Articles of Note

Pierre Bayle was renowned as an advocate of tolerance, intellectual modesty, and the questioning of authority. Now he's a forgotten hero of the Enlightenment... more »

Lolita is romantic and funny and perverted, but Pale Fire is the great gay comic novel — a catalogue of homosexual desire through the ages... more »

In 2013, linguists discovered a previously unknown language. Three years later, it's on the brink of extinction. Every conversation may be the last... more »

Propaganda art is crude, primitive, and inferior to real art. Except, of course, when it isn’t. Consider the career of Jacques-Louis David... more »

Scott Joplin was obsessed with fashioning ragtime as high art. He failed, and his life lingers only in factoids, fragments, snapshots, and grainy recordings... more »

For four years, William Styron pushed his No. 2 pencil across the page, writing The Confessions of Nat Turner. He'd “unwittingly created one of the first politically incorrect texts of our time”... more »

Did the Inquisition judge Galileo on the basis of theology, or did it rely on the scientific standards of the day? The answer depends on a peculiar piece of punctuation ... more »

Nabokov suffered from adenoma, heart palpitations, neuralgia, lumbago, pleurisy, and psoriasis. Did epilepsy cause his hallucinations?... more »

Mikita Brottman started a reading group at a men's jail because she believed in the power of literature to transform lives. Now she's not so sure... more »

Faber in the 1960s. The atmosphere at T.S. Eliot's publishing house was much like the man himself--old, grand, and glowering. It's where Mary-Kay Wilmers got her start... more »

Two men and the city. James Joyce and Italo Svevo met in Trieste in 1907. One was an artistic prodigy and a drunk, the other was an abstemious businessman. Both were geniuses... more »

You think Jonathan Franzen is overrated and out of touch? He's OK with that. “I go to extraordinary lengths not to hear what people are saying about me”... more »

When it comes to writing, the world is divided between Pantsers and Planners. Pantsers fly by the seat of their pants; planners plan. Everyone else believes there are no rules to writing... more »

Proust was literature's greatest mama's boy. "She takes away my life with her," he wrote when she died. He filled the void with work on his novel... more »

Used to be that America's foremost public intellectuals were theologians on the Christian left. Their ideas triumphed, but their type disappeared. All except Marilynne Robinson... more »

Inexplicable, almost unthinkable acts of violence; audacious, nihilistic, adolescent self-righteousness: Looking for ISIS in a 1907 novel... more »

New ideas are necessary engines of progress. Most aren't new, however, but result from what Steven Poole calls the looping "evolution of ideas"... more »

H.L. Mencken, who died 60 years ago, was irritable, unpredictable, bigoted, brilliant — and he's as relevant as ever... more »

You can’t weigh, record, or export it. You can’t eat it, collect it, or give it away. But in a noisy world, silence sells. Just ask Finland... more »

Wasps are a threat, often putting us at risk of a sting. But wasps lead exemplary lives, and they're responsible for a great shift in cultural history... more »

Literature is full of impostors, but few have pulled off a hoax as brazen or bizarre as JT Leroy, the novelist who wasn't who he seemed ... more »

"A story is like a human face," says Svetlana Alexievich. "We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they're all a little different"... more »

Diane Arbus is remembered for taking her camera into the street to capture images of outsiders. Her career began as the quieter half of a polite fashion-photography couple... more »

For Martha Nussbaum, aging wisely requires coming to terms with one's body. She’s done so through opera singing, running, Botox, semi-public urination, and an unsedated colonoscopy... more »

Victorian spiritualism was not just a fixation on death. Its history includes Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, P.T. Barnum, and the telegraph... more »

The agonies of H.T. Tsiang: literary rejection, an imagined feud with Pearl S. Buck, a deportation order. His life was stranger than his fiction... more »

In his youth, Voltaire, spendthrift and gambler, met writers who were "penniless and held in contempt.” He would avoid that fate. So he gamed the lottery... more »

Helen DeWitt went to Oxford to study Euripides and discovered she’d rather be Euripides. Now she rages against the publishing industry: “Plato did not have an editor”... more »

Sleep was once about the spiritual, the Greek gods, the Sandman. Now it’s about physiology, medicalization, insomnia. Philosophical consequences abound... more »

Catullus’ corpus of 116 poems teems with rage and obscenity. He was Rome’s most erotic poet, but we know almost nothing of him. Cue the dark arts of speculative historical reconstruction... more »

New Books

Eulogies are not a genre noted for honesty — the origin of the word, after all, is “to speak well.” What are the benefits of truth when speaking of the dead?... more »

Boas, bugs, and backscratchers, cockroaches and condors, the evil eye and the history of toast. In praise of the erudite eclecticism of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica... more »

Justin E.H. Smith is battling against philosophical insularity - its overly male, overly white, overly Western biases. He's losing ... more »

Accused of plagiarism, T.S. Eliot annotated The Waste Land with notes about his sources. To his dismay, that kickstarted the critical practice of allusion-hunting... more »

Frederick Law Olmsted created a profession - landscape architecture - and stumbled onto an ironic truth: It takes a lot of artifice to create “natural” scenery... more »

For as long as human cultures have existed anywhere, we have buried our dead. What's changed is the place the dead occupy in our lives... more »

Jungian theory emerged from the dynamics of Carl's marriage: a mercurial husband who strays, a wife who brings up the children and puts her own ambition on hold ... more »

An “uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet.” Robert Lowell was mad. And when he was mad he fell in love. His affairs were all the same: intense and fleeting... more »

Marx’s views were occasionally prescient, often wrong-headed, sometimes repugnant. But they had little in common with what later came to be understood as Marxism... more »

In praise of Cynthia Ozick, "a sorceress of silken prose, wholly incapable of platitude, of cliché, of even the stray dead phrase"... more »

It took 51 years for Don Quixote to be widely translated. Today it would take mere months. Still, there are consequences for writing that’s “born translated”... more »

"Poetry is like an old clock that stops ticking from time to time and needs to be violently shaken to get it running again." Enter Jana Prikryl... more »

Much of what we do isn’t the result of a calculation of consequences, but an expression of our sense of identity. Such is often the case with terrorism... more »

Life of Liszt. People have been writing about his virtuosity, charisma, and affairs since the 1830s. What’s left to say?... more »

Nietzsche's politics were unsavory and harsh, but prescient. He understood the attraction to nationalism, racism, parochialism, and insularity ... more »

Cervantes’s career as a soldier ended in injury, not glory. But rather than cynical, he became ambivalent, as his characters showed... more »

Tim Parks disdains the conventions of book talk and the posturings of the literary establishment. He ridicules everyone but himself... more »

The strange prestige of exhaustion. From popes to poets, having an exhausted mind has long been both a weakness and a badge of honor. Why?... more »

Whether his strange blend of fact and fiction elicits delight, astonishment, or boredom -- or all three -- give Geoff Dyer his due: He's an original... more »

Clive James is not a Proust scholar, but he is a Proust appreciator — an enthusiast, not an expert. The distinction is what matters... more »

Books burn at 451 degrees F. The human body burns at 1,500 degrees. “Where they have burned books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will end in burning human beings”... more »

We love our friends. But any explanation tends to feel inconclusive, vague, banal. Friendship defies language... more »

Among society’s greatest achievements have been ever more ways to keep our fingers busy. Fidgeting makes us human... more »

“The art of storytelling is coming to an end,” wrote Walter Benjamin. His own humdrum attempts at fiction serve to confirm that conclusion... more »

Our notions of “progress” are fatuous. We embrace empty ideas. We worship celebrity humanitarians. Is the key to real progress simply to forget the past?... more »

We know Goethe for The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust, and his other literary work. But he thought most highly of his scientific studies. Was he right?... more »

American utopianism was not as popular with intellectuals as it might have been. As Thoreau put it, "I'd rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven"... more »

By all accounts, including his own, Evelyn Waugh had an aptitude for unpleasantness, beholden as he was to his personal trinity: religion, rudeness, and drink... more »

To be 50 is to feel like an old coin: "worn – worn down and worn out.” Or so memoirists of a certain age tell us. When did midlife become a problem to be solved?... more »

Essays & Opinions

Aristotle called plot "the first principle." Though many revolutions have tried to replace it with intellectual or aesthetic dazzle, plot always returns... more »

What's changed isn't that politicians and media lie, but that we seem to have stopped caring whether they tell the truth or not. It's as if we've bid farewell to reality... more »

As the purpose of college is reduced to questions of profit and loss, it's time for humanists to embrace a new credo: If we must perish, let us perish resisting... more »

Christopher Logue, a "Catholic atheist," found war to be the only god he could believe in. In the Iliad he found a stoic resignation to bloodshed. He made translating it his life's work... more »

Self-improvement through shocks. Electricity is central to our understanding of religion, philosophy, and love. Ever since the Victorians, we've made ourselves electrical ... more »

Very few of the Nuremberg defendants were mentally diseased. Psychiatry can offer diagnoses, but it reveals little about the problem of human evil ... more »

Yes, Rudyard Kipling was a racist, misogynist, and imperialist. He was also a wonderful writer. To simply dismiss him for his prejudices reveals little but cultural ignorance... more »

To the extent that intellectuals are out of touch with the societies they inhabit, it is because they lose sight of a central fact: They belong to a tiny and bizarre minority... more »

Hieronymus Bosch. We know the painter witnessed a wildfire, married up, and joined an elite religious brotherhood. But where did his real world end and fantasy begin?... more »

What matters is not what you think or do but how you feel. So goes the reigning view of neuroscientists, mindfulness mongers, and other technologists of joy... more »

By the age of 50, Basil Bunting had been a balloon operator, military interpreter, and spy. He'd survived assassination attempts and jail. Then he became a poet... more »

A philosophy of education. Influenced by Hegel and Darwin, John Dewey launched a revolution that overthrew the methods of the day. Hannah Arendt was not pleased... more »

We have a nuanced canon of war literature. Motherhood, however, is missing from our literary and philosophical tradition. That's beginning to change ... more »

To writers, their work amounts to evidence that they've fallen short of their potential. The oeuvre is never satisfied, always taunting, a work in progress until the end ... more »

How to think about anger. Its arguments are weak and pathetic, says Martha Nussbaum, while the voice of generosity is strong as well as beautiful ... more »

Widowed, Patrick Brontë sought a new wife with remarkable crassness and egotism. What, if anything, did his literary daughters learn from him?... more »

Rousseau was a hypocrite for our times. He preached family values but exposed himself to women and was given to compulsive masturbation, though he warned against it in his writings... more »

Libertarians like genre fiction but tend to ignore romance novels. Want to understand the importance of work and free markets? Crack open a bodice-ripper... more »

“Never underestimate the willingness of a man to believe flattering things about himself,” said Paul Samuelson. Just ask a success about luck's role in life... more »

Death is unavoidable and suffering is everywhere, says Julian Baggini. The only debate should be about the nature and extent of our participation. So let's talk about eating meat... more »

What is modernism? How a term that's come to mean so much — as a literary movement, a design aesthetic — has always lacked a clear definition... more »

Art asks for an emotional investment, with the promise of some insight into the human experience. But what if the artist is an algorithm?... more »

Every culture has rules and taboos about food, but moralizing about what we eat is most evident in cultures with a dichotomy between pleasure and virtue... more »

Academics have exhausted topics like Virginia Woolf and democracy. They now study such things as dust, coffee, masturbation, bullshit, and, most fittingly, boredom... more »

Neuroscience marches on, but if it becomes possible to scan and upload your brain, will the result be you? Humans are not brains in vats... more »