Wicked baronets and disastrous marriages — the “sensation novels” of the 1860s updated Gothic elements for Victorian sensibilities... more »
The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »
Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »
In 2020, a star physicist claimed an incredible advance: a room temperature superconductor. Retractions followed... more »
Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »
Wonders emerge in the ocean’s deepest trenches: corals, crustaceans, a multitude of bizarre fish. Also: nuclear waste and tins of Spam... more »
Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »
What can a generation of deeply religious thinkers in a moment of disenchantment teach modern humanists? Everything... more »
If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »
“Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »
Nietzsche’s misogyny. Yes, he railed against intelligent women, said Helene Stöcker, but anyone could see he meant it ironically... more »
“It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »
Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »
For decades, rumors circulated about Charles Bukowski’s pro-Nazi letters. Now discovered, they reveal a surprise: Bukowski was joking... more »
“There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »
Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »
In 1819, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a philologist and theologian, was jailed. His crime: teaching gymnastics and calisthenics... more »
Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »
We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »
Gabriel García Márquez wanted his final novel destroyed. Now, a decade after his death, it will be published... more »
Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »
Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »
Unesco has tasked itself with safeguarding “intangible cultural heritage.” Does Belgian horseback shrimp fishing need protection?... more »
Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »
Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »
When philosophers had sharp elbows, idiocy was mercilessly mocked. Now the field is kindler, gentler, and awash in silliness... more »
Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »
Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »
Miles Davis’s Take 3 was nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of musical transcendence. His impromptu solo has gained immortality... more »
Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »
Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »
Hollywood’s obsession with constructed languages started with The Lord of the Rings and continues in the latest Dune movie... more »
Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »
The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »
Black weddings, vampire plagues, a blood tax — in Eastern Europe, storytelling and ritual were key to regional identity... more »
“Habermas is a blockhead. It is simply impossible to tell what kind of damage he is still going to cause in the future.” So wrote Karl Popper in 1969... more »
Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »
In the 1960s a team of scholars explored interspecies communication with dolphins. Then the experiments with LSD began... more »
Christopher Hitchens was renowned and reviled for his pugnacity. But key to his style was the eloquent rejoinder... more »
“The people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies”... more »
Tarek Masoud: “The problem is not our students. It is us: faculty and administrators who are too afraid”... more »
Where Norman Mailer fulminated, Ellen Willis pontificated, and Stanley Crouch threw punches: The Village Voice... more »
What if writing history were less about archives and ideas and more about forensics and genomes?... more »
The case for ethical fandom. Being a sports fan doesn’t diminish one’s ethical obligations — it heightens them... more »
Mid-century modern conundrum: Once American takes on Danish design caught on, Danish furniture makers started copying them... more »
Do our lives consist of the stories we tell about our ourselves? Galen Strawson on a view that’s ascendant and plainly wrong... more »
“In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace”... more »
Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »
The editor and memoirist Diana Athill’s philosophy was that fidelity is a faulty mechanism on which to base a relationship... more »
A question hangs over the reputation of the writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo: Did he betray his lover, a spy, to the French in World War I?... more »
As a critic, Michiko Kakutani was fearsome and discerning. As an author of inert buzzword-laden books, she's pitiable... more »
“The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food”... more »
The A.J. Finn saga: After writing a best seller, the thriller writer was exposed as a serial liar. Now he’s back with a new novel... more »
Are you a feminist killjoy? For Judith Butler, that entails the joy of struggling against injustice... more »
Self-help is often glib, politically obtuse, and intellectually dishonest. Why, then, are philosophers writing it?... more »
“When the end is in sight, even the most successful careers seem haunted by the specter of failure” ... more »
Few writers have so deftly distilled the cloistered sensibility of the Small Circulation Lit Mag as Lauren Oyler... more »
The psychic entanglement of the generations, the tumult between old and the young: What we need Mary Gaitskill for... more »
The biggest art fraud in history? The number of fake Norval Morrisseau works could surpass 10,000, with criminal profits of up to $100 million... more »
The legend of Byron’s libertinism was propagated foremost by Byron. The fashionable parties, seduction techniques, and knowing small talk were all carefully calibrated... more »
After the suicide of his wife, Blake Butler wrote a book detailing her secret life. Was it art — or literary revenge porn?... more »
Wicked baronets and disastrous marriages — the “sensation novels” of the 1860s updated Gothic elements for Victorian sensibilities... more »
In 2020, a star physicist claimed an incredible advance: a room temperature superconductor. Retractions followed... more »
Wonders emerge in the ocean’s deepest trenches: corals, crustaceans, a multitude of bizarre fish. Also: nuclear waste and tins of Spam... more »
What can a generation of deeply religious thinkers in a moment of disenchantment teach modern humanists? Everything... more »
Nietzsche’s misogyny. Yes, he railed against intelligent women, said Helene Stöcker, but anyone could see he meant it ironically... more »
For decades, rumors circulated about Charles Bukowski’s pro-Nazi letters. Now discovered, they reveal a surprise: Bukowski was joking... more »
In 1819, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a philologist and theologian, was jailed. His crime: teaching gymnastics and calisthenics... more »
Gabriel García Márquez wanted his final novel destroyed. Now, a decade after his death, it will be published... more »
Unesco has tasked itself with safeguarding “intangible cultural heritage.” Does Belgian horseback shrimp fishing need protection?... more »
When philosophers had sharp elbows, idiocy was mercilessly mocked. Now the field is kindler, gentler, and awash in silliness... more »
Miles Davis’s Take 3 was nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of musical transcendence. His impromptu solo has gained immortality... more »
Hollywood’s obsession with constructed languages started with The Lord of the Rings and continues in the latest Dune movie... more »
Black weddings, vampire plagues, a blood tax — in Eastern Europe, storytelling and ritual were key to regional identity... more »
In the 1960s a team of scholars explored interspecies communication with dolphins. Then the experiments with LSD began... more »
Tarek Masoud: “The problem is not our students. It is us: faculty and administrators who are too afraid”... more »
The case for ethical fandom. Being a sports fan doesn’t diminish one’s ethical obligations — it heightens them... more »
“In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace”... more »
A question hangs over the reputation of the writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo: Did he betray his lover, a spy, to the French in World War I?... more »
The A.J. Finn saga: After writing a best seller, the thriller writer was exposed as a serial liar. Now he’s back with a new novel... more »
“When the end is in sight, even the most successful careers seem haunted by the specter of failure” ... more »
The biggest art fraud in history? The number of fake Norval Morrisseau works could surpass 10,000, with criminal profits of up to $100 million... more »
A typical Alasdair MacIntyre insight is simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true... more »
On campuses across the country, students have lost something fundamental: the ability to parse complex texts and arguments... more »
The unmistakable earthiness of Dutch high art comes across via pissing cows and crapping dogs... more »
The “eyeball test” measures a society’s fellow feeling: Can people look one other in the eyes without fear or deference?... more »
What – or who – killed Pablo Neruda? That is just one of the questions dogging his legacy and reputation... more »
“Our premodern precursors often had a special mechanism for dealing with old people who faltered. Quite simply: they killed them... more »
“Lives of wives” books, like those about Véra Nabokov and Zelda Fitzgerald, often define their subjects via their spouses. That misses the point... more »
Artists used to obsess over what it means to be a person in the world. Now they obsess over how to turn themselves into a brand... more »
How did China Medical University and King Abdulaziz University overtake UCLA and Princeton in rankings of math departments?... more »
The asphalt whisperers. When noise pollution requires treatment, acoustic ecologists and urban soundscape planners get called in... more »
Humanist vs. non-humanist battles can feel narrow and academic. But the political and cultural stakes are enormous... more »
How to make it in the art world? Anna Weyant and the occupational hazards of being young and successful... more »
When a scientist lopped off the heads of worms, he discovered a new possibility: You don't need a brain to be intelligent... more »
Goodbye, “Cooper’s hawk.” The American Ornithological Society has decreed no birds will be named after people. How come?... more »
The language of Scotland was not English, but the Germanic-infused Scots, which fell out of favor in the 17th century... more »
What happened to David Graeber? Late in his career he seemed ready to reject or severely qualify his radical anarchism... more »
Bored with concrete and steel, architects are backing away from ultra-modern design. But classical design has the same flaw: predictability... more »
If listening to the same songs year after year sounds boring, get ready: That’s where we’re heading... more »
George Orwell’s father was a civil servant of the most dismal variety: He helped oversee opium production for the British Raj, in India... more »
The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »
Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »
“It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »
“There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »
Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »
Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »
Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »
Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »
Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »
Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »
“Habermas is a blockhead. It is simply impossible to tell what kind of damage he is still going to cause in the future.” So wrote Karl Popper in 1969... more »
Christopher Hitchens was renowned and reviled for his pugnacity. But key to his style was the eloquent rejoinder... more »
Where Norman Mailer fulminated, Ellen Willis pontificated, and Stanley Crouch threw punches: The Village Voice... more »
Mid-century modern conundrum: Once American takes on Danish design caught on, Danish furniture makers started copying them... more »
Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »
As a critic, Michiko Kakutani was fearsome and discerning. As an author of inert buzzword-laden books, she's pitiable... more »
Are you a feminist killjoy? For Judith Butler, that entails the joy of struggling against injustice... more »
Few writers have so deftly distilled the cloistered sensibility of the Small Circulation Lit Mag as Lauren Oyler... more »
The legend of Byron’s libertinism was propagated foremost by Byron. The fashionable parties, seduction techniques, and knowing small talk were all carefully calibrated... more »
Copyrights and wrongs. A well-intentioned idea has become a Frankenstein that’s now out of control... more »
A memoir of an open marriage was marketed as upbeat, sassy, and liberated. In reality it was just sad... more »
We are all in favor of equality: But equality of what? Of whom? Darrin McMahon on a powerful and contested idea... more »
Terry Eagleton on Hegel’s vision of things. “The only viable future is one with its roots in the present, not one that is parachuted into it by dreams or diktats”... more »
Hannah Arendt was shaped more by Kant than anything she learned in Heidegger’s lectures or his bed... more »
“She is crazy!” Charles de Gaulle said of Simone Weil. That was a common view. Impractical and odd, she was also undeniably admirable... more »
Wolves howl, gibbons sing, dolphins whistle, cows moo, cats meow. But do animals talk?... more »
Willa Cather was nothing if not dedicated to her craft: “I could simply become a fountain pen and have done with it — a conduit for ink to run through”... more »
Frantz Fanon’s influence has not waned, even though the culture's ideological space for his ideas at large is minuscule... more »
Hope to cope with a world given over to “permanent crisis”? Modern strategies include detoxing, bingeing, filtering, and ghosting... more »
“At a moment when everything in America seemed to be accelerating, Thoreau … came up with a counterproposal: slow down”... more »
Memoir, autotheory, the personal essay — today’s first-personalism is a dark mutation of literary style, holds Anna Kornbluh... more »
A Lower East Side gallerist: “The art world is the way it is because not everyone has access to it”... more »
Rachmaninoff in America. In contrast to many of his peers, Rachmaninoff is the one who left Russia but stayed Russian... more »
Thomas Hardy is celebrated for his portrayals of women, leaving even him baffled at how he alienated the women in his life... more »
J.L. Austin brought a piercing clarity to his discussions. Among philosophers at Oxford, he wasn’t alone... more »
Russians in space. “The pantheon of cosmists includes numerous thinkers who propounded the preposterous as indubitable”... more »
Lou Reed loved misery – he embraced it, wallowed in it, and made the rest of us dance to it... more »
Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »
Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »
The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »
“Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »
Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »
Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »
We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »
Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »
Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »
Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »
Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »
The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »
Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »
“The people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies”... more »
What if writing history were less about archives and ideas and more about forensics and genomes?... more »
Do our lives consist of the stories we tell about our ourselves? Galen Strawson on a view that’s ascendant and plainly wrong... more »
The editor and memoirist Diana Athill’s philosophy was that fidelity is a faulty mechanism on which to base a relationship... more »
“The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food”... more »
Self-help is often glib, politically obtuse, and intellectually dishonest. Why, then, are philosophers writing it?... more »
The psychic entanglement of the generations, the tumult between old and the young: What we need Mary Gaitskill for... more »
After the suicide of his wife, Blake Butler wrote a book detailing her secret life. Was it art — or literary revenge porn?... more »
Maverick, crank, wisecracking economic pundit? Milton Friedman was thought too radical, then later — when his ideas won the day — too obvious... more »
Garrison Keillor, Leon Wieseltier, Otto Penzler: Is there still a role for grumpy old men in arts and letters?... more »
The legend of Eugène-François Vidocq. Circus performer, forger, and private detective, he claimed to have escaped from more than 20 French prisons... more »
“Is it possible to imagine the ballet world without a primary teleology of aesthetic perfectionism and a baseline of low self-worth?”... more »
“Opera was pretentious, boring, effete, and effeminate… Opera represented everything that my childhood in postwar America asked me not to be”... more »
Barbara Johnson’s concept of muteness envy is the result when a culture needs a way to feel power and powerlessness at once... more »
A way of arguing — breathless, declaratory, aggressive, aggrieved — has taken root in the university. Call it the hyperbolic style in American academe... more »
The Free Press is a vital journalistic corrective to progressive consensus, says Jonathan Chait — but its politics are an overcorrection... more »
The art world is crawling with counterfeits. That creates not only confusion but also opportunity. Consider the "missing" Basquiats... more »
What is art for? Our answers are aimed at justifying art’s existence. But none of that is why we care about it... more »
Given its sub-disciplines and broad range of schools and methods, Jonathan Kramnick poses a question: What unites literary studies?... more »
What to make of Anthony Hecht, whose erudite and elegant writing produced bitter, creepy, sexist poetry?... more »
For Andrea Long Chu, writing is like flirting. “A lot of people think that when you flirt, you are trying to get the person to like you. This is wrong.”... more »
The divisive Alan Watts. Was he a sophisticated distiller of Eastern philosophy — or an unlettered, alcoholic dilettante?... more »
Is the distinction between large language models and human creativity one of degree or fundamental difference?... more »
Sontag, seriousness, and the freedom to be funny. Why writing a novel, The Volcano Lover, felt so transgressive and wild... more »
Tyranny of the QR code. Digitization is killing paper playbills and theater tickets — and our memories of Broadway will suffer... more »
British explorer Alastair Humphreys exchanges the Arctic ice for his local neighborhood. Cue the “microadventure”... more »
AI and literary style. Adam Kirsch wonders: Will we appreciate writing that is aesthetically coherent but chronologically incoherent?... more »
Why write criticism? For Greil Marcus, it’s to achieve the effects of art — the same sense of mystery, awe, and surprise... more »
What is it like to be an animal? The question has driven philosophical treatises — as well as the donning of a $23,000 human-sized wolf suit... more »
The Algorithm: Not since the discovery of the libido or the printing press has something loomed so large... more »
With major elections looming, a moral panic has swept the globe: social media empowers populism. Is there anything to that?... more »
What’s most difficult about Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is finding the time to read it. Ryan Ruby explains... more »
The evolution of celebrity analysis: Madonna-ology was based on critical theory, Taylor Swift studies is concerned with teaching skills... more »
Flaubert’s solitude. In 1851, he asked rhetorically: “Am I really to have a goal other than Art itself?”... more »
Once you enter Guy Davenport’s labyrinth of learning and imagination, you never get out. John Jeremiah Sullivan explains... more »
“No one can really believe in an apology until after it happens,” says Agnes Callard. “That’s the telltale mark of a miracle”... more »
“Critique is not against reason; it is the very practice of reason.” Peter Gordon lays to rest some misconceptions of critical theory... more »
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