science... more» Joan Didion is guilty of a great artistic and personal crime: She got old. Her writing got old, her perspective got old. Her bag of tricks doesn’t work anymore... more» In the future, says Laurie Anderson, we’ll really use our senses. “We’ll have huge ears and we’ll tune in to Mars, or we’ll be able to look at the surface of Mars with our bare eyes”... more» The Internet, says John Brockman, is the “infinite oscillation of our collective conscious interacting with itself, adding a fuller, richer dimension to what it means to be human”... more» Dickens is both an example and a reproach to every high-minded stylist and low-minded popularizer, says Howard Jacobson. “You don’t have to like him, but you’re impoverished if you don’t”... more» Leo Stein was a man of many ambitions – historian, philosopher, artist – but little follow-through. His was “a life of perennial self-analysis in the pursuit of self-esteem”... more» “Science is becoming inaccessible. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics, and biology? ” asks George Steiner. “Knowledge no longer communicates”... more» Idea pushers. Once regarded as nonpartisan “universities without students,” think tanks have become glib and politicized. Is Washington where intellectual rigor goes to die?... more» What did queer theory stand for? Bad prose, for starters. But sometimes we have to overthink before we can think. That’s one of the field’s unintended lessons... more» When the Berlin Wall fell, a myth arose: Humanity – or at least Europe – had converged on a shared set of institutions and values. Well, every utopian project comes to grief in the end... more» Each generation is smarter and more moral than the last. It’s a good story, and Steven Pinker tells it well but unpersuasively. Timothy Snyder explains... more» Apocalypse anytime now. Secular and religious prognosticators agree on this: Disaster is in the offing. “The 10,000-year experiment of settled life is about to come crashing to a halt”... more» Some problems have only partial solutions. Ask Hume, who embraced the gradual expansion of the “boundaries of justice.” And today incrementalism is more important than ever... more» Noontime demon. Call it what you want – ADHD, laziness, information overload, acedia – we’ve never been good at resisting temptation and distraction... more» A better capitalism. Keynes had strong moral objections to capitalism, but he also regarded it as an essential guarantee of personal liberty... more» Who killed Homer? The ancient world can help us understand our own, says Mary Beard, but the classics are in crisis. Why? It’s always been that way... more» Mafia state. Putin is corrupt and secretive, but he doesn’t represent a return to Soviet ways. Russia today is less ideological, more criminal... more» Making sense of the Middle Ages. The 11th century was a time of stifling, intolerant religiosity, but also loose morals, confused gender roles, avarice, and hypocrisy... more» About the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel says, “Any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined.” Nonsense, perhaps, but also irrefutable... more» Gay marriage isn’t a blow to the ancient tradition of marriage, says Justin E.H. Smith. That institution was long ago blown apart – by love and capitalism... more» The Future of History. Liberal democracy is the world’s default ideology, says Francis Fukuyama. There is no rival, at least not yet. “The alternative is out there, waiting to be born”... more» Technology is everywhere in our lives, but our reliance on it has given rise to preposterous concerns. “Pity the poor rationalist in polite company”... more» Parents can be crushing, especially when dad is a famous writer. Consider the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “The oakling withers beneath the shadow of the oak”... more» |
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