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2012 ARCHIVE |
VERITAS ODIT MORAS |
Nota Bene Archive
At The New Yorker
Paul Kurtz, R.I.P.
Die, die, DIY!
In defense of emoticons
Sex lives of conjoined twins
Online dating
On bullying
A novel in 30 days
Was Jesus married?
Lascaux’s Picassos
Most annoying sound
Foodie idioms
Art heist in Rotterdam
Hayek and Friedman
Genovese and Hobsbawm
Is “whom” history?
Chocolate and Nobel prizes
Useful punctuation marks
To win a MacArthur
Weird names in Hong Kong
Consider the spork
No to Michelin!
Science as art
Barry Commoner, R.I.P.
Varieties of Amazon critic
Stop pagination now
Another Mona Lisa?
Sport and politics
‘Iron man’ from space
Bionic book worm
To play a Strad
If Michael Sandel ruled
Letter to a son
On comics criticism
Biblioclasm
Scruton and the right
Art forgery 101
Open-source lexicography
Kerouac’s rise and fall
Crutch words
Darlings of the right
Meeting Naipaul
Web-addicted writers
Chinese sarcasm
Von Karajan was right
Psychology of swearing
Ellis v. Wallace
Evolution theory’s crisis
Bookworms of China
Fake reviews
Life of a fact-checker
Promiscuous reading
Remembering S.J. Gould
Reviews for sale
How Trotsky was killed
Monopolies for monks
String players
Ecstasies of parking
Botched restoration
Locations of F-bombs
Car buying
ElvisLit
Writing a bad review
Professor of burps
Rise of the nebbish
At home with Hitler
Lederhosen on fire
Helen Gurley Brown, R.I.P.
Is football wrong?
Modern economics is sick
Who wrote teen fiction?
Ten most difficult books
Starbucks of ancient America
Robert Hughes, R.I.P.
The lost art of postcard writing
How to win more medals
The cult of busyness
The Immortality Project
Autobiography of a condom
Spanx on steroids
Baudelaire’s Bordeaux
Tolkien and technology
Plagiarism in Europe
Is the Iliad non-fiction?
Writing for money
My night with éiûek
How to write erotica
Alexander Cockburn R.I.P
Space stinks
Theoretical machines
Dawkins and his mail
Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky
Abolish Law Reviews!
Words from India
Warm emotions
Brooklyn as mecca
Truthinessology
Traffic in Lagos
Letter from Ted Hughes
Thanks for killing my novel
Semicolons: A love story
The case for coffee
The end for critics
Creepiness of E-books
Is philosophy literature?
F-bomb at The New Yorker
Amis’s flick-knife
Writer’s panic
Nora Ephron, R.I.P.
“Nigerian” scammers
Secret of a mystery
Andrew Sarris, R.I.P.
French bookstores
AP Stylebook
Which books impress women?
Alan Turing, tech hero
God and the economy
Task of the critic
Cost of white t-shirt
Pre-Photoshop fakery
Decline of porn
History of tattoos
No brain, no mind
Guide to book tours
Virtues of daydreaming
Coffee kills monkeys
Chicken, world conqueror
Amis in Brooklyn
Q&A: Sam Harris
Awfulness of classical music
Economics and happiness
Context of language
Fukuyama on China
Poetry of the Taliban
Lunch with Krugman
Desert-island cartoons
On literary interviews
Typo at UT Austin
The multiverse
In praise of audiobooks
Scaling the Great Wall
Recipes from writers
Rushdie on censorship
Writing flash fiction
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
TED balks
World won’t end
Birth of the taco
Maurice Sendak, R.I.P.
Did Stalin murder Lenin?
Grumpiest living writers
Breasts
Non cogito, ergo sum
God as friend
Against luxury cinema
Greatest literary feuds
Inside a reporter’s bag
International SF
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
History of book reviews
Too ugly for TV?
Let’s do lunch
Bathroom muse
Swimming helmsman
“Hopefully”
Churchill style
Blurb your enthusiasm
Novel of a blind author
Porno v. porn
Tips for dining out
Spending a book advance
Math and martial arts
Girly book covers
Older and wiser?
Rise of the lecherous professor
Psychoanalysis and poetry
Searching for aliens
Art or hype?
Life without sex
Vonnegut was real
Harry Crews, R.I.P.
Moving rock
Nudge nudge, think think
Alphabet soup
Third-culture club
Irving Louis Horowitz, R.I.P.
From exile to everywhere
Hey dude!
Advice from Einstein
What teens should read
Birth and death of words
Writing automatons
No space
Dictators and pop culture
Why finish books?
What killed Britannica?
Tips from Steinbeck
Best skies in art
Is philosophy a science?
Franzen on Twitter
QWERTY effect
From Huxley to Orwell
Homans on Judt
Splendor preserved
Gender bias
Fact-checkers
Writer’s job
Mutinies in economics
Fukuyama’s drone
Beautiful bookshops?
Best language to learn
Snyder on Judt
Trouble with decline
Tireless, tirelessly
George Dyson
Krugman in Playboy
Fear and abstract art
Why not elect scientists?
Shelf-conscious
On female conductors
Judging book covers
Canon fodder
Krugman v. the World
Literally?
What the Dickens
French parents rule
Charles Murray at home
Life of couch potato
Mark Lilla v. Corey Robin
Sad saga of Little Albert
On bowling alone
To my old master
Homepage for Philosophy
Fukuyama on financial crisis
Putin’s reading list
Blogs v. term papers
Sword swallowing
Freeman Dyson
Mystery of poetry editing
Crime-fighting Mozart
How to write
Before Big Bang
Writing v. word-processing
Mathematics of serial killing
Hockney landscapes
Index of pretentiousness
God and football
Talking with Hirst
Wealthy shoplifters
Digital republic of learning
Books v. birds
How to be a dictator
Meet the Gee-Bees
China v. Harry Potter
Hockney v. Hirst
Double-blind violin test
Center of the universe
Joy of quiet
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The struggle for Harold Bloom’s soul. On one side, Emerson, apostle of the self. On the other, Freud, the pessimist. The battle has been long and fruitful...more»
Is James Wood abandoning criticism? “It’s tiresome to hand down judgments all day. You want to do something else with the language”... more»
“I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” said Ray Bradbury. His prose was colloquial, poetic, never boring. The science fiction master is dead at 91... NY Times... LA Times... Telegraph... Paris Review... Guardian... WaPo... Daily Beast... John Plotz... Junot Diaz... Michiko Kakutani... Virginia Postrel... Michael Dirda... Stanley Kauffmann... Daniel J. Flynn... Margaret Atwood... John Crowley... Paul Di Filippo... Charles C. Johnson
The mentalist. ESP is real, says Cornell's Daryl Bem. And if he’s wrong? “Science is self-correcting. Reality always bites back”... more»
Library of utopia. If Robert Darnton gets his way, all of human knowledge will be available, free, to all. Can he succeed where Google hasn’t?... more»
Faith in markets remains high. Why? They spare us from the unpleasant work of thinking and arguing about the meaning of goods... more»
Some are green, some have fangs, some have no bodies at all. But when it comes to aliens, only this matters: Can we coexist or not?... more»
Why did Neandertals die off while humans survived? Our species may owe a giant debt of gratitude to our four-legged best friends... more»
Amazon’s world. The book industry’s woes are largely self-inflicted. “This is a business run by English majors, not business majors”... more»
The “happy novel” is an oxymoron; the suburban novel is out of touch. What Americans want is to read about the end times... more»
Philosophy of love. Why is a lefty like Alain Badiou preaching monogamy? “If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic”... more»
On the topics of poetry, class, and tourism, Paul Fussell was acute and acerbic. But he was at his best when writing about organized killing... NY Times... Slate... n+1... Jay Winter... Drew Faust...
Prestigious and problematic. The best and worst Nobel Peace Prize choices: Sakharov? Kissinger and LÃ Đức Thọ? As for Arafat, well... more»
Yale’s Irving Fisher was one of America’s best-known economists. He counseled congressmen and presidents and inspired Adolf Hitler... more»
Orhan Pamuk has built a museum, in effect, to himself. A colossal act of ego? Perhaps. But it’s also an ingenious work of art... more»
Can a man’s ideas be separated from his deeds? What if he’s murderous and maybe insane, but insightful? What if the man is the Unabomber?... more»
We’re hard-wired for the pursuit of happiness to our repeated regret, the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding... more»
Secret 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 toppingsñyou, 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 passÈ. 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 84Ö 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 LÈvy... 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
Christopher Hitchens, polemicist, literary critic, anti-theist, raconteur, is dead. He was 62... NY Times... AP... Guardian... Telegraph... Wash Post... Graydon Carter... Benjamin Schwarz... Christopher Buckley... Nicholas Shakespeare... Matt Labash... John Lloyd... James Fenton... Jacob Weisberg... Anne Applebaum... Timothy Noah... Justin EH Smith... Peter Hitchens... Julian Barnes... Timothy Garton Ash... David Frum... David Corn... Ian McEwan... Peter Wehner... David Ulin... Jason Cowley... Nick Gillespie... Richard Lingeman... D. D. Guttenplan... John Heilemann... Anna Wintour... Francis Wheen... Stephen Fry... Mick Brown... Richard Dawkins... Kathleen Parker... Ron Radosh... Richard Lea... Sandra Martin... Alexander Cockburn... Graeme Wood... Ross Douthat... Simon Schama... James Kirchick... Joan Smith... Lee Siegel... Dave Zirin... Russell Jacoby... Benjamin Kunkel... Daniel Dennett... George Scialabba... Katha Pollitt... George Packer... Damir Marusic... Michael Fitzpatrick... Matthew Rothschild... James Fallows... Michael Lind... Megan Daum... Victor Navasky... Sam Harris... Hendrik Hertzberg... Bob Hoover... Victor Davis Hanson... Salman Rushdie
Next to a lake in Finland, Jean Sibelius built a house and composed his major works. Then he fell silent. Julian Barnes pays a visit... more»
Boyd Lee Dunlop used to play nightclubs. Now he works the cleanser-scented halls of a Buffalo nursing home. But man, can he rattle a piano... more»
The Freakonomics formula. Anecdote-rich, contrarian narrative + speculative claims presented as fact = publishing phenomenon... more»
Jesus and the Jews. They were his earliest followers. Then Jewish Christianity faltered, and gentile Christianity was born... more»
Herbert Marcuse’s blend of philosophy, psychology, and politics made him a guru to some in the 60s, and might make him relevant again... more»
“I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades,” says Kurt Andersen. Is this how history ends?... more»
Politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should be able to engage with ideas. How about a panel discussion on the history of the Middle East?... more»
What provoked the London riots in August? Resentment, and with good reason. Brits are provided an education that is nearly useless... more»
The radical evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, dead at 73, didn’t consider her ideas controversial. She considered them right... NYTimes... Edge... Wash Post... Michael Ruse... John Horgan
Why is art so expensive? Because the market for a Klimt or a Picasso defies economic assumptions. “If I can’t sell something, I double the price”... more»
Does the impact of literary scholarship really justify the money and effort that go into it? Not even close, says Mark Bauerlein... more»
Steve Jobs and David Gelernter seemed like natural allies: Both chided technologists for neglecting design. Instead, they fought each other... more»
When his time came, Mozart had no doubt: “I have the taste of death on my tongue.” As for Beethoven, he quipped: “The comedy is over”... more»
The New York Public Library has long been a magnet for intellectuals and eccentrics. But will its new austerity doom a great institution?... more»
To some, evolutionary psychology is fatalistic: Our defects are in our genes. To Steven Pinker, it explains how to make life better... more»
Who’s shaping the marketplace of ideas? A survey of the world’s most influential thinkers suggests that Arab activists are setting the agenda... more»
John Waters is glad that people feel comfortable coming out of the closet. And yet: “I wish some gay people would go back in. We have enough”... more»
J¸rgen Habermas is angry. “Our politicians have no political substance.” If the EU fails, he warns, democracy will be set back 100 years... more»
The mystery of mirth. Comedy is the brain’s way of correcting our mistaken assumptions. But does that explain the pleasure of a punch line?... more»
Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose – biologist, botanist, crank – revealed the secret life of plants, including the fearsome power of a boiling pea... more»
We will get over the notion of free will, says the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. Moral agency comes from living in social groups... more»
How a Canadian in a bathtub, together with transgender radicals, and a “mystical anarchist” organized a revolution on Wall Street... more»
The Warhol bubble. Auction prices for his work have jumped 3,400 percent in 25 years. Time for a market correction in contemporary art... more»
Neanderthal neuroscience. What are humans made of? Find 40,000-year-old hominid pinky bone, extract the DNA, compare and contrast... more»
If you’ve been at death’s door or your wits’ end, about to bite the dust or cast the first stone, you’ve inhabited the King James Bible... more»
The study of human illness depends on bloated rodents. Biomedical innovation has stalled, but behold the awesome power of the buck-toothed mole... more»... more»... more»
Jonesing for Freakonomics: Social psychologists are addicted to findings that make headlines. Data massaging is warping the field... more»
Gloria Steinem, still tiny of waist and big of hair, wants you to know that she has never gotten by on her appearance. “Who wants to be feminine?”... more»
Liberals are stupid, according to a ballyhooed study. Now it’s been retracted. Turns out conservatives are stupid, too... more»
Behavioral economics has moved to the policy world. The ideas are being tested on a national scale. How’s that going? Not well... more»
Ticking toward eternity. Can a massive, 10,000-year clock provide some long-term perspective to our instantly gratified culture?... more»
Daniel Kahneman has spent a lifetime thinking about thinking. His catalog of cognitive quirks reveals the limits of intuition... more»
Camus the Jew. He was born a Catholic and died an atheist, but his philosophy of the absurd reveals a deep bond to Judaism... more»
Steve Jobs wasn’t an inventor. He was a tweaker, an idiosyncratic perfectionist who took other people’s ideas and made them better... more»
SlutWalk, body-snarking, cisgender: Feminism thrives on the Internet. Come for Ryan Gosling, stay for fashion, porn, and poststructuralism... more»
For Picasso, originality was rooted in imitation – and theft. Did Cubism emerge from the ears of an Iberian statuette looted from the Louvre?... more»
Geeks in love. When obsessive math whizzes mate, it’s bad genetic news for their offspring, says Simon Baron-Cohen. That’s the theory, anyway... more»
My brain made me do it. Can neuroscience distinguish between an automatic impulse and a self-directed action? Mike Gazzaniga chooses to weigh the evidence... more»
Gushing optimism and cultural ferment – 150 new magazines in Benghazi alone. It’s a good time for intellectuals in Libya. Just ask Hisham Matar... more»
Between Pauline Kael and Joan Didion, the enmity was mutual. The suffering-princess act grated Kael. “I’ve done soul-wrestling. It’s not tough”... more»
When Groucho Marx met T.S. Eliot. The Jewish wit and the morose anti-Semite shared a friendship and a compulsion: extreme frankness... more»
Ilya Khrzhanovsky has erected a film-set panopticon. Civilians act out his fantasies; everyone snitches; the cameras never stop rolling... more»
He had brown eyes and a taste for greasy food. Had he not been murdered, a heart attack would have done him in. Defrosting the Iceman... more»
The future of Freud. Psychoanalysis is changing, but not him: still a cocaine-sniffing, cigar-chomping punchline... more»
Russia in the 1920s: Desperate times produced utopian architecture. Never before had avant-garde design been official government policy... more»
Retractions in scholarly journals are on the rise. Why? Let’s ask an editor. “It’s none of your damn business!”... more»
Literature and the loo. For Henry Miller, the toilet enriched certain works: Ulysses could not be read anywhere else... more»
In bed by 9, awake by 4: Haruki Murakami’s novels, a brew of ennui and exoticism, emerge from a highly regimented life... more»
The greatest director, writer, and producer in the history of radio died this week. They were all Norman Corwin. He was 101... more»
Tough crowd. There’s nothing like lecturing on Tolstoy to an audience of fiercely loyal kin, judgmental literary critics, and Russian novelists... more»
Having dissected her own staggering misfortune, Joan Didion might look like a self-help guru. Don’t be fooled. She’s indifferent to your pain... more»
What’s ugly beyond belief, singed, moldy, water-stained, and, until now, inaccessible? Archimedes’ brain in a box... more»
Anarchism in action. The intellectual origins of Occupy Wall Street aren’t in Cambridge or Morningside Heights. They’re in Madagascar... more»
Violence and misogyny are loud and clear in hip-hop. But pause the criticism. Listen carefully. Hear that? It’s the sound of capitalism... more»
NoÃŽl Coward likened reading a footnote to going downstairs to answer the door while making love. Digression didn’t suit him. He’s not alone... more»
The biologist and the billionaire. What’s E.O. Wilson doing in Africa’s Great Rift Valley? Stirring up controversy, of course... more»
In the West, graffiti is an empty, often clichÈd visual commodity. In the rest of the world, it’s the lingua franca of political revolt... more»... more»
Raymond Tallis – fedora-topped medical man, polemical polymath – is keen to cure the humanities of two illnesses: neuromania and Darwinitis... more»
With an existential swagger, Willem de Kooning hopped from affair to affair. Then he met Ruth Kligman: “She really put lead in my pencil”... more»
Enough with the hagiography. Steve Jobs was a genius of invention, but his were not epoch-making innovations. Instant history has its perils... more»
Want to hatch a dinosaur? Might be as simple as reverse-evolving a chicken. It’s just a theory. For now... more»
Maurice Sendak doesn’t mince words. “Detestable” is his view of Salman Rushdie. “I called up the ayatollah – nobody knows that”...more»
Something’s rotten in the Kingdom of Print. Books that call for 60 pages are fluffed out to 600. Why? The dismal economics of publishing... more»
For the smug and misanthropic Ambrose Bierce, cynicism wasn’t an attitude; it was his essence... more»
The hole in The Old Farmer’s Almanac made it easier to hang in an outhouse, where it served dual purposes, equally useful... more»
Quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable theories in science, but that doesn’t mean physicists understand it... more»
For Arthur Conan Doyle, who found “unaffectedness” his own chief virtue, the ideal of happiness was “men who do their duty.” He did his... more»
In 1965, researchers set out in campers to hear Americans talk. The Dictionary of American Regional English is a road trip of the mind... more»
Al Jazeera, victim of its success: Amid the Arab Spring, the network faces competition, in the Middle East and beyond... more»
Right-thinking people take it for granted that, in criticizing business, American literature has saved the nation’s soul. That assumption needs revisiting... more»
5-by-8-inch cardstock, about to be thrown away: the report cards of strangers long dead. Paul Lukas delivered a precious few to where they belong... more»
The fortune of Conrad Black, jailed newspaper mogul, has shrunk to $80-million. “I can live on $80-million,” says the gentleman, unbowed. “At least I think I can.”... more»
Natural selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. So how did humans survive adolescence? New research on the brain offers an adaptive accounting... more»
Sweat stains on the cover of your new Amazon book? Could be from a temp worker in the sweltering Lehigh Valley warehouse; paramedics know the route...more»
Rah, rah, bah, humbug. College sports is a multibillion-dollar racket, says a famed historian of civil rights. It's time to pay those who do the sweating...more»
Is experimental philosophy superficial, touchy-feely, faddish nonsense? That’s the rap on Joshua Knobe. He hears it. He just doesn’t care... more»
Exile and identity. When Ariel Dorfman fled Chile, he left his library behind. His years of roving were shaped by the books he could not read... more»
In Havana, morality is malleable. The open secret: Everyone does something illegal. To eat well, for example, call Mr. Dean & Deluca... more»
Science on trial. In 2009 an earthquake destroyed the Italian city of L’Aquila, killing 300 people. Were seismologists guilty of manslaughter?... more»
For the hyperactive, mildly Asperger-y Stanford computer-science crowd, coding is like cocaine. “It’s misery, misery, misery, euphoria”... more»
Fashion, Kant wrote, belongs “under the heading of folly.” But men, it seems, have always been bemused by catwalk-gazing fashionistas... more»
fMRI’s and free will. Imagine a neuroscientist knowing what you’ll decide before you do. Is consciousness a biochemical afterthought?... more»
“I'm getting old,” says Bernard Lewis. But his memory remains sharp. Just ask him about swapping Marx Brothers films with the Shah... more»
David Protess is one of the few professors whose work actually saves lives. Why was he unable to save his own career?... more»
Beyond humiliation. Brought low by scandal, Conrad Black found a literary refuge in unit B-1 of a federal prison in Florida... more»
Niall Ferguson: not just another pretty face. “The real point of me isn’t that I’m good looking. It’s that I’m clever”... more»
Barry Duncan has built a monument to reversibility. The 400-word Greenward palindrome reads like a slightly batty prose poem... more»
The fate of “forsooth.” Like other abandoned words, it is but an archaic fragment. Its history is distinguished, its future nonexistent... more»
Zomia has been called the largest anarchic region in the world, stretching from Vietnam to India. But is it real?... more»
Struggling through unemployment? Try Taoism. Midlife crisis? Read Nietzsche. Philosophical counselors have the cure for whatever ails you... more»
India’s love for correction fluid and carbon paper endures in the computer age. “Bicycles survived cars. Why not typewriters?”... more»
“One camera can’t show you that much,” says David Hockney, who prefers a multi-lens view of the world... more»
“Inflation,” said Ronald Reagan, is “deadly like a hit man.” Maybe not. Is it time to stop worrying and print more money?... more»
Some people want to know the future; others don’t. Some feel powerful in the face of fate. Others know that the way to escape fate is to not know it... more»
Some people can’t read a book without a pencil in hand. Geoff Dyer can’t read without picking his nose. To each his own... more»
Terrorist methods are widely available – a manual lists 14 “simple tools” to wage violent jihad. So why are there so few Islamist terrorists?... more»
On the road. GPS means that you never have to find your own way in the world. What would Jack Kerouac think?... more»
Losing heir. In his doctoral thesis, Saif Qaddafi endorsed holding war criminals personally responsible. Was he sincere? Probably not; he never was... more»
Ah, the Moulin Rouge: a paragon of decadent, belle epoque entertainment. Toulouse-Lautrec saw it as a scene of poignant melancholy... more»
In the 1960s, an exotic species roamed the earth: jet-set playboys. Today their pricey chivalry is gone, replaced by tweet-happy politicians... more»
Freedom and democracy are incompatible, says Peter Thiel. His solution? Build a libertarian utopia off the coast of California... more»
Temptation’s toll. You spend three or four hours a day resisting desire. The result: terrible decisions... more»
Albert Barnes built an immaculate estate to hold his $30-billion collection of Picassos, Renoirs, Matisses. It was beautiful – and doomed... more»
In the past decade, China has invested $4-trillion in housing. But 65 million homes are vacant. Behold history’s biggest ever property bubble... more»
Brilliant as an artist but dreadful as a man, James Joyce turned his obsessions – religion, sex, bigotry – into deeply moving fiction... more»
Avoid fats and sweets, right? Wrong. Slowly savor the “subtle pleasures of dining” even if that clash with our evolutionary tendencies... more»
When Jean-Francois Champollion died, in 1832, the ability to decipher hieroglyphs nearly died with him. He had trained no disciples... more»
If not born unpleasant, Bismarck quickly got the hang of it. His honesty was brutal and disarming, his manner bullying, his appearance ogre-like... more»
From 1941 and 1944, 750,000 people died in Leningrad. Some left diaries. Has there ever been a comparable combination of malnutrition and eloquence?... more»
By the 1950s, the British Empire had waned. But not in Iran, where red-faced men went around in tailcoats – “helpless, niggling, without an idea”... more»
The faith instinct. Did religion evolve as a response to warfare? That theory isn’t so much wrong as ridiculous. Human behavior isn’t so tidy... more»
Elisabeth Badinter doesn’t do subtle. It’s hyperbole that sells. Her cri de coeur against motherhood is provocative, but unconvincing... more»
Christopher Isherwood was an anti-Semitic hypochondriac with a nasty streak. But he understood the vagaries of love as well as anyone... more»
If pop science is the new self-help, is Jonah Lehrer its Tony Robbins? Their insights are similarly uninteresting and unsurprising... more»
James Brown’s ego was impregnable, his behavior deplorable, his charisma undeniable. The godfather of soul was all hard work and street hustle... more»
At their worst, TED talks turn science into a rat-a-tat of meaningless anecdotes and sweeping generalizations. Exhibit A: Philip Zimbardo... more»
The traffic between science and literature is not one-way. Darwin’s writings weren’t merely freighted with metaphor, but often formed by it... more»
Why do aged eccentrics – Ron Galella, R. Crumb – become cultural darlings? Sometimes a pervy cartoonist is just a pervy cartoonist... more»
Literary criticism is hung up on textuality: intertextuality, subtextuality, contextuality. Enough! What about the thinginess of books?... more»
Papa’s taut prose was marred by engorged nouns and a prideful streak he couldn’t break. At 18, Hemingway signed his letters “Old Master”... more»
August Strindberg was a novelist, painter, alchemist, and believer in the occult. He was also a feminist, but his relationships with women foundered... more»
Immortal ennui. Does eternal life sound appealing? Well, it isn’t. In fact, it’s a bad idea. Living forever isn’t good for your soul...more»
Slang exists to communicate identity and attitude, not meaning. Terms can be witty and appealing, but those who use slang often are not... more»
The devaluation of ideas and intellectual tradition is real. One symptom: Colleges are in the midst of a fiscal, ethical, even existential crisis... more»
Origins of the Golden Rule. Long the stuff of theology and politics, morality is best understood as a feature of biology, not heart and soul... more»
Voltaire teaches that even when you disagree with what a speaker has said, you must defend to the death his right to say it. Well, maybe not... more»
P.G. Wodehouse’s stay in wartime Berlin might make him a fool. But when it came to fascism, the comic novelist was far from a naÔf... more»
Why has E.O. Wilson embraced an erroneous view of evolutionary theory? Two words, says Richard Dawkins: “wanton arrogance”... more»
English spelling: “the world’s most awesome mess” and “an insult to human intelligence.” How did this nonsensical system come together?... more»
Joseph Brodsky brooded on the meaning of life and the place of art in it. The purpose of poetry, he concluded, is “to make the future more tolerable”... more»
If reading stories increases empathy, English departments should be oases of decency and good will. That theory warrants a brief response: Ha!... more»
Eric Hoffer wore the bluest of collars but lived the life of the mind, writing about man as a social, political, and religious being... more»
Nations 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 JaurËs, 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-FranÃois 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 BuÃ’uel, 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, clichÈ-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»
Decline 5.0. Prophets of American collapse have a poor record. But the fifth wave of declinism is different: It’s being met with resignation, not protest... more»
“God of art.” Tormented and tormenting, Tolstoy nonetheless produced masterpieces of serene introspection and humane insight... more»
“The American way of laughing does me good,” said Nietzsche. The admiration was mutual. Disciples included Mencken, Hugh Hefner, even Huey Newton... more»
The Clive James style. He’s long had a knack for speaking plain sense about complex subjects. Now he has a serious worldview to match... more»
Steve Jobs sold the idea that there is no conflict between the corporate and the countercultural, mass-market appeal and niche cachet. We bought it.. more»
Joseph Epstein reconciles wit with virtue in his scrutiny of the human condition. Envy, snobbery, gossip – no topic is too trivial... more»
Umberto Eco is not bad because he is dangerous; he is bad because he makes history a headache-inducing game of semiotics... more»
Why was Buzz Aldrin’s spacesuit soft? The answer involves a computer simulation, psychopharmacology, haute couture, and Gil Scott-Heron... more»
Faith and knowledge. Could it be that religion and enlightenment are not eternal foes? That religion is reason’s point of departure?... more»
Was Count Harry Kessler the most cosmopolitan man who ever lived? Auden thought so. Just look at Kessler’s wonderfully gossipy diary... more»
Before it became a financial malady, debt was a moral and cosmological condition. We owed the gods, our parents, the cosmos... more»
Freud, James, Kahneman: great explorers of the human psyche. Freud and James plumbed our emotions, Kahneman our cognitive processes... more»
Two men, two worlds. Verdi and Wagner represent opposing conceptions of not only opera, but also ways of life and philosophies of existenceÖ more»
Queen Anne knew heartache, enduring 16 failed pregnancies in 17 years. Deserving of pity, of course, but remember: She was a loathsome, unscrupulous lady... more»
“We are both contemptible individuals,” Michel Houellebecq tells Bernard-Henri LÈvy, who likewise relishes being a pariah. Why are they so hated?... more»
The New Yorker deals with experience by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This allows readers to feel intelligent without thinking... more»
To enliven a well-trodden globe, what’s a travel writer to do? Some try gimmicks, like hitchhiking with a fridge. Evelyn Waugh opted for wit... more»
Sure, left-handedness used to have immoral connotations. But is it really a conundrum worth tracing through the centuries?... more»
“If a mad scientist were to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell”... more»
Joseph Epstein is an old-fashioned gossip hound. When done right, he says, the exchange of titillating stories can rise to the level of art... more»
The hatchet man. Dwight Macdonald’s ire was easily aroused. “I can work up a moral indignation quicker than a fat tennis player can work up a sweat”... more»
Writing about cruelty. Historians of war, mesmerized by the theater of combat, have lost sight of the ideological, political, and economic contexts of battle... more»
The ideal critic. Adam Kirsch is a throwback to Lionel Trilling, another thinker capable of opining on all aspects of literary thought... more»
Death is messy, and so too is the way we respond. Mourning makes us uncomfortable, a thing to be acknowledged but not dwelled on... more»
Feminists might be squeamish about women using sex appeal to get ahead, but erotic capital should not be squandered... more»
Christopher Hitchens is the Edmund Burke of our time: two ingenious, subtle essayists whose belligerence triumphed over their judgment... more»
Assassination fiction. Political murders have always stoked the irrational underside of politics. Why do we prefer pseudo-scholarship to the truth?... more»
The African boom. After decades of war, disease, and plummeting living standards, the continent is on the rise. What happened?... more»
Working mothers are nothing new. In hunter-gatherer societies, women brought in half of the food. So much for the myth of passive femininity... more»
Marilyn and Mailer. His essay has been repackaged with photos from a final shoot. ’The pairing has the intimacy and delight of a Pap smear“... more»
Economics might act like a science, but it isn’t one, says Robert Trivers. Its key ideas are naive, and it’d take more than a nudge to fix that... more»
Americans read Nietzsche without becoming Nietzscheans. As for those few who go whole hog, they’re rarely intellectuals of the first rank... more»
It wasn’t easy being George Kennan, a curmudgeon well before he was old. His pet peeve in high school? “The universe”... more»
Though reluctant to work with the U.S. military, anthropologists have a lot to say about the war in Afghanistan. Alex Star listens... more»
Alienation and misanthropy. Stephen Sondheim’s muse is misery – about success, relationships, aging, and mankind itself... more»
“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” He heeded his own advice... more»
The Book of Genesis is a bedtime soporific, not a page-turner. God, says Jonathan RÈe, is the death of narrative, and narrative the death of God... more»
An epidemic of biologism has gripped academe. Symptoms include the belief that the mind is the brain, and that Darwinism explains everything... more»
Burning and fuming. Writing Bleak House put Dickens into a creative frenzy, with nothing to calm himself but a bucket of cold water... more»
Can world history be described via precisely 100 art objects? Sure, when illumined by cultural relativism with a flicker of hypocrisy... more»
Aliens and us. If those bulbous-eyed green men are so smart, why do they have to stick probes up abductees’ butts to see what we’re made of?... more»
Like the cocktail was to the Jazz Age, the microbrew is the drink for our precarious times. Even the oenophilic Italians have discovered the romance of beer... more»
Martin Amis broke with his biographer. The salacious revelations? Nope. It’s the book’s shockingly bad prose that Amis can’t stand... more»
Stephen Hawking included just one equation in A Brief History of Time. Others followed suit. But can physics be explained without math?... more»
A life in letters. When the day was done, P.G. Wodehouse returned to his chief pleasure: “writing stinkers to people who attack me”... more»
The university is broken. Students learn little and take on big debt to pay for an education that, intellectually, doesn’t amount to much... more»
Nietzsche-mania. From Lionel Trilling to Huey Newton: What is it about this anti-Christian, antidemocratic madman that appeals to Americans?... more»
In private, Samuel Beckett was as you might imagine him: sullenly professing distaste for his own work, too fatigued to do anything new... more»
Michel Houellebecq – nihilist, alleged racist – is a first-rate prose stylist and a practiced provocateur. That doesn’t mean he’s a good novelist... more»
Hitler, Stalin, Mao – three reasons to question moral progress. But has cynicism blinded us to a worldwide decline in belligerency?... more»
Politics of personality. How to explain William F. Buckley? He had ideas, of course – 50-some books. But what mattered was his charm... more»
The revolutionary who loved birds. Rosa Luxemburg’s passion for animals was resolutely cheerful and gentle. Even cloying... more»
In studying William Carlos Williams, it was best to avoid his son. “If you’re a bloodhound come to sniff out my father’s affairs”... more»
To be human is to think recursively. But what if apes and dogs think recursively, too? Time to reconsider what it means to be human... more»
So you want to be a famous economist? Repackage an old idea as a bold new insight. It works for Robert Frank... more»
All religions have bloodstained garments, but Scientology has more blood on fewer garments, more pints per believer... more»
Samuel Beckett wasn’t much for navel-gazing or self-promotion. “I do not know who Godot is. I do not know if he exists”... more»
A night at the Nietzsches’. Harry Kessler – dandified German count, family friend – barely slept. Friedrich, mad and sick, cried all night... more»
Imagine that Trotsky, not Stalin, had succeeded Lenin. Russia would have been spared decades of terror, right? Probably not... more»
Brutality and blazing sun: No greater poem than the Iliad. It shocks still – a spear through the bladder! But really, four new translations?... more»
Hunter S. Thompson. Look beneath the lore and legacy-buffing to watch a writer developing and deteriorating in real time... more»
“Listen, you miserable bitch.” Hollywood didn’t appreciate Pauline Kael’s contrarianism. She couldn’t have cared less... more»
Ben Jonson, Britain’s first literary celebrity, was a bruiser, intellectually and physically. It surprised no one that he stabbed a man to death... more»
He blogs! He tweets! He consults! Jeff Jarvis has a way of turning trivial observations into buzzy business maxims... more»
Spalding Gray, who called himself a “connoisseur of ambivalence,” was certain about this: He was a fraud, life was rotten, he should end it... more»
In the creation of Maus, everything mattered. Were there tufts of grass in Auschwitz? Ruts in the path? Puddles in the ruts?... more»
Behold a scholar of repute, writing on a subject in which he has long been immersed, suddenly out of his depth, awash in psychobabble... more»
Alexander the Great: Hero or tyrant? Neither, says Mary Beard. The king of Macedon was merely a “drunken juvenile thug”... more»
In public, Jackie Kennedy was wooden, wide-eyed, carefully staged. Does that explain why she spoke like a child? Not quite... more»
Politics and principles. When it comes to staying in power, democrats and dictators have more in common than not... more»
John Milton would appreciate today’s personal ads: seekers in meticulous revolt, like Satan, against the reality imposed on them... more»
Evolutionary psychology is mere speculation, says John Gray. Consider, for example, the notion that humans have become less violent... more»
Alfred Kazin, neurotic and bitter, lived in a perpetual state of high anxiety: “My craving for fame, prestige, ‘love’ seems uncontrolled”... more»
Epicureanism is not about heedless hedonism, says Stephen Greenblatt. Rather, it is an antidote to the allure of limitless power... more»
Joseph Schumpeter wanted to be the greatest horseman, lover, and economist of his era. Alas, he had time to accomplish only two of the three... more»
The great illumination. Streetlights changed everything, a fact not lost on those who prefer the dark: thieves, prostitutes, drunks, students... more»
Google wants to know your reading habits, taste in music, and where you are right now. You are not Google’s customer. You are its product... more»
An affectionate if troublesome son, Ezra Pound wrote to his parents almost every day, often more than once. How did he afford the postage?... more»
Hemingway’s later years: Ill health, night terrors. “Forgive him anything,” said a friend. “He writes like an angel”... more»
The British took umbrage at the Qing dynasty for blocking their opium shipments. A fleet was dispatched. Thus was China “opened” to Western trade... more»
David Mamet, Hollywood conservative. Why bother with his welter of invective and pseudo-sophistication when you can go read Friedrich von Hayek? ... more»
Can’t talk or eat or drink, can’t walk or even stand easily. Roger Ebert, scrubbed of self-pity, is sustained by love, movies, and all those memories... more»
The facts of H. G. Wells’s life – imaginative author, social thinker, lover (100 women, he guessed) – are rich enough to constitute a novel. And so they have... more»
Thomas L. Friedman’s optimism is terrifying, writes Andrew Ferguson. And his language? Pointless alliteration + runaway metaphor = Friedmanism... more»
Freakish expectations. The economics of high-fashion modeling dictate that most models starve not by choice, but by necessity... more»
The Harold Bloom Show. The plot: Celebrity, solipsism, and megalomaniacal excess transform a brilliant critic into a hollow sham... more»
Pity Jenny Marx. Her husband, Karl, was arrogant and underemployed. His drinking jags sometimes led to infidelity, or violence... more»
Christopher Lasch’s distaste for the self-regard of intellectuals bewildered his peers. He found their bewilderment reassuring... more»
Twitter, Facebook, and Google filter the world to flatter your preconceptions. Is intellectual cocooning the end of democracy?... more»
The percentage of black and white adults using drugs is the same, but blacks are nine times more likely to go to jail for drug crimes. Why?... more»
Sex, that voyage of discovery for generation after generation. But Ariel Levy has a reality check: You’re not a Cortez of coition... more»
From seamstress to mistress to magnate, Coco Chanel never kept her little black dress on for very long... more»
Gustav Mahler was no austere perfectionist. His music contains multitudes. “The symphony must be like the world. It must be all-embracing”... more»
T.S. Eliot was one of the world’s unhappiest people. His life was a nightmare of anxiety. But misery stirred creativity... more»
Dwight Macdonald, a naysayer by nature, was irascible but logical. Asked why he drank so much, he replied, “I'm an alcoholic, goddamit!”... more»
Christopher Hitchens’s secular moralism transcends left and right. He is a lodestar of candor in an age of double talk... more»
Jane Austen produced frivolous “feminine tosh,” says V.S. Naipaul. But the key to understanding Austen is not her gender, but her genius... more»
Is Gary Taubes a scientific Solzhenitsyn, bravely exposing the nutrition establishment? Or is he peddling his own bunk health advice?... more»
Chet Baker had a pure sound and matinee-idol looks. Then heroin took over. The trumpeter’s self-degradation, says Greil Marcus, is irresistible... more»
Self-control is the best predictor of a successful life. To prevent that next lapse of will, take Steven Pinker’s advice: Eat chocolate... more»
Conservatives, fearful of lowering standards, have long been wary of efforts to democratize higher education. Now liberals are following suit... more»
Mass-produced images cheapen what they portray. You doubt that? Consider pornography and the corruption of desire... more»
On April 30, 1945, Eva Braun bit into a cyanide capsule. She died as she had lived, invisible to the world... more»
Wendy Wasserstein used intimacy as a smoke screen, and, to the dismay of friends, her life – and theirs – as source material... more»
What ails American literature? English departments, says Joseph Epstein, have become intellectual nursing homes, where old ideas go to die... more»
Hitler humor. The ubiquity of anti-Nazi jokes in wartime Germany suggests that instead of acting against Hitler, most critics just laughed at him... more»
Hugh Trevor-Roper was many things – social climber, political intriguer, intellectual bomb thrower – and in none of them was he ever boring... more»
America is ardently capitalist and famously materialist. But, says Carlin Romano, it’s also the most philosophical culture in the history of the world... more»
Envy means wanting and not getting. But artistic envy? That’s another thing entirely. Nothing reveals a writer’s flawed character more than his jealousy of a peer’s success... more»
The Barthesian moment. These days everyone fancies themselves a culture critic. The blogosphere is a Petri dish of amateur semiology... more»
August Comte believed that bureaucracy would save mankind. Now we’re drowning in paperwork. What happened? The sad end of a strange idea... more»
A Russian publisher spikes a translation of Orlando Figes’s book on the horrors of Stalinism. Censorship? That’s what Figes says. But the problem might be shoddy scholarship... more»
What revolution? Egyptian activists are skilled and courageous in protest, but fickle and disorganized when it comes to the grind of winning elections. Francis Fukuyama explains... more»
Kurt Vonnegut’s decline began when he traded being a writer for being a celebrity, and, worse, a spokesman for his facile faith of niceness. At least he deteriorated with eyes wide open... more»
When liberals invoke Jewish tradition, it’s to the prophets they turn. But the prophets’ calls for justice, says Michael Walzer, weren’t political. They were demands for submission to God... more»
By 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 Socrates. 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»
G¸nter 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 V·clav 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 royaltyóthe 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 éiûek 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»
If you want to know something, Google it. Knowledge and ideas have become too easy to come by, says Mark Pagel. Why innovate when it’s easier to copy?... more»
Sexonomics. Sure, beauty rewards tall, thin young people with symmetrical faces. The unattractive, though, are not all victims of discrimination. Just think of ugly, rich old people... more»
The boy from Brownsville. Alfred Kazin never severed his proletarian roots, and never stopped wrestling with ìthe aspiration and torment of democracyî... more»
The genre-busting magazine essay – think John Jeremiah Sullivan or Geoff Dyer – has emerged as a worthy alternative to the creaky conventions of fiction... more»
Writing, self-affirmation, and self-loathing are so intimately joined in Sven Birkert’s psyche that when the right words don’t fall into place, the universe folds in on itself... more»
Feminism is floundering. A movement that called for a transformation of all relationships has run up against the reality of what women actually want... more»
“Live like a poet,” Picasso told Max Jacob. And so he did, creating poems of complex, controlled discontinuity that helped make way for Cubism... more»
Christopher Hitchens is re-examining familiar principles. In the harsh light of illness, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is revealed as a facile, foolish maxim... more»
Bitter and brilliant, George Kennan inveighed against American foreign policy – and his own ineptitude. “I see myself as a spineless, somewhat infantile, futile little man”... more»
“Loosen your tie, but keep your clothes on.” Airline safety cards are not so much instructional guides as works of fantastically imaginative literature... more»
Glamour and the gutter. Rome is a study in contrasts – sublime beauty meets muck and grime. The city’s crassness is intrinsic to its grandeur, says Robert Hughes... more»
Beware literary friendships. The terms are murky. Camaraderie slips subtly into commodity, amity into transaction. Before you know it, you’re sleeping with William Faulkner... more»
Doomed idealism. Hailed by Marx as the first “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Paris Commune of 1871 ended in bloodshed. Indeed, occupy movements tend to self-destruct... more»
William Deresiewicz is the latest of the would-be New York Intellectuals. So what’s he doing in Oregon, land of tattoos and flannel? Trying another kind of life... more»
Philosophy and faith. Baghdad was the intellectual center of the early medieval world. Then free inquiry faded in Muslim countries. Why?... more»
Animals have long formed a contrast to everything we aspire to be. They are hairy brutes; we are enlightened creatures ashamed of thinking of them as our kin... more»
In the 1970s, alternative magazines published a trove of rock criticism. Robert Christgau remembers the democratic babble of that brief era... more»
Taking aim at middle-class aspirations, Dwight Macdonald drew a bazooka when a pistol would do. He didn’t open the conversation, he killed it... more»
Money and art. The two can’t be disentangled. But some entanglements are more troubling than others. Culture is in retreat before the brute dollar. Jed Perl explains.. more»
The merchandising of Milosz. Pens, postcards, T-shirts, even biscotti – few poets have been commodified and branded with such rock-star exuberance... more»
Jackie Kennedy, a name synonymous with style and class. What a surprise, then, that her first instinct was for the popular, the kitsch, the second-rate... more»
The neuroeconomic revolution. Neuroscience is changing the way Robert Shiller thinks about economics. Do prevailing theories have a physical basis in the brain?... more»
George Harrison had two personalities: self-effacing spiritual seeker and cocaine-addled adulterer. The latter made him a clichÈ, the former made him the most unlikely rock star... more»
Thanks to the Internet, everyone has a say, everyone is a cultural arbiter. A golden age of criticism? Nonsense. The Web has made criticism obsolete... more»
Education greases social mobility and cures social ills. College levels the playing field. Not true, says Steven Brint, but sure is nice to think so... more»
When semiotics was king. No longer hip and transgressive, theory-heads came to the realization: Not everything that seems worthy of literary study is literature... more»
Solipsism and lust. Philip Roth has always been his own preoccupation. In novel after novel, he floats lofty, universal ideas, and then unzips his fly... more»
Erudite, farsighted, fearless: The accolades continue to be piled on Tony Judt. But his talent as a polemicist and pamphleteer disqualified him as a historian of ideas... more»
Once the epitome of glamour, fur has fallen on hard times. The mink coat has come to signify hussies on the make or the kept woman... more»
Triumphal delirium. Despite the trappings of social science and academic prose, Francis Fukuyama’s belief in progress is nothing more than a statement of faith. John Gray explains... more»
For the teenage Geoff Dyer, Penguin Modern Classics did not have the subversive allure of drugs, but consuming them was an expression of independence and discovery... more»
“I was born for greatness,” Oprah has said. She was born, in fact, as poor as a child can be in America. So how did she build her empire? Being a kooky megalomaniac helped... more»
Jonathan Lethem regarded James Wood as the most gifted and consequential critic of our time. Then Wood reviewed one of Lethem’s novels. “The letdown startled me”... more»
Social science is wrong: Crowds are not violent forces that submerge individuality and destroy rationality. In fact, they bring out the best in people... more»
Chicken Sexers and Plane Spotters. There’s a gap between awareness and knowledge, and some skills can be mastered only by your unconscious... more»
Everything is suddenly a distraction to William Ian Miller. His brain is “balsa wood floating in a helium sea.” In truth, his brain is shrinking. And so is yours... more»
Jung understood the need to believe – in religion, mysticism, even in quasi-Nazi flimflam. He wanted to be a prophet but couldn’t shake his faith in science... more»
Isaac Deutscher mistook an adolescent dream for reality-based politics. Just the picture of the intellectual who knows so much but understands so little... more»
What makes a good prophet? Showmanship and luck, but also a taste for secrecy and controversy. Most of all, be a blank slate: People see what they want to see... more»
Tolstoy of the nursery. The Alice books have been interpreted to death: an allegory of Darwinism, a tale of toilet training, a story of sexual desire. All miss the point... more»
Gertrude Stein – foreigner, lesbian, Jew – survived World War II in France. How? She knew a dapper, Harvard-educated aesthete with an obscurely punctuated last name... more»
Holding out for emotional fulfillment is all very well, but lots of women are still single, and it’s getting late. Blame Gloria Steinem, men, monogamy, and, of course, Mom... more»
Swaggering and despairing. Niall Ferguson speaks to men of a certain class and education, from the Upper East Side to the West End. Pankaj Mishra explains... more»
For Philip Larkin, letters were a crucible in which to refine his poetry. They were also the venue for airing regrets. “I’m sorry that our lovemaking fizzled out”... more»
Politics between the sheets. Revolutionaries must be monomaniacal, it’s said. But what is a revolution without sex? Without art? A failure, argued Emma Goldman... more»
In our secular world, relics of the dead still are hallowed. Care to mix your loved one’s ashes into an oil painting, suitable for framing?... more»
Aphrodite, goddess of...looting. Consider the journey of one classical statue, hidden in loose carrots, from Italy to Los Angeles and back... more»
“We live in a world where information is potentially unlimited,” says George Dyson. “Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning?”... more»
Take a clear-eyed look at the book biz. Only two major players, Amazon and Google, are still standing. Everyone else is looking for the best way to go bankrupt... more»
What’s worse: A fatwa sentencing you to death or being asked thousands of times what it’s like to be sentenced to death? “It’s pretty close,” says Salman Rushdie... more»
Hinduism’s classic texts are suffused with sexual pleasure. But a combative prudishness is on the rise in India. Martha Nussbaum wonders why... more»
Literary fiction is not a standard to aspire to, says Geoff Dyer. It’s merely a convention that writers and readers collapse into, like an old sofa... more»
The 19th-century social network. To enjoy the crowd, Baudelaire told us, one must have masks. His love of observing was at war with his fear of being seen... more»
Would you like a planet with old-growth forests, a living ocean, and no extreme climate change? Of course. Only technology can make such a world possible... more»
“Hey, babe, fancy a shag?” Drink doesn’t make us amorous and uninhibited. Culture does. So next time you wake up with regrets, blame not the booze, but yourself... more»
In an age of recklessness and complacency, the future of finance belongs to the prosthetic gods of mathematics and supercomputers. What shall we risk today?... more»
For a century, says Will Self, the symphony and the novel made beautiful love. Then the novel lost interest. Now it just lies there, summoning up past pleasures while playing with itself... more»
No more Manhattan Projects. Technological innovation has stalled, says Peter Thiel. Scientists are ignored. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mailroom... more»
Is Terry Eagleton a credulous dupe for believing that democracy and the Holocaust are two sides of the same capitalist coin?... more»
Was he or wasn’t he? Neoconservatives wrap themselves in the mantle of Lionel Trilling. But for a thinker of his subtlety, such labels are irrelevant... more»
Is evil free-willed wickedness? Or are evildoers compelled to act as they do, victims of an errant electrochemical impulse, an anomaly in the amygdala?... more»
Sure, Norman Mailer was preposterous. But let’s give the man his due: He was a centrifuge of sentences, a spinner of narrative fragments. Jonathan Lethem explains... more»
Adam Smith’s invisible hand is stayed by the inexorable force of Darwinian selection. How can this be? Consider the woodworker and the table saw... more»
The Anti-Romantic child. Every morning another word was gone, another moment of eye contact lost. At stake is not Amy Leal’s job as a scholar, but her son’s life...... more»
W.G. Sebald the novelist exposed Germany’s culture of silence about its Nazi past. Sebald the professor took aim at the deterioration of academic culture... more»
The demand for certainty is the innovation-killer of our age. Solve big problems, build big stuff? No. Don’t risk failure... more»
Has J¸rgen Habermas – gasp! – found God? The neo-Marxist philosopher who once viewed religion as an alienating reality now credits Christianity with spreading egalitarianism... more»
Murder, rape, torture – a typical day during the Middle Ages. The world today, by comparison, is Edenic. Has human nature changed? Steven Pinker explains the humanitarian revolution... more»
“You need a baby,” he told his 47-year-old lover. Thirteen years later, their two children are growing up. Anyone have a problem with that?... more»
Webster’s Third was hardly the radical manifesto it was made out to be; its three main sources were Shakespeare, the Bible, and Milton. In dictionaries nowadays, every “wassup” is welcome... more»
Carl Oglesby’s singular voice – Midwestern, idealistic, in love with and anguished by America – helped inspire the New Left. Until the cocky revolutionists said he had “bad politics.”... more»
Persuasive though the rationales for atheism may be, the idea of God is still a reminder that as clever as you are, there will always be a lot of things you do not understand... more»
George W. Bush looks great. Two-plus years as a civilian have been good to him. Plenty of time to read now (fascinated by Genghis Khan). Decided he was going to get better at golf... more»
Boxing, once central to American history, has sunk to sideshow and, even lower, to a metaphor for politicians. Now a heroic figure from the Philippines trails auguries of glory into the ring... more»
Why do we exist? asks Richard Dawkins. Why are we here? For the 70-year-old biologist, a compelling answer: to continue deft battle with intolerably conventional wisdom... more»
Meet Clyde, Joseph, and Leon. Each believes that he is Jesus. Brought together in one room, the three Christs reveal that sometimes psychosis is as good as it gets... more»
John Holdeen took the long view. In 1936, he placed $2.8-million into a series of 1,000-year trusts. Will the compound interest shatter the U.S.economy?... more»
The morality of refusal. Catch-22’s explosively cynical, disillusioned take on military valor remains relevant. Morris Dickstein explains... more»
Behold the patchwriter, who recycles, steals, appropriates other people’s words to construct something new. Welcome to the age of unoriginal genius... more»
“The Islamists come out of modern intellectual settings, out of universities and libraries,” says Paul Berman. “Everyone can argue with them.” And everyone can argue with Berman... more»
Ours is a culture of whateverness: Disbelief trumps belief; opinions, buildings, behavior are trivial curiosities. Enthralled by ephemera, we’ve become idea surfers... more»
The Loeb Classical Library – 518 volumes covering 1,400 years of Greek and Latin literature – is among the greatest accomplishments of modern scholarship... more»
Evil and us. Sloppy historical analogies, amateurish psychological speculations, oversimplifications, tired moral platitudes – we’ve gotten evil all wrong... more»
When it comes to political judgment, G¸nter Grass has shown that he hasn’t any. So why does Germany’s cultural elite persist in believing that he does?... more»
Revolution is the triumph of hope over experience, says Avishai Margalit. Any cause for hope should be celebrated. In Egypt, there is still reason to celebrate... more»
It’s the first day of college, but before Mark Edmundson welcomes the freshman class, he has a question: What are you doing here?... more»
Marx was wrong: Capitalism, not communism, killed the bourgeoisie. Now there’s no escaping the mercurial market forces. Prepare for further upheaval... more»
In 1967, Noam Chomsky accused intellectuals of deceit and distortion for rationalizing American militarism. Four decades later, little has changed... more»
Literature and the mind. Novelists are thought to be uniquely perceptive about human nature, but does reading fiction increase knowledge? Clarify emotions? Deepen sympathy?... more»
Nabokov was fascinated by extreme characters: pedophiles, murderers, megalomaniacs. He depicted and appealed to psychology. For insight, psychology should look to him... more»
Arendt in Jerusalem. The trial of Eichmann, she thought, failed to take the measure of the man and his deeds. That failure, perhaps, was her own... more»
Learn. Unlearn. Relearn. The Internet makes it hard to concentrate. Good, says Cathy Davidson. Disruption and distraction spark innovation and creativity... more»
The power of ideas. Material factors can’t explain 9/11 or the Arab Spring. To understand those events, says Paul Berman, study the influence of intellectuals... more»
Militant atheism offers a simplistic reading of religious belief, says James Wood. In reality, our beliefs fluctuate. We are all flip-floppers... more»
Early computer culture was a battle between gray, regimented corporations and psychedelic hippie-nerds. It’s still not clear who won... more»
“I like walking because it is slow, and the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour,” says Rebecca Solnit. “Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness”... more»
Literary studies: esoteric, politicized, and out of touch with reality, says Scott Herring. Let the dead French theorists lie, and the field will come back to life... more»
Philip Larkin is a novelist’s poet. It’s novelists, like Martin Amis, who revere his inimitable skill as a scene-setting phrasemaker... more»
For David Hume, conversation – the exchange of ideas, the free play of wit – contributed to “an increase of humanity.” But conversation is one thing; online chat is another... more»
Jean Sibelius’s music – slow, simple, beautiful – was lionized between the world wars. The backlash was as predictable as it was misguided... more»
War, recession, the recent riots in Britain: Is there anything bad in the world that “neoliberalism” is not blamed for? Brendan O’Neill wonders... more»
Robert Johnson never denied that he’d cut a deal with the devil: his soul for his guitar chops. The bluesman knew that scandal sells... more»
Jews playing Wagner. It happens, though not much in Israel, where the Nazis’ favorite composer is unofficially banned. But music has many anti-Semites – why single out Wagner?... more»
Postmodernism is dead. But before throwing a shovelful of dirt on this dominant idea – or clever sham? – a question: What the hell was that about?... more»
Genocide, terrorism, insurgencies: The world feels like an ever more violent place. It isn’t. In fact, war is on the wane. And where it still occurs, it’s less brutal... more»
Think of Winston Churchill, what comes to mind? Jowly war hero, stirring orator, acidic wit. How about father of the British welfare state?... more»
Charles Taylor routinely raises provocative questions – and routinely fails to answer them. More interested in foreplay than climax, he is a master of the philosopher’s tease... more»
Anders Behring Breivik represents more than his own act of violence. His is a new creed of right-wing extremism, a Christian version of al-Qaeda. Malise Ruthven explains... more»
Michael Ignatieff ditched Harvard for Canadian politics, insisting that philosophers can transform themselves into kings. Canadians begged to differ... more»
Women and wages. Fewer hours at an undemanding job for reduced pay: Welcome to the mommy track. Far from an unjust, patriarchal imposition, it’s where many women want to be... more»
Secularism is an achievement, but is it also a predicament? Are nonbelievers condemned to lead desperate lives devoid of meaning? James Wood wonders... more»
Death, fear, evil, enemies, justice, courage, patriotism, resilience – what did those things mean on September 11, 2001? What do they mean today?... more»
About modern intellectual history, Irving Kristol knew at least this: Big-impact ideas tend to come from small, intently focused groups... more»
“Our culture is afflicted with knowingness,” says Erik Davis. But what we know are other peoples’ opinions. Yelp, Digg, Twitter, Facebook...Make up your own damn mind!... more»
Ted Hughes, it was said, went through women “like a guy harvesting corn.” Thus Sylvia Plath, the martyred saint of wronged wives. Sounds plausible, but... more»
You know the type: abstemious, compulsive exercise, supplements by the fistful. Mark Edmundson is not one of those people. In fact, he loathes them... more»
He was among the greatest talkers of his – or any – time, but Oscar Wilde meticulously revised his written prose, never quite sure how subversive he wanted to be... more»
Reading is a physical act. Touching the page helps us to feel the words, to learn to feel ourselves. Can we hold digital texts in the same way?... more»
The fanatical habit. Philip Roth has spent much of his life alone in a room. The achievement – a few great novels – is marvelous. The cost has been high... more»
Arguments for fairness are everywhere. But our use of the term is at best a confusion and at worst a deception. Stephen Asma explains... more»
Engineering evil. It is an enduring shibboleth that science and technology are amoral. Consider Albert Speer, who may not seem relevant today. Unfortunately, he is... more»
There are about 6,000 languages, though Larry Summers thinks we need only one: English. But prophecies of an Anglophone future are overstated... more»
Biology and Buddhism share a view of the nature of reality and the reality of nature. Never mind the aspects of Buddhist tradition that no scientist can believe... more»
Why read books? To learn, yes. But also to escape the messiness of life, to establish a sense of superiority, to distract ourselves from ourselves... more»
The conscience has long been considered the site of moral reasoning. But from Plato to Sara Ruddick, the female conscience has proven confusing... more»
Totalitarianism: The term originated in Italy; the system was perfected in Eastern Europe. It wasn’t about efficiency, it was about remaking man for the future... more»
Do you prefer obscurity over clarity? Fond of neologisms? Name-checking Heidegger? Peter Sloterdijk stands in a long line of hip European philosophers... more»
Tolstoy preached Tolstoyism, but there was no “Chekhovism.” Chekhov’s genius wasn’t for big ideas, but petty concerns – a small lie, filthy latrines, a slovenly manner... more»
Magicians of money. Jackson Lears on the connection between religious belief and social practice, mystical ideas and earthly success, Mormonism and capitalism... more»
If solitude doesn’t lead us back to companionship, then where does it lead? Emerson and Thoreau knew well “the dangers of forest thinking”... more»
The ≠journalist-as-translator has been replaced by the journalist-as-sage. Jonah Lehrer is a product of this new world, and its first real casualty... ... more»
The education of George Scialabba. It arrived between covers – On Liberty and Middlemarch. It is a march of progress, or at least he thinks it is... more»
We turn to science for certainty. And scientists are all too happy to play soothsayer. But it’s folly to think catastrophes can be predicted... more»
Poet on the road. Having moved for decades from reading to reading, party to party, Donald Hall has some advice: Beware of strangers bearing poems... more»
Karl Popper, George Soros, Francis Fukuyama: What is it about promoting democracy that drives otherwise sensible thinkers to embrace extreme positions?... more»
The Theory Generation. Franzen, Eugenides, Egan, and Lipsyte were educated while Derrida and Foucault ruled the humanities. Their novels reflect this, uneasily... more»
Pass the bone-marrow and caviar. So you think it’s a waste to spend lavishly on food? You miss the point. The meal is ephemeral, it’s true, but so are you... more»
The Rotterdam thieves made off with a Picasso, a Monet, a Matisse, a Gauguin, a Meyer de Hann. Wait, who? It must be a clue!... more»
History flows from geography. Place is everything. So says Robert Kaplan. What about the impact of ideas? They’re no match for mountains and monsoons... more»
The greatest artist of our time? It’s the man who closed the gap between art and technology. It’s George Lucas, or so says Camille Paglia... more»
Translating jokes takes luck and pluck. Just ask David Bellos or Gary Shteyngart. Have you heard the one about the pair of translators who walk into a bar?... more»
Orwell the anti-Semite. A public advocate of tolerance, he was a bigot in private. His racism was more than an embarrassing tic, more than an emblem of his times... more»
Poetry is a salve for emotional pain, says Christian Wiman. For physical pain, however, it’s useless. But as a lesson in suffering, even as a model for how to die, it’s essential... more»
They were middle-class Oxford boys who bonded over hatred – of women, Evelyn Waugh, their families. They were Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. They were Lucky Jim... more»
Some dream of a theory of everything, a unity of knowledge. But maybe disciplinary boundaries are not so much an accident of history as a result of how we understand the world... more»
Isaiah Berlin was charming, affable, erudite. But was his primary contribution to the art of conversation or to the field of political philosophy?... more»
Oliver Wendell Holmes described the camera as a “mirror with a memory.” At that time, photography was not yet routine; a single picture could capture a person for life... more»
The fine arts have become a wasteland, says Camille Paglia. A blasÈ liberal secularism has killed off creativity. More capitalism is the solution... more»
In politics, says Jonathan Haidt, truth or falsity is beside the point – a “rationalist delusion.” Likewise the idea that “reasoning is our most noble attribute”... more»
Born to lie. You fake smile, fake laugh, think you’re smart and good-looking. You’re neither, probably. But it’s OK: You’re hard-wired to deceive... more»
Handwriting is sensuous, immediate, personal. The movement away from writing by hand diminishes, in a quiet but real way, our humanity... more»
Theodor Adorno’s mystique. His arguments are essentialist, sweeping, and unconvincing, his prose obfuscatory. Perfect that Judith Butler has won an award that bears his name... more»
Allan Bloom may have been many things – culture warrior, scourge of feminism and rock music, “Philosopher Despot” – but here’s one thing he wasn’t: conservative... more»
Given the cult that surrounds Portrait of a Lady, it’s worth remembering that its author was a young man crafting subtle yet catty – even bitchy – prose... more»
Baathism – the anticolonial, pan-Arab ideology – is near collapse. Damascus is its last stand. What will remain after the fall? Intellectual bafflement and paranoia... more»
The world’s worst words. How did they get that way? Overuse, mostly. Here’s the thing: Resistance is futile. “Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule”... more»
The American Heritage Dictionary, once the choice of fogies, stood as a bulwark against the loose argot of popular culture. Yet it was first to drop an F-bomb into its pages... more»
Letters from the editor. At The Criterion, clerical routine fueled literary insights for T.S. Eliot, who was masterly at cajoling difficult contributors... more»
Free markets and fast growth are well and good, but they won’t make you happy. There remain political, philosophical, and ethical questions that markets can never address... more»
Kingsley Amis was a bleak, bigoted curmudgeon. But when it came to the necessary task of skewering snobs and sycophants, and tweaking liberal pieties, he was without peer... more»
Self-immolation is an extreme, extraordinary, and increasingly routine act. It has little to do with suicide and everything to do with politics... more»
Intellect is a disadvantage in American politics. The curious mind is a trivial mind, unless it’s used to make money. This was as true in Richard Hofstadter’s day as it’s today... more»
The new gender economics. In 40 percent of American marriages, the wife outearns the husband. What's the future? A more feminine workplace, a more masculine home... more»
Ray Bradbury liked gadgets – indeed, he anticipated the invention of many, including the iPod – but it was the habits of humans that preoccupied him... more»
Call it what you want – neuroscientism, neurobabble – it’s evidence that quackery is on the rise. No matter what the question, it seems, brain research has the answer... more»
In which Terry Castle explores the fabulously eccentric world of the Jazz Age smart set, muses about sex in the academy, and coins a necessary word: lesbuffoon... more»
Politics and the novel. A writer should resist the temptation to simply promote his views. Political fiction thrives on contradiction and irresolution... more»
Are you a migrant, living in a city, born poor? You’re at higher risk of schizophrenia. Our social interactions make us who we are, and they can make us sick... more»
Those who knew Ford Madox Ford – Conrad, Hemingway – wrote about him. Admired and resented, he’s among the more mercurial figures in literary history... more»
Ghost stories make metaphysicians of us all. “Let us honor the marvelous as well as the matter of fact!” writes Michael Dirda... more»
When Simon Schama was young, gangly, and peculiar, he fell in love with the essay. Long-form nonfiction, he says, is still “our best hope of liberating text from texting”... more»
In apocalyptic times, Simkha-Bunim Shayevitch believed, great care must be given to culture. He died at Auschwitz; his poems survive as a Jeremiad... more»
Call Susan Jacoby an “ugly old atheist” if you choose, but don’t dare describe her atheism as “soft”. It’s by no means flabby or weak-minded... more»
Great books and grand subjects are soul-saving, except when they’re not. Too much of what gets taught in the liberal arts isn»t great, but merely what interests professors... more»
Science’s imperialist ambitions. Are the only real questions empirical ones? Can human behavior be explained by physics or biology alone?... more»
Queer kids used to be cool. Now they’re boring and banal. If gay men are to recover their panache, it’ll take some practice. Here’s where to start... more»
The dream of a world governed by earnest technocrats, guided not by ideology or nationalism but by efficiency and “best practice,” is an old dream – one with a noble but checkered past... more»
Punk tactics and political art. Ai Weiwei shows that one man can shame a state, that art can undermine propaganda and become the conscience of reform... more»
Parody gets bad press. It’s mistaken for pastiche; F.R. Leavis thought it “demeaned” those lampooned. But at its best, parody is literary criticism... more»
One day Norman Mailer, ever self-indulgent, decided to become a film director. Watching the movies he made is like being trapped in an elevator with obnoxious drunks... more»
Why did conservation – a gentle, optimistic undertaking – give way to the more divisive environmentalism? Two words: Rachel Carson... more»
Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges imagined it, and now Google might make it real: a one-to-one scale map of the world. Useful or creepy? “The map is mapping us”... more»
Here’s something true about sentences: The ones built for a purpose tend to hold up; the ones built to be beautiful tend to collapse. Christopher Beha explains... more»
Sure, “paradigm shift” is a banal buzz of hucksters and marketers. But Thomas Kuhn really did upend the way we think about how science does – and should – work... more»
Daniel Mendelsohn is no hatchet man, but he can sling a zinger – and face the consequences. If you want to avoid awkwardness at parties, he says, become a caterer, not a critic... more»
Reading is a habit, another thing we do. But then you read something that renews the act. For Sven Birkerts, who has a thing for melancholy brooders, that something is W.G. Sebald... more»
Economics is a discipline in denial, says Howard Davies. Flawed models remain in fashion; economists no longer even try to explain the world as it is... more»
Can a butterfly build a better TV? Indeed so. And a camel's nose can irrigate a greenhouse. The answer to many of life's problems has already been crafted by natural selection... more»
Against acknowledgements. That extraneous page at the end of a novel is a narcissistic, clichÈ-ridden act of faux-modest self-promotion. Sam Sacks makes the case... more»
Hype, superficiality, ¸bercurators: Contemporary art is an easy thing to hate, says Simon Critchley. What can save it? More disgust and revulsion... more»
The Economist, Michael Lewis once said, “is written by young people pretending to be old people.” That voice – slightly creaky, sophisticated, at times offbeat – is now that of the new global elite... more»
The balance of power in science is changing. Those with analytical skills used to be ascendant. Now it's the custodians of big data who hold sway... more»
What’s a national writer to do in a global literary marketplace? Keep telling tales from the margins, says Irvine Welsh. Express your culture, “however movable a feast that is”... more»
Morbid curiosity has always been with us. After all, death up close is unusual and uncomfortable--and irresistible. Macabre displays humanize us, says Stephen Asma... more»
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Samuel Johnson remarked. His was a quaint notion. Remuneration can play too small a role in the lives of artists... more»
The tools of hard science – statistics, data sets – have migrated to the humanities. Want to study social networks in Beowulf? You’re not alone. But what’s the point?... more»
Enough with America’s tread-so-carefully literary culture, says Dwight Garner. Criticism isn't for uplift. It’s for straight talk, a little humor, and above all, an argument... more»
Culture thrives on conflict. Warfare, terror, and bloodshed nurtured the Renaissance in Italy. Peace and democracy in Switzerland gave rise to... what, exactly?... more»
Lonely Planet politics: Kim Jong Il was a pragmatist. Iran is benign. The burqa is “a tool to increase mobility and security.” Why do the travel guides coddle tyrants?... more»
The end of affluence. Economic growth, a secular religion, is stuck in a long-term fizzle. The future promises to be crimped and contentious... more»
Foodie sanctimony is not new. Meet the Michael Pollan of the 19th century, Sylvester Graham. “A greater humbug or a more disgusting writer never lived”... more»
What is the nature of knowledge? Can a theory be valid if it cannot be proved? Where does knowledge end and philosophy or religion begin?... more»
Edward Gorey’s drawings – macabre and discomfiting, whimsical and witty – reveal “a whole little personal world,” as Edmund Wilson put it... more»
The West must tend to “the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant.” Kipling? Churchill? No, Tony Blair. What’s with the neo-imperialism?.. more»
Rock 'n' roll is thick with nostalgia, says Leon Wieseltier. Enough with the swooning over Bruce Springsteen. It’s unseemly and undeserved. “He is Howard Zinn with a guitar”... more»
What happened to the hatchet job? Critics today praise the pugnacity of, say, Pauline Kael, but won’t land a blow themselves. Even well-considered pans are now shunned... more»
In the world that TED built, marketing masquerades as theory, charlatans as philosophers, slogans as truths. Evgeny Morozov explains... more»
A philosophy of sleep might sound sleep-inducing. It isn’t. After all, sleep is so strange. For around eight hours a day you lose control of your faculties and become delusional. What’s that about?.. more»
Religion isn’t just what you believe, says Robert Bellah, it’s what you do. “The misinterpretation of people like Dawkins is that religion is a mistaken proto-science. But religion is about action”... more»
What does a dispute among the muses have to do with empathy? Literature helped ignite a humanitarian revolution, or so argues Elaine Scarry... more»
Photography is about disappearance: cultures changed beyond recognition, lives long gone. As Cartier-Bresson put it, “A contact sheet is full of erasures”... more»
Henry Luce and James Agee were an odd couple. The conservative Time publisher clashed with the rebellious, bohemian writer. Agee fantasized about shooting the boss... more»
For W.B. Yeats, the spirit world was anything but false and foolish. “The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write”... more»
Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre: Ideas migrate among texts, letters morph into essays. Books are unstarted, unfinished, abandoned, aborted... more»
Friderike Burger was 30 when she met Stefan Zweig, soon taking the title of Wife of a Famous Writer. There are worse lots in life, but not many... more»
What are aurochs? Caesar called them “elephantine creatures prone to unprovoked attack.” Much later, Nazi ideology, a zookeeper named Konrad Lorenz, and the Heck brothers revived the brutal breed... more»
“The idea of a utopia has always been completely repulsive to me,” says Martin Amis. “If you are at all artistic, you want all those inequalities – that’s what makes life interesting”... more»
Does quantum physics undermine materialism? Ostensibly, yes. But it sort of depends. Can the mind transcend matter?... more»
The truth about truth is complicated. After all, lying is sometimes desirable. Indeed, small lies can reveal big truths. Ask Gulliver... more»
What’s happened to intellectual life on the right? In flight from elitism, conservatism has dead-ended in a populist swamp, says Russell Jacoby... more»
Promoting democracy might seem like a good idea. It’s not. The world is riven by sectarian conflicts and allegiances. Will we ever learn from history?... more»
The European Union is “not merely an institutional fantasy,” insists J¸rgen Habermas. Such cosmopolitanism is not without its charms, but can it ease the financial crisis?... more»
The Brothers Grimm, 18th-century terrorists, savored violence in their art. Toes are chopped off, severed fingers fly through the air. The fairy tales validate our own fears... more»
“Hitch-slap.” Any subject can reach a state of worship that threatens criticism and free thought. So noted Christopher Hitchens, that most Orwellian of Orwell’s successors... more»
What’s considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion. “I wish you was here,” John Adams wrote to Abigail from France in 1778... more»
The artist installs apps in Macs at an Apple store for a work called “People Staring at Computers.” Then the Secret Service rings his doorbell and assumes the role of critic... more»
The creator of The Norton Anthology of English Literature spoke only Yiddish until he was 5. Now about to turn 100, M.H. Abrams still has plenty to say... more»
Computers are dumb. Of course, they’re also necessary. But as we increasingly shape our lives to accommodate computers, their dumbness will become ours... more»
What made George Orwell tick? Being an amateur anthropologist, understanding things – poverty and squalor, politics, himself – at the level of basic experience... more»
Don’t confuse Allan Bloom with his admirers: He was no culture warrior, aiming at both left and right. It’s time to rescue Bloom from the partisans... more»
It’s true: Talented people can be unpleasant or immoral. But do they behave worse than the untalented? Not always. Consider Haydn, neither tormented nor cruel... more»
“Man can live about 40 days without food,” said AndrÈ Gide, “but only for one second without hope.” Can a secular worldview provide the degree of hope that religion can? more»
What is intellectual humility? It’s the love of knowledge swamping concern for status. It’s knowing your opinion might be misguided. It’s a virtue, or so we’re told... more»
John Updike thought James Agee was feckless, inadequate, and rambling. Perhaps he was right, but isn’t there something magnificent about Agee’s amateurism?... more»
Stephen Wolfram was an academic. But he wanted to turn his ideas into things – quickly. So he left. “I look at academia and think: ‘Wow, things moved so slowly there in the last 25 years!’”... more»
What would Rousseau, a great education theorist, make of the modern university? Two words come to Terry Eagleton’s mind: “squalid betrayal”... more»
James Joyce was a raconteur and a barfly. He wrote pornographic letters to Nora, the “man-killer,” and preferred a low figure of speech, the pun... more»
Full of outlandish proverbs of dubious origin, H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary disparaged the Irish and the married man. The million-word monster just turned 70... more»
When it comes to the relationship between art and morality, Walter Benjamin put it best: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism”... more»
For Edvard Munch, art was an act of memory, a revisiting of images and ideas, a blurring of the line between original and copy. “I don’t paint what I see – but what I saw”... more»
For lonely people in a lonely age. Psychoanalysts were once imbued with intellectual authority, dabbling in religion and philosophy. Now therapists are more like artificial friends... more»
Is the human brain shaped by group selection? Appealing idea, says Steven Pinker, but there’s no use for it in psychology or social science... more»
The banality of money. Pity the novelist who writes about the rich. Demonizing Wall Street might be good politics, but it’s usually bad art... more»
Is higher education a credentials cartel? College isn’t primarily about imparting knowledge; it’s about certifying graduates. To join you must pay, and pay dearly... more»
Martha Gellhorn came to regard her antifascist journalism from the 1930s as a “a perfectly useless performance.” Among war reporters, despair is now the norm... more»
Why do we tell ourselves particular stories in particular ways at particular times? What does a boxer reveal about the transformation of Eastern Europe? Carlo Rotella has some thoughts... more»
What is wealth for? How much is enough? Now that we have achieved abundance, the habits bred into us by capitalism leave us unable to enjoy it properly... more»
Read Claude Lanzmann’s memoir for his portrait of Beauvoir, his sometime lover. Read him on the making of Shoah. Read him as a case study of vainglory... more»
You don’t easily give up Saul Bellow to death. His novels were obsessed with big questions. But he didn’t impose his ideas. “No amount of assertion will make an ounce of art”... more»
There was a time when we sought heavenly, artistic, or political glory. Now we seek happiness. Social scientists even measure it. But can such a thing be quantified?... more»
How is it that a father of historic preservation was also a forerunner of the Surrealists? Both schools sprang from a mind with an instinct for the strange and forbidding... more»
The rumors have long swirled around Batman and Robin. And remember Wonder Woman’s catchphrase: “Suffering Sappho!” Costumed crusaders are finally coming out of the closet... more»
The tyranny of the clock. Our ever more intimately clocked world is increasingly efficient. The problem: We are forever on the edge of being late... more»
Why is it that some eminent scholars, late in their careers, suddenly exclaim, “This profession really is getting to be a crock!” George Scialabba has some thoughts... more»
Dolling up declining linguistic standards as cultural diversity makes a virtue out of dumbness, and turns illiteracy into a perverse form of literacy... more»
Pop music makes you feel vital, vigorous, intense. And that’s just it – pop neatly packages the emotions. All you have to do is listen. It’s so easy... more»
Mary McCarthy might have been a viperish, bipolar nymphomaniac. Who cares? Pay attention to what matters most: her writing... more»
Most people in academe want to get out, says Terry Eagleton, who is himself getting out. And it’s just as well. So often the intellectual is the opposite of the academic... more»
David Graeber was once certain a new age was dawning. Jet-packs, antigravity shoes, flying cars – all within reach. He wasn’t alone. How did we get the future so wrong?... more»
“What will survive of us is love.” Oprah? The Beatles? Hallmark? No, Philip Larkin. As soon as he wrote it, he had second thoughts... more»
What is the lesson of culture? That it is a precious but precarious inheritance, more difficult to achieve than destroy. And once destroyed, it’s irretrievable... more»
Linguists vs. The New Yorker. Language conventions are desirable, even if all of them are arbitrary and many are spurious. Steven Pinker explains.. more»
Can a literary interview be a weapon? What if the magazine in which it appears – The Paris Review – is part of a CIA-financed campaign of psychological warfare?... more»
Psychology’s most misunderstood visionary. B.F. Skinner’s ideas about behavior modification have been maligned as morally bankrupt, even fascist. A bum rap?... more»
Crises force us back to first principles. This is a moment for political philosophy, a moment for one of its most intelligent practitioners, Alan Ryan... more»
Derrida may be derided as a purveyor of gobbledygook. But he was that too rare thing, an intellectual who doesn’t have to speak of intellectual matters... more»
Thomas Gradgrind and Austin Powers, Holly Hazeleyes and George Savage Fitz-Boodle: What do characters’ names mean?... more»
Scholarly writing and journalism are as different as cross-country skiing and downhill. Few excel at both. Then there’s Jill Lepore... more»
Skull clamps and scrotum calipers. Harvard scholars poked and prodded students to learn the secrets of a successful life. What did they find?... more»
The politics of famine. Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused 36 million people to starve to death. The takeaway? The best foreign policy is calorie-based... more»
Politics in the age of Caesar: “Surround yourself with the right people.” “Give people hope.” “Know the weaknesses of your opponents.” Sound familiar?... more»
Raised in an anarchist utopian community, Gilbert Seldes never lost his sympathy for the radical fringe, the pseudoscientific, the ridiculous or faddish... more»
Once upon a time, fairy tales raised social consciousness. Then their revolutionary soul was subverted, commodified, extinguished. Blame Disney... more»
Robert Oppenheimer had a personality made of “many bright, shining splinters.” Nothing quite cohered. He was a brilliant disaster, elegant and obscure ... more»
Catastrophism. Immanuel Velikovsky was a psychoanalyst who expressed a unifying idea in planetary astronomy. Was he as crazy as his critics thought?... more»
Built to last, but for how long? We all want to protect architectural treasures, but sentimental attachments may be stifling creativity... more»
How did the Master’s reputation survive the culture wars? He became a shape-shifter, a worldly, gay, feminist. Henry James: He’s just like us!... more»
The charismatic, paranoid, melancholic Jacques Derrida acquired his textual tics at an early age. He was reprimanded for his “tendency to complication”... more»
Europe under the Soviets. How were its agricultural, conservative, religious regions forced behind the industrial, atheistic Iron Curtain?... more»
In 1914 Edward Thomas, 36, wrote his first poem. He was killed by a German shell a few years later, having no idea his reputation would survive... more»
Jazz and the Great American Songbook – think Irving Berlin, Cole Porter – evolved together. Then the Songbook style withered, and so has jazz... more»
Benoit Mandelbrot set out to alter our view of the world. He succeeded, discovering fractal geometry. He was in his own mind a second Kepler... more»
Victim, symbol, sexy mess – Marilyn Monroe has spawned a large literature. Of the many theories, few regard her as a person rather than an archetype... more»
Foreign-policy intellectuals attach catchy labels to existing trends. They craft grand strategies, doctrines, op-eds. They have little influence... more»
Joseph Epstein: Even his detractors must concede that the man can’t write a boring sentence. His favorite trick: toeing the line between amiable and smug... more»
Reading George Steiner. Polyglot polymath? Glorified dilettante? Eurocentric blowhard? Amit Majmudar has some thoughts... more»
Cambridge, 1946. Wittgenstein returned after his wartime service, a cranky, mercurial mutterer: “I get stupider and stupider every day”... more»
Forget “beautiful” or “elegant,” “painterly” or “sublime.” We now talk about art as “interesting” or “cute,” even “zany.” What do those things mean?... more»
Empathy and altruism. To change a heart, tell a story. To change politics, says Martha Nussbaum, it takes more. It takes history and economics... more»
Immanuel Velikovsky was wrong about everything but wildly popular nonetheless. The pseudoscientist wanted to be friends with Einstein... more»
Is immortality a vain, heedless pursuit, a contemptible act of cowardice? Or is meekly resigning ourselves to our mortal fate tantamount to murder?... more»
Gay men call one another many things – “Dinge Queen,” “Potato Queen,” “Rice Queen,” “Princess Pencil Meat”. But how do they learn to be gay?... more»
Descartes was wrong: The brain is the mind. But how? The answer lives at the intersection of neuroscience and psychoanalysis... more»
Sophocles’ insights into humility and tragedy were elegant and incisive, which is why it’s dismaying to see him handled by a ponderous scholar with a tin ear... more»
Knowledge doubles every 15 years. But much of what you know is wrong. What to do? “Stop memorizing things and just give up”... more»
Thomas Nagel takes on natural selection. His tools? Inconsistent logic and an idiosyncratic view of common sense. The result? Unconvincing... more»
A few scientists write fiction, but the neuroscientist Giulio Tononi has produced a deeply bizarre, deeply imaginative work about science... more»
Learning from taxidermy. How we look at dead animals is linked to how we see each other. Taxidermy offers clues – and warnings – about our collective past.... more»
Leviathan was always an enemy-maker for Hobbes, for a time the most loathed thinker in Britain. But his heresies helped generate British philosophy... more»
Evolution hints at why women lag behind men in the workplace. How to fix the discrepancy? Simple: compulsory paternity leave... more»
Poet, war hero, drug addict – Gabriele D'Annunzio was also a notorious womanizer – and, remarked Lenin, “the only real revolutionary in Italy”... more»
Followers of Jane Austen faithfully look to her for insights. What explains their devotion? Her novels are the archetypal self-help guides... more»
August Strindberg, whether eccentric or mad, had an immense talent for writing, polarizing opinion, and striking up awful relationships with women... more»
The real Count of Monte Cristo was a slave and renegade aristocrat, a strapping, six-foot dandy and valiant leader. Did Napoleon condemn him to die?... more»
Science and speculation. Do we know what we’re talking about when we talk about the evolution of the mind? Not really, says Anthony Gottlieb... more»
A tale of two cities. Hitler adored Munich but hated the hedonism of Berlin. So when it was his, he tried to remodel the city as Germania, capital of the world... more»
John Keats was no mere star-crossed, sickly neurasthenic. He could walk 600 miles, and for a time he considered joining the forces of SimÛn BolÌvar... more»
Condemned as a heretic, Savonarola was later considered for sainthood. Though convinced he was a prophet, he was no simple pretender... more»
Something strange happens when we read the trickiest of poems. We become embarrassed or panicky. Relax. Difficulty is innate in poetry... more»
The spat between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael might feel archaic now, even irrelevant, but it remains misunderstood. It was about sexism... more»
Robert Duncan was immersed in myth: Greek, Sumerian, and Egyptian sources; the Bible; kabbalah; fairy tales. All of it found its way into his verse... more»
Webster’s Third Dictionary, billed as an unfussy catalog of common English, was simply too much for Jacques Barzun. “The longest political pamphlet ever”... more»
The algorithmic takeover. Automated decision-making is on the rise. If this sounds like something from a Vonnegut novel, that’s because it is... more»
Bernard Lewis has studied the Middle East since 1933. Now he’s witness to the region’s great upheaval, the Arab Awakening. He’s not optimistic... more»
“Rap is poetry,” says Jay-Z, “and a good MC is a good poet.” But a good MC is a good MC; isn’t that enough? Why the grasping for literary stature?... more»
Alvin Plantinga’s philosophy is subtle and scientifically informed. His theism is comprehensive, even ingenious, but ultimately hard to agree with... more»
Fairy tales are memes, told and retold across generations until only the fittest survive to shape the way humans live together... more»
Charles de Gaulle was a genius at blurring the line between myth and history. His legend is a comfortable blanket in which all can wrap themselves... more»
A good magic book is like a good self-help book. It must provide user-friendly spells to fend off forces of evil. The Long Lost Friend is that book... more»
Aung San Suu Kyi has traded in house arrest for a seat in parliament. Her next challenge: transitioning from godlike savior to pragmatic politician... more»
What do you call it when Madison Avenue co-opts Motown jingles to peddle raisins, cars, or cake frosting? The sweet sound of capitalism... more»
Hoover and Reagan. The FBI director trusted few but found a comrade in the former-actor-turned-politician. For a time, they shared a foe: UC Berkeley... more»
What’s the matter with meritocracy? It breeds a cult of intelligence, a sense of entitlement, and unequal outcomes. But what’s the alternative?... more»
What about Katie Roiphe so annoys people? There’s her contrarianism, her controversialism, her solipsism. But give her this: She’s not boring... more»
Listening to silence. John Cage knew that nothing is not nothing. It is always something – a provocation, a joke, an invitation to pay attention... more»
The language wars have raged since the beginning of language. Battles have been bloody, front lines move back and forth, but there’s no victor... more»
When is a book more than a book? When it’s wielded as a weapon, or used to signify wealth, status, taste. Or to wrap food, wipe bottoms... more»
At National Review, William Rusher was “the other Bill.” But in many ways it’s Rusher, not Buckley, who shaped contemporary conservatism... more»
Philanthropy and foreign policy. Bankrolled by private foundations, the American Century was sustained by an unshakable faith in expertise... more»
By the end of her life, Lillian Hellman had accumulated many titles: ”archetype of hypocrisy,” “embodiment of ugliness,” “the quintessential liar”... more»
Chomsky’s intellect is promiscuous, his take on linguistics formidable, his view of America cartoonish, and his contradictions glaring... more»
There’s nothing funny about scholars parsing political humor. Still, no one else asks an important question: Can conservatives do satire?... more»
Why is it that so many academics fail to write well, or even intelligibly? Because too often they write not to be read, but merely to be published... more»
Charles Rosen likes difficult prose. Take the Marquis de Sade’s writings – difficult because they’re repellent but “fascinating because they are so sordid”... more»
Behind every Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Solzhenitsyn was an overworked, underappreciated wife. Do they deserve pity? No, they deserve more credit... more»
Here’s the thing about Pauline Kael: You could trust her diligence and enthusiasm. The question, says Clive James, is whether you could trust her judgment... more»
Peter Sloterdijk, who’s never met a neologism he doesn’t like, is an immodest, unfashionable thinker. But when he doesn’t convince, he provokes... more»
Paul Auster’s self-mythologizing is epic – and odious. He likens himself to Keats, but Keats would not have published such an ill-conceived, rambling diary... more»
Homo mysterious. Evolution is a fact, but aspects of human development remain unexplained. One persistent riddle: Why do women have orgasms?... more»
Witold Gombrowicz settled in Argentina, far from the Polish intelligentsia. He loved catastrophe and lived in penury. He wanted to maroon himself... more»
What would you do with more leisure time? Explore the mysteries of space and time? Or brawl, steal, and drink? Richard Posner has some thoughts... more»
“Modern classic” is a fuzzy term. Does it mean anything at all? At least this: A “writers’ writer” is more marketable dead than alive... more»
Philip Larkin lauded Louis MacNeice as a poet of everyday life: shop windows, traffic, ice cream. He was also an exquisite love poet, if a fickle lover... more»
China, 1974. Roland Barthes noted the “uniformity of clothes” and a joyless May Day celebration. “Wherever do they put their sexuality?” he wondered... more»
Sincerity is a fickle friend, an artful pretense. Machiavelli manipulated it, Montaigne prized it, the Romantics made a fetish of it... more»
The work of a critic. Roger Kimball’s task is twofold: preserve tradition and collect the cultural trash, disposing of the faddish and ephemeral... more»
Pleased to meet you? Joyce turned up sloshed to meet Proust. Allen Ginsberg thought Patti Smith was a pretty boy. He was dismayed to learn otherwise... more»
Law and libido. Harmless titillation to some is a grave crime to others. 'Twas always thus: Mesopotamia was no place to get caught cheating... more»
In America, “isolationism” is an epithet, a philosophy for xenophobes and fools. Though its future is dubious, its history is rich... more»
“To what should we cling?” Joachim Fest’s father asked as Germany lay in rubble after the war. Fest spent his life grasping for a suitable answer... more»
George Orwell was a Tory anarchist, political radical, and cultural conservative. It was his contradictions that made him great... more»
Hitler was the “screaming little defective in Berlin.” But early studies of the Nazi mind reveal more about psychoanalysis than about Nazism... more»
Ryszard Kapuscinski was evasive in person, and he had much to evade. His reporting was full of fictions; he was a Communist spyÖ more»
The New Yorker is often ridiculed as a bastion of upper-middle class banality. But the magazine has long been home to abrasive and subversive art... more»
Ours is not a dignified age. But what is dignity? And how can it justify both human rights and Iran’s nuclear program?... more»
The anticolonialism of Liang Qichao, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Rabindranath Tagore shapes our post-Western world. Their influence cannot be doubted... more»
Titian was a mercenary who was expert at satisfying the vanity of the highest bidder, whether wealthy duke, corrupt pope, or powerful emperor... more»
T.S. Eliot was down. He’d separated from his wife, The Criterion was struggling, and he’d failed to get a position at All Souls. He wasn’t yet 40... more»
Shark! We hunt them; they hunt us. The very word summons fear. But here’s what’s really scary: shark sex. It’s rough. Brutal, in fact... more»
Dickens’s defects – melodrama, contrived plots, manufactured happy endings – were those of his era. He was a crowd-pleaser, says Joyce Carol Oates... more»
What’s the meaning of nothing? The edifice of pop cosmology rests on that question, says Ron Rosenbaum. The search for answers goes on... more»
What do you call someone who feels immune to norms of decorum? Geoff Nunberg has a seven-letter noun in mind, beginning with “a”... more»
The 19th-century ascendance of the West was an unprecedented crisis for intellectuals in the East. Their response was notable in its ambivalence... more»
The world wars brought about mass slaughter, the destruction of entire cities, genocide, and a great flowering of Modernist architecture... more»
Can evolution explain the instinct to make and appreciate art? No, thought Darwin. Yes, argued Denis Dutton. Adam Kirsch sorts it out... more»
Facts turn out to be fetishes; fetishes turn out to be facts. The philosophical superstar Bruno Latour, post-midlife crisis, introduces the “factish”... more»
Mickey Mouse and existentialism. Albert Camus was once a 20-something with a degree and no job in sight. Then he joined up with Walt Disney... more»
Same as it ever was. Philosophy no longer speaks to the way we live. Or so its critics claim. But the discipline has always had its share of theoretical thickets.... more»
Pretty much every cultural assumption about women’s breasts is wrong. But then, what men think about them doesn’t really matter... more»
Doves in Basque country, calves’ brains in Lyon. This reminiscence of fine dining in France is best consumed in small portions... more»
Many tales in the Arabian Nights were born far from Arabia. Like the genie, they took on magical new forms under new masters... more»
A Bolshevik’s memoirs. The totalitarian virus did not enter the Soviet state with Stalin. It was there when Lenin and Trotsky were still in charge... more»
W.G. Sebald is better known for his haunting prose than for his poetry. A new collection of those poems, never before in English, shows why... more»
A little sincerity is a good thing, but too much is toxic. Nietzsche said it best: “The truly sincere person ends up understanding that he is always lying”... more»
Why is there something rather than nothing? That question was posed by Leibniz. He didn’t know the answer. But Jim Holt has some thoughts... more»
The human rights movement has become awash in moral certainty and platitudes. Will a new generation of purists take heed of the old guard?... more»
A literary history of sex. When it comes to debauchery, to voyeuristic enjoyment of pain, Christian Grey is no Marquis de Sade... more»
Matisse worked alone. A member of no school, no group, he relied on his patrons, many of them Jews who departed from the expectations of their times... more»
Aung San Suu Kyi is traditional and cosmopolitan, whimsical and short-tempered, prim and heroic. Can she manage her cult of personality?... more»
To Winston Churchill, historian of “English-speaking peoples,” facts were malleable. More than one account, he said: “is all true, or ought to be”... more»
Camus once asked Sartre why he was so relentless a seducer of women. Sartre pointed at his own face: “Have you seen this mug?”... more»
Is he really losing it? William Ian Miller says he’s old and infirm. But his whines, kvetches, and oy veys are fooling no one... more»
The world Robert Kagan made. Admired on the left and right, his views on American power rest on questionable theory, economics, and politics... more»
Is there a more overexposed poet than Robert Pinsky? Popular doesn’t mean predictable. His work is varied, prolific, and still evolving... more»
The evolution of T.S. Eliot. Why did the iconoclastic American poet choose to become a religious, donnish English man of letters?... more»
People who live alone are more fit, more culturally attuned, and better for the environment, says Eric Klinenberg. That’s a novel view. It’s also nonsense... more»
Gertrude Stein’s radical aesthetics mixed easily with her reactionary politics. It’s an old combination, but no less chilling for that... more»
To disentangle nature and nurture, study twins. Meet Oskar, raised as a Nazi, and his identical brother, Jack, raised as a Jew... more»
Before Fred and Ginger, there was Fred and Adele – the woman who put “the flap in flapperdom.” They were agile, versatile, goofy, and graceful... more»
“I was a bit insouciant,” Conrad Black says by way of explaining his crimes. Out of jail, he’s diminished in wealth but not in spirit... ... more»
The American crowd has little taste for difficult ideas. It’s an old problem, one that has shaped literary history. Consider Melville... more»
Some philosophers reject the premise of biography, that understanding a life can illuminate the work. Ray Monk begs to differ with them... more»
Tales from Odessa. The city’s literary brilliance – Babel, Pushkin – lives on in a run-down museum founded by an ex-KGB officer... more»
Orhan Pamuk’s obsession with objects: He wrote fiction about an imaginary museum. Then he built that museum. Why?... more»
Brash yet logical, sharp-edged yet lyrical, Elliot Carter’s sound was entirely his own. He composed for himself... more»
Maurice Sendak had many loves: William Blake, Proust, Mozart, Schubert, noses. He was passionate about noses... more»
The roots of MOOC’s. Postal courses, said Frederick Jackson Turner 100 years ago, would carry “irrigating streams of education into the arid regions”... more»
Preacher or power-hungry opportunist? Fethullah G¸len may be a cult leader – or simply a well-intentioned businessman... more»
Oliver Sacks: place-blind, face-blind, nearly blind blind, prone to hallucinations. But the doctor is more than the sum of his disorders... more»
How did Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer triumph over Revolutionary Road and Catch-22 at the 1962 National Book Awards? The fix was in... more»
William Manchester’s death left his Churchill biography unfinished. Enter an unknown journalist. “If I didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to get done”... more»
What’s so appealing about an asexual, aloof character like Sherlock Holmes? It’s that Conan Doyle created a superhero, not a superhuman... more»
“Listen,” Colm TÛibÃŒn says. Silence. Nights are spent alone in a hard rattan chair. “Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age”... more»
A modern-day Diderot. Like the Enlightenment encyclopedist, Lewis Lapham sifts through history for clues to human nature... more»
Secret history of Monopoly. Known variously as Auction and Finance, the board game may have been invented as a paean to socialism... more»
How literature became data: The dispiriting tale of intellectual failure begins on a Friday in 2002. Stephen Marche explains... more»
Jacques Barzun, historian, essayist, critic, gadfly, is dead at 104. Writing for a general audience, he said, was “a responsibility of scholars”... NY Times... Wash Post... Telegraph... LA Times... Guardian... NY Post... The Atlantic... First Things... New Criterion
The psychopathic society. Our era is marked by a casual callousness. Empathy is down, narcissism up. What good news!... more»
A man falls into a coma and lands in heaven. (Lots of butterflies there.) It’s a story that a brain scientist could sell. And one of them has... more»
Boualem Sansal’s novels are full of big ideas. He has attracted a following in Algeria and France. Now Hamas has made him a star... more»
Tom Wolfe in full. Above New York, amid marble sinks and monogrammed towels, the man in white punctures the vanities of others... more»
A life in books. Joe Queenan can’t stop touching them, smelling them, scribbling in them, and reading them – 6,128 of them, to be exact... more»
We like our politicians authentic – and funny. Though prepared political humor is inauthentic, it’s effective. Can a bon mot win votes?... more»
The digital future is nigh. Art grows immaterial, ephemeral, impermanent. Will there be a place for sculpture, that most inconvenient of fine arts?... more»
Fatwa against films. In Saudi Arabia, moviemaking can land you in jail. Hide your camera in an abaya so that secret cinema can endure... more»
To understand art, it helps to understand the mind, says Eric Kandel. “I see psychoanalysis, art, and biology ultimately coming together”... more»
Forgery at its finest. The biggest art scam in history netted millions for a German hippie and his wife. Then they lost it all... more»
Naturalist, philosopher, oddball – Thoreau wrote prodigiously but remains inscrutable. “I love Henry,” Emerson said, “but I cannot like him”... more»
How to write a 400-page, historically accurate novel in five months? Take pains in the research, of course. And listen to the voices in your head... more»
Chinese novelist Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature... NY Times... Guardian... LA Times... Wash Post... WSJ... Telegraph... Global Times... New Yorker... Independent... Globe & Mail...
At the Obesity Society, every angle of soda is debated, except the argument that drinking it is pleasurable and pleasure is a good thing... more»
Clive James insists that he’s not about to die. In fact, the man with every illness in the book is translating The Divine Comedy... more»
“Th’ Dustiest of Th’ Dustbowlers.” Woody Guthrie’s “aw, shucks” persona was both genuine and a masterly work of performance art... more»
Hitler had no foes more admirable than Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Both died just before Germany’s surrender... more»
The Greeks had Oedipus. We have TMZ and the celebration of petty misfortune. We’ve democratized tragedy, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing... more»
Chess and art. Man Ray has designed pieces; Damien Hirst, too. The former’s is sleek, the latter’s lumpy. Neither rivals Marcel Duchamp’s... more»
Brian Thomas, fast asleep, strangled his wife. He awoke and remembered nothing. Are murderers responsible if they’re unconscious?... more»
Is TED running out of ideas? Yes, says its founder, Richard Saul Wurman. He’s got a new notion for a big-think conference: “intellectual jazz”... more»
Eric Hobsbawm, historian of Europe, lifelong Marxist, intellectual polymath, is dead at 95... Guardian... NY Times... AP... Telegraph... Independent... Jacobin... Economist... Mark Mazower... Timothy Snyder... Michael Burleigh... Stephen Kotkin... Eric Foner... Timothy Shenk... Ramachandra Guha... James Cronin... Jonathan Derbyshire... James Heartfield... Paul Gottfried... Christopher Caldwell... Modris Ecksteins... Jonathan Jones... Theodore Dalrymple... David Feldman... Morgan Meis...
Build your own iPhone. Throw away your nuts and bolts, grab some bits and atoms. Digital fabrication is coming. It’ll change everything... more»
Camille Paglia at the Met: “This is the way a museum should be.” She isn’t so sanguine about the contemporary art scene. Or about Stanley Fish... more»
Long ago, the search for rules that govern the physical universe was religious in nature. It may yet be so again... more»
How do punk rockers pass the time in a Russian jail? Reading the Bible, mostly. “Prison is like a monastery – it’s a place for ascetic practices”... more»
The marketplace in your brain. Neuroscientists say they know how people compute value. Why won’t economists listen?... more»
“Tastes like chicken.” Why is the phrase a constant? The story began 350 million years ago, with an iguana-like animal, Pederpes finneyae... more»
A volunteer fireman in San Francisco, Tom Sawyer went on an epic bender in 1864 with a loudmouthed chain-smoker named Samuel Clemens... more»
Derrida in Baltimore. The unknown 36-year-old arrived on short notice. He left days later as the man who tore down the temple of structuralism... more»
We fetishize memory, which “can be a burden, even an illness,” says Philip Gourevitch. “Memory – hallowed memory – is a kind of disease”... more»
The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. In the world of biblical creeds, will a scrap of papyrus change everything? Karen King believes so... more»
Separating the pseudo from science. The greater science’s prestige, the more fringe theories flourish, like shadows of the real thing... more»
Is digital self-publishing – its books widely ignored, endlessly revisable – the beginning of the end of literature, of works that endure over time?... . more»
The word hung around his neck like a millstone: “Fatwa.” He was no longer Salman Rushdie, writer, but a villain, a victim, an apostate, a cause... more»
It’s easy to dismiss Slavoj éiûek for his buffoonish antics, maddening prose style, contradictory arguments. Or maybe he’s just misunderstood... more»
Can a robot be moral? Can a drone exercise a conscience? Can ethics be reduced to an algorithm? Answers are inevitable and imminent... more»
Can a photograph be true or false? No, says Errol Morris. “Truth and falsity properly considered are properties of language, not of images”... more»
“An incredible ass.” Few dispute Archibald MacLeish’s description of Ezra Pound. But was the poet guilty of treason, or was he loony?... more»
Three Hasidic Jews and a philosophy professor walk into a bar. On tap, the big questions: God, reason, doubt, the meaning of life... more»
An open letter from a novelist. Dear Wikipedia: If Philip Roth is not a credible source regarding his own work, who is?... more»
From the Greek for “sneer at or taunt,” sarkasmos is among man’s great achievements. Can it survive our sensitive, oh-so-sincere age?... more»
When Naomi Wolf’s orgasms went from transcendent to lifeless, she sought the wisdom of a man who’d seen an image of the Virgin Mary in a vagina... more»
The idea of a gentleman seems quaint, the stuff of a Trollope novel. That magnanimous type has vanished, leaving a sad gap in our culture... more»
John Templeton had an interest in mysticism and science – and an eye for investing. His foundation is pouring money into philosophy. To what end?... more»
The multiple Martin Amises. How to reconcile the scabrous wit, the dark philosopher of evil, and the romantic sentimentalist?... more»
Yes, AC Grayling is starting a college. No, he’s not out to “milk the parents of dim rich kids.” Never mind the Bentley brochure outside his office... more»
For as long as writers have written, they’ve tried to retract what they wrote. Hawthorne did it; Gogol and Auden, too. They rarely succeed... more»
“How good it is to be us,” Christopher Hitchens told his wife. Their life was raucous, joyous, never dull. Carol Blue remembers her husband... more»
Doubt is crucial to intellectual life. But a malign and exaggerated skepticism has undermined science. What’s to blame, gullibility or greed?... more»
“Don’t think, look!” For Wittgenstein, the maxim was fundamental to his philosophy. Seeing connections precedes understanding... more»
“I had suicidal thoughts,” says Clive James. ”They all promptly vanished the moment I was under real threat. There was a sudden urge to live“... more»
In any language, the word for red is typically coined before the word for blue. Why? Theories come and go. A new one is in vogue... more»
Richard Dawkins talks with Playboy. They discuss the usual things: Jesus, Darwin, creationism, bipedalism, and buggering a bald transsexual... more»
“I shall die in the gutter,” Melville said about Moby Dick’s reception. Instead he went to Jerusalem. But he found a backwater, not God’s grace.... more»
The path to Infinite Jest. At 28, David Foster Wallace lived in a halfway house, barely sober. "I will be a fiction writer again or die tryingî... more»
Tom Stoppard is a connoisseur of stories, not topics. A play is not the product of an idea, he says. “The idea is the end product of the play”... more»
Plato was wary; Horace, too. And why not? Magic is irrational, a false science. Yet our fascination continues unabated in this rationalist age... more»
Overpopulation, famines, plagues, falling sperm counts: Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking... more»
Has neuroscience undermined free will? Not at all, says Eddy Nahmias. The science explains how free will works, not that it doesn’t exist... more»
Let us praise the pallet. Whether pooled or one-way, block or stringer, wood or plastic, pallets pretty much move the global economy... more»
Oscar Wilde’s office job: editing a women’s magazine. He needed money but found a style, later plagiarizing his own work for Dorian Gray... more»
Does God exist? Doesn’t matter, says David Sloan Wilson. Better to ask why belief in God has been so useful for so long... more»
Steve Jobs is a paragon of entrepreneurial intensity, a role model. Or is his a cautionary tale, of an abusive boss with a broken family?... more»
Robert Hughes had an aversion to pretense and a knack for the withering putdown. He tried to save art from the art world... more»... more»...
Life’s been pathologized – fear is an abnormal anxiety, persistent sadness a mental illness – and psychiatry faces a crisis of legitimacy... more»
Imagine if art were as integral to the Olympics as sport is. Imagine medals for painting, music, literature. That’s how the games used to be... more»
Type “Cormac McCarthy” into your smartphone. The result: “Comcast McCarthy.” Is autocorrect progress? Regardless, it’s the future... more»
In 19th-century America, the line between seer and scammer was vague. Enter Joseph Smith, who sparked the religious scandal of his time... more»
So history adheres to no general laws, no discernible patterns. Then why are huge databases being used to predict events?... more»
Lenny Bruce taught Zappa, Mailer, and Roth how to be macho. His fury was not merely nihilistic; Bruce was trying to save the world... more»
A museum in Italy is setting paintings on fire. If nobody cares about the art, says the cash-strapped director, “I’ll burn it”... more»
Does LSD have a bum rap? Can it improve problem solving? Steve Jobs said it was among the most important things he’d done... more»
Gore Vidal, witty, acerbic gadfly, novelist, memoirist, essayist – “an American version of Montaigne” – is dead at 86... NY Times... LA Times... Wash Post... Telegraph... LA Review of Books... Telegraph... Alex Nazaryan... Jay Parini... Lee Siegel... Andrew Sullivan... Christopher Buckley... Heidi Landecker... David Greenberg... Hilton Als... Andrew Ferguson... Adam Mars-Jones... Morris Dickstein... Sam Tanenhaus... Paul Berman
Adam Wheeler went to Harvard to study English and ended up in prison. His crime? Fraud. What’s worse, he made Harvard look stupid... more»
Holocaust histories dodge a central question, says Timothy Snyder: Why did it take place in Eastern Europe rather than elsewhere?... more»
How did the Aleppo Codex – the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible – end up in an iron case at Hebrew University? Why are 200 pages missing?... more»
Leopold Munyakazi was a friendly, if dull, man about campus. Could the overly formal French professor really be a war criminal?... more»
Fast cars, fast boats, fast women: The life of Dmitri Nabokov – a 6 foot 5, stentorian-voiced child of exile – could resemble a James Bond film... more»
Is environmentalism an ideology with totalitarian overtones? Beware the “commissars of carbon,” warns Pascal Bruckner... more»
Old polymaths never die. Isaiah Berlin and Hugh Trevor-Roper dispensed with academic formalities, addressing big subjects, not cloistered scholars... more»
Hans heard voices. They commented on how he dressed, how he looked, what he should do. (Die, mostly.) Then Hans started talking back... more»
King of the body snatchers. Astley Cooper was unfathomably rich. He taught Keats, he severed limbs, he accused others of unmanliness... more»
How to fake a masterpiece: Simulate the spider-web cracking in the paint, the dots of fly droppings, the slimy green look of old varnish... more»
When Nietzsche died, among the combatants over his legacy was Harry Kessler, whom Auden called “the most cosmopolitan man”... more»
Money is an abstraction. Whatever it looks like or whatever it’s backed by, what matters is that people believe in it... more»
Walter Kirn left the Mormons long ago. But they would not forget him. And they were still there when he needed a place to land... more»
So only now does everything seem to be for sale? In medieval churches, aisle chapels were as likely to be named for bankers as for saints... more»
Stanford University is “the germplasm for innovation,” the farm system for Silicon Valley. Who can argue with such success?... more»
In 1965, well before Stonewall, New York cops put aside their own prejudice to bust an exortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men... more»
A young psychologist’s research on brain activity proves useful in planning military attacks. Does he have a problem with that?... more»
The city of booze. Bangalore’s growth from quaint colonial outpost to an info-tech hotspot was fueled by arrack, toddy, rum, and whiskey... more»
Albert Barnes was a progressive idealist and a hard-hearted bastard. The museum that bears his name reflects both qualities... more»
What would you call a chocolate bar stuffed between two slices of white bread? Andy Warhol called it cake. He had issues with food... more»
Where did the modern Olympic Games get their start? Meet Penny Brookes, a town magistrate in a backwater near Wales... more»
An unlikely fact: Marxism is undergoing a renaissance. But is socialism relevant to our economically catastrophic times?... more»
Defusing Mein Kampf. The German ban on Hitler’s 700-page, two-volume monstrosity will soon expire. What then?... more»
Philosophy, long specialized and introverted, is again becoming a communal exercise. So much for the lonely thinker in a garret... more»
The Paris Ritz. For Proust it was a refuge; for Scott and Zelda it was home; for Hemingway it was heaven – all for $17,770 per night... more»
Professor Google, Dr. Xerox, and Mr. Jumbo Jet have made research much more efficient. But what of the thrill of the hunt? It’s gone... more»
Computers trounce humans at chess, but Marvin Minsky is unimpressed. “The majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack”... more»
Boycott threats, menacing graffiti, cyberattacks: Behold the radioactive celebrity of the Polish historian Jan T. Gross... more»
The perfect shot. Grind, temperature, pressure: Good espresso is good chemistry. It’s also good art. Done well, it’s pure sensory pleasure... more»
The Right Honourable Edmund Burke was corpulent, petulant, and fond of lewd jokes. He was also eloquent, brilliant, and brave... more»
When countries fail. Collapse is marked by a whimper more often than a bang. An economy built on exploitation cannot long stand... more»
More than 12 million civilians were expelled from their birthplaces; at least 500,000 died: This is the European atrocity you never heard about... more»
Alan Turing’s insights hinged on a new view of intelligence and this strange inversion of reason: Competence doesn’t require comprehension... more»
Varieties of linguistic experience. So your Spanish is good? What about your Wintu, or Tofa, or Aka? One language dies every 14 days... more»
Rudolph Valentino was an on-screen original: the brooding, slightly effeminate, but irresistible lover. It was an image he despised. .. more»
George Plimpton’s voice, serious and antiquated, could sound affected. Still, it was one of the great voices of modern storytelling... more»
Don’t be fooled by Mario Vargas Llosa’s image as a prim and proper man of letters. This is the guy who punched out Gabriel GarcÃŒa M·rquez... more»
The rise of the tweet. Does it already seem pretentious and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care?... more»
Literature’s most tyrannical estate. James Joyce didn’t care for biographers, coining “biografiend.” But he has nothing on his irascible grandson... more»
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Why would you forgo speech? Let’s ask a Trappist monk. “Silence keeps me from idealizing myself.” Well, that’s the idea... more»
Darlings of the right
Meeting Naipaul
Web-addicted writers
Chinese sarcasm
Von Karajan was right
Psychology of swearing
Ellis v. Wallace
Evolution theory’s crisis
Bookworms of China
Fake reviews
Life of a fact-checker
Promiscuous reading
Remembering S.J. Gould
Reviews for sale
How Trotsky was killed
Monopolies for monks
String players
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Botched restoration
Locations of F-bombs
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ElvisLit
Writing a bad review
Professor of burps
Rise of the nebbish
At home with Hitler
Lederhosen on fire
Helen Gurley Brown, R.I.P.
Is football wrong?
Modern economics is sick
Who wrote teen fiction?
Ten most difficult books
Starbucks of ancient America
Robert Hughes, R.I.P.
The lost art of postcard writing
How to win more medals
The cult of busyness
The Immortality Project
Autobiography of a condom
Spanx on steroids
Baudelaire’s Bordeaux
Tolkien and technology
Plagiarism in Europe
Is the Iliad non-fiction?
Writing for money
My night with Žižek
How to write erotica
Alexander Cockburn R.I.P
Space stinks
Theoretical machines
Dawkins and his mail
Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky
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Words from India
Warm emotions
Brooklyn as mecca
Truthinessology
Traffic in Lagos
Letter from Ted Hughes
Thanks for killing my novel
Semicolons: A love story
The case for coffee
The end for critics
Creepiness of E-books
Is philosophy literature?
F-bomb at The New Yorker
Amis’s flick-knife
Writer’s panic
Nora Ephron, R.I.P.
“Nigerian” scammers
Secret of a mystery
Andrew Sarris, R.I.P.
French bookstores
AP Stylebook
Which books impress women?
Alan Turing, tech hero
God and the economy
Task of the critic
Cost of white t-shirt
Pre-Photoshop fakery
Decline of porn
History of tattoos
No brain, no mind
Guide to book tours
Virtues of daydreaming
Coffee kills monkeys
Chicken, world conqueror
Amis in Brooklyn
Q&A: Sam Harris
Awfulness of classical music
Economics and happiness
Context of language
Fukuyama on China
Poetry of the Taliban
Lunch with Krugman
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On literary interviews
Typo at UT Austin
The multiverse
In praise of audiobooks
Scaling the Great Wall
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Rushdie on censorship
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TED balks
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Maurice Sendak, R.I.P.
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God as friend
Against luxury cinema
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Moving rock
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Irving Louis Horowitz, R.I.P.
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Homepage for Philosophy
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Putin’s reading list
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Freeman Dyson
Mystery of poetry editing
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How to write
Before Big Bang
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Hockney landscapes
Index of pretentiousness
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A volunteer fireman in San Francisco, Tom Sawyer went on an epic bender in 1864 with a loudmouthed chain-smoker named Samuel Clemens... more»
Derrida in Baltimore. The unknown 36-year-old arrived on short notice. He left days later as the man who tore down the temple of structuralism... more»
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The multiple Martin Amises. How to reconcile the scabrous wit, the dark philosopher of evil, and the romantic sentimentalist?... more»
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For as long as writers have written, they’ve tried to retract what they wrote. Hawthorne did it; Gogol and Auden, too. They rarely succeed... more»
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Doubt is crucial to intellectual life. But a malign and exaggerated skepticism has undermined science. What’s to blame, gullibility or greed?... more»
“Don’t think, look!” For Wittgenstein, the maxim was fundamental to his philosophy. Seeing connections precedes understanding... more»
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Richard Dawkins talks with Playboy. They discuss the usual things: Jesus, Darwin, creationism, bipedalism, and buggering a bald transsexual... more»
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The path to Infinite Jest. At 28, David Foster Wallace lived in a halfway house, barely sober. "I will be a fiction writer again or die tryingâ€... more»
Tom Stoppard is a connoisseur of stories, not topics. A play is not the product of an idea, he says. “The idea is the end product of the play”... more»
Plato was wary; Horace, too. And why not? Magic is irrational, a false science. Yet our fascination continues unabated in this rationalist age... more»
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Let us praise the pallet. Whether pooled or one-way, block or stringer, wood or plastic, pallets pretty much move the global economy... more»
Oscar Wilde’s office job: editing a women’s magazine. He needed money but found a style, later plagiarizing his own work for Dorian Gray... more»
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Steve Jobs is a paragon of entrepreneurial intensity, a role model. Or is his a cautionary tale, of an abusive boss with a broken family?... more»
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Life’s been pathologized – fear is an abnormal anxiety, persistent sadness a mental illness – and psychiatry faces a crisis of legitimacy... more»
Imagine if art were as integral to the Olympics as sport is. Imagine medals for painting, music, literature. That’s how the games used to be... more»
Type “Cormac McCarthy” into your smartphone. The result: “Comcast McCarthy.” Is autocorrect progress? Regardless, it’s the future... more»
In 19th-century America, the line between seer and scammer was vague. Enter Joseph Smith, who sparked the religious scandal of his time... more»
So history adheres to no general laws, no discernible patterns. Then why are huge databases being used to predict events?... more»
Lenny Bruce taught Zappa, Mailer, and Roth how to be macho. His fury was not merely nihilistic; Bruce was trying to save the world... more»
A museum in Italy is setting paintings on fire. If nobody cares about the art, says the cash-strapped director, “I’ll burn it”... more»
Does LSD have a bum rap? Can it improve problem solving? Steve Jobs said it was among the most important things he’d done... more»
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Adam Wheeler went to Harvard to study English and ended up in prison. His crime? Fraud. What’s worse, he made Harvard look stupid... more»
Holocaust histories dodge a central question, says Timothy Snyder: Why did it take place in Eastern Europe rather than elsewhere?... more»
How did the Aleppo Codex – the oldest text of the Hebrew Bible – end up in an iron case at Hebrew University? Why are 200 pages missing?... more»
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Camus looked like a movie star, all laid-back cool. Sartre looked like a gargoyle. Enter a woman named Wanda... more»
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Slavoj Žižek can’t fathom why people ask him for advice. “Look at me!” he shouts. “Look at my tics! Don’t you see that I’m mad?”... more»
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Worried about big data? Don’t be. We fretted about the printing press, the encyclopedia, the dictionary. It’s how we use technology that matters... more»
Why would you forgo speech? Let’s ask a Trappist monk. “Silence keeps me from idealizing myself.” Well, that’s the idea... more»
Let us praise the paper clip. Yes, it’s a symbol of drudgery. But look at the little thing: It picks locks, cleans fingernails, even hacks phones... more»
“I have fun with ideas; I play with them,” said Ray Bradbury. His prose was colloquial, poetic, never boring. The science fiction master is dead at 91... NY Times... LA Times... Telegraph... Paris Review... Guardian... WaPo... Daily Beast... John Plotz... Junot Diaz... Michiko Kakutani... Virginia Postrel... Michael Dirda... Stanley Kauffmann... Daniel J. Flynn... Margaret Atwood... John Crowley... Paul Di Filippo... Charles C. Johnson
The mentalist. ESP is real, says Cornell's Daryl Bem. And if he’s wrong? “Science is self-correcting. Reality always bites back”... more»
Library of utopia. If Robert Darnton gets his way, all of human knowledge will be available, free, to all. Can he succeed where Google hasn’t?... more»
Faith in markets remains high. Why? They spare us from the unpleasant work of thinking and arguing about the meaning of goods... more»
Some are green, some have fangs, some have no bodies at all. But when it comes to aliens, only this matters: Can we coexist or not?... more»
Why did Neandertals die off while humans survived? Our species may owe a giant debt of gratitude to our four-legged best friends... more»
Amazon’s world. The book industry’s woes are largely self-inflicted. “This is a business run by English majors, not business majors”... more»
The “happy novel” is an oxymoron; the suburban novel is out of touch. What Americans want is to read about the end times... more»
Philosophy of love. Why is a lefty like Alain Badiou preaching monogamy? “If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic”... more»
On the topics of poetry, class, and tourism, Paul Fussell was acute and acerbic. But he was at his best when writing about organized killing... NY Times... Slate... n+1... Jay Winter... Drew Faust...
Prestigious and problematic. The best and worst Nobel Peace Prize choices: Sakharov? Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ? As for Arafat, well... more»
Yale’s Irving Fisher was one of America’s best-known economists. He counseled congressmen and presidents and inspired Adolf Hitler... more»
Orhan Pamuk has built a museum, in effect, to himself. A colossal act of ego? Perhaps. But it’s also an ingenious work of art... more»
Can a man’s ideas be separated from his deeds? What if he’s murderous and maybe insane, but insightful? What if the man is the Unabomber?... more»
We’re hard-wired for the pursuit of happiness to our repeated regret, the Declaration of Independence notwithstanding... more»
Secret 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...
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New links are added at or near the tops of sections, with older ones sliding down the columns accordingly. Most items will continue to be available for five or more days.
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Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
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Founding Editor (1998-2010): Denis Dutton
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Reader suggestions for links are always welcome. Send them here.
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New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week. We continually test links for reliability. Despite our best efforts, links may fail (often only temporarily) without warning. We apologize for any inconvenience.
New links are added at or near the tops of sections, with older ones sliding down the columns accordingly. Most items will continue to be available for five or more days.
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New links are added at or near the tops of sections, with older ones sliding down the columns accordingly. Most items will continue to be available for five or more days.
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Reader suggestions for links are always welcome. Send them here.
We are keen to hear from readers who detect errors on the page. Please let us know here.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education
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New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week. We continually test links for reliability. Despite our best efforts, links may fail (often only temporarily) without warning. We apologize for any inconvenience.
New links are added at or near the tops of sections, with older ones sliding down the columns accordingly. Most items will continue to be available for five or more days.
As most links will eventually expire, sometimes after only a few days, we urge readers who see an item worth keeping to save or print it while the link is still valid. Items removed from Arts & Letters Daily are transferred to our 2012 ARCHIVE. We also retain archives for items removed in 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999, and 1998.
Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
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Founding Editor (1998-2010): Denis Dutton
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Eggnog vs fruitcake
Rudolph is a girl
Nice presidents
Santa anarchy
Cult of the gym
Chinese wedding
Better Bill of Rights
Faithful dog
French intellectuals
Nightclubs for fat people
How to be happy
Saddam’s new novel
Warrior or wimp?
Tie your shoes
Vodka
Ascent of British Man
Life
Bad Sex Prize
Shopping in Rome
Dollar-menu death
Rude audiences
Bush, the moron?
Don’t lift that kilt
Jeffrey Sachs
Hitchens vs Pollitt
Lewis Feuer, R.I.P
Dumas exhumed
Blinded by MSG
Post-traumatic whatever
Michael Jackson, freak
Team mascots
Fool’s gold medals
Flabby law school
New Larkin poem
Dumb and dumber
The Simpsons
Marx fails again
J. Lo
50 best places / List
Vonnegut is 80
Shakespeare questions
Trapped Belgian
Zombies
Limbaugh Left
Food snobs
Ham ’n’ terrorists
Yann Martel
Gullible Kiwis
Quantum bogosity?
End of tape
They drank here
Well-cooked witches
Neohawks
Painting for peanuts
Buchanan vs Kristol
Belafonte’s racism
Police vs media
Ancient feces
Funniest joke?
Hapless Jewish Writer
Mrs. Sese Seko
NOO-kyuh-luhr
Purging P.C.
Our literate youth
Redheads!
Old-time sex wars
Bush plan bold, honest
NPR: a union shop
Cellphone danger?
Over- and underrated
Who grew that carrot?
“Help” with tipping
Feminism post-9/11
Zagat’s for singles
Globalization now
Five facts about Kyoto
Barenboim attacked
Houellebecq on trial
Lunch-time boob job
U.S. bargain on Iraq
Jack Kerouac’s grave
The GM debate
New fall nonfiction
Steven Pinker
Edward Tufte’s space
Hallmark and Aristotle
Rushdie in New York
Dearest Martin
Manhattan toilets
Trauma debriefing
Gourmet fakes
Hollywood’s ni**ers
Warm Alaska?
New look Kate Moss
Auden’s orphan [text]
Breast Cancer Myth
“Holding my dead baby”
Knapsack men
Dating NY women
Hitchens on war
Amy’s Orgasm
Top Ten Movies
Asian Brown Cloud
Tolerant British
Kill the library!
Full Frontal
Greenpeace hokum
A late-onset cook
Narcissism
Knight of the long knives
Amos Oz is enraged
Blurbology
Ich bin ein Slacker
English men as lovers
Classical CD gloom
’Zine plans “sex issue”
Fountain of money
New Scientist’s politics
Lies of language
Jay Gatsby, bootlegger?
“Par-kayyy!”
Origins of violence
Kidnapping for kicks
Dear Catherine M.
Fighting monks
Endangered species
Britney’s Physics Guide
Celebrity politics
Let history come to you
Deconstructing fries
No 118
Insurance costs
The end is nigh, again
Ghost bios
Chicken wings
Punjabi rape
Hitchens vs. friends
Harriet, book reviewer
Today’s golf tips
Accounting art
7-Eleven
Who’s a dictator?
Riemann hypothesis
Earth is doomed
Worthless vitamins
Volokh’s America
Chomsky on terror
Darwin’s Dangerous Diet
Class Day Address
Art? Merde!
M. Zola’s tragic death
Testing Einstein
Battling spam
Milton Friedman is 90
Teachers murder music
Musicians are smarter
Black stars war
It’s true!
Shakespeare? Not!
Moth case moot?
How to write a bestseller
Stanford vs. Harvard
Hitchens the father
Hollywood’s birds
Er... Um...
Marxist S.J.Gould
Moby Dick’s weapon
Hawking the shaman
Mike Tyson is gay?
Masai react to 9/11
P.C. kills
Life vests for all citizens
The Unenlightenment
Milan Kundera
Keystrokes of genius
Nostradamus
Gould’s last interview
JFK Jr. and me
Surrealism
Knocking Kissin
Orwell’s money
Obituaries (Oops!)
Think globally, act lunarly
Hitchens the cop
Mr. Bush in Europe
Bill Clinton, 9/10 man
David Brock, liar
Destroyed art
Colors of the Greeks
Graduation time
Cuban rations
Robt. Hughes cubed
God’s in the details?
Poincaré puzzle
Odds are you’ll lose
History term papers
Feminist cleavage
Trilobite cookies
Worst cars ever
Bye-bye Libertarians
1980s back in vogue
Pseudoscience
PC helps Le Pen
Suicide bombers
Read newspapers
“Despicable” scholar
Sick man of Europe
Dopey carry-on bans
Le Pen can win
Nietzsche was right
America’s big stick
Chiropractors
Le Pen and the Left
Apples are unhealthy
Krazy Kat
Ice cream
Bin Laden figure
The Phraselator
Blog Nation
Piano paradise
TV and sex
Lewis Carroll’s girls
Psycho Cry Fest
Doris Kearns Goodwin
Buckley on email
Pulitzer prizes
Queen Mum RIP
Israel, for and against
Museum’s vile crap
Gulf War maladies
Gullible Gauls
Professors profess
Wrecking Zhivago
Decoding Bush
A stupid white man
Biotech corn danger
Lincoln was a woman!
Hair
Tolkien’s life
Saddam’s last novel
Safest U.S. big city
PowerPoint did it
Hector Berlioz
JenniCam R.I.P
Smithsonian lies
Nobel banquet
Lennon’s Imagine
Medical ghostwriters
Guns and butter
Frisky seniors
Fossil discovered
Stars and signs
Those Pesky Protocols
Picasso on a junket
Judeophobia
Cold war coups
Jan Morris
Me? Anti-American?
Master/slave outrage
Oz: love it or leave it
Martin Amis on porn
Palm in Warsaw
Hating Britney
C.S. Lewis
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Life in Mosul
Movie cowboys
First wine
Flesh wounds
Lord of the Gold Ring
One-handed economist
Top ten scams
Mass extinctions
Where’s love?
Wesley Clark
Exhuming Petrarch
Royal scandal
Loïc Wacquant
Milton Friedman
Zbig’s speech
Drooling men
Wolfowitz’s Iraq
Edward Teller lab?
Hobsbawm remembers
What is I?
William Gibson
Pamela Anderson
Moving on
Ageing wine drinkers
Was Diana murdered?
Cannibalism
Coming out
“Imperial America”
The new SAT
Bush hatred
Neo-neocons
Diamonds
Sex and health
$1m for the Bard
Shenzhou 5
Writers’ mistakes
Ministering
Groping
Jhumpa Lahiri
Best bad poetry
“Oy” is in
Dear Leader’s sex life
Fuzzy logic
Escort girls
Thinkers and clerks
Aids in Africa
Goldfish
v. Dershowitz
Art for dummies
To change the world!
Oddest Hemingway
What’s in a name?
Oddest hotel
Survival of the dolts
BBC in trouble
Pit pruning
Bloom on King
Zen of Weeding
Rattled in Berlin
Sleek Baroque?
J. Lo’s posse
Spanglish
“Patriot Studies”
Doggy-doting
Iraq Museum news
Naked Yoko Ono
“Fascism”
Heavy lifting
9/11 myths
German-English
Clueless cooks
Writing good leads
Digiholics
P.J. O’Rourke
Political musicians
Gary Coleman
NYC postcards
Orson Welles
Republican fundraisers
Old age and humor
Real Horatio Alger
French know how to eat
Feynman’s diagrams
Booze talking
Mozart non-effect
Great Sexpectations
Home despot
White girls, catcalls
Celebrity worship
Julian Schnabel
Dad’s road rage
As Paris burns
Yo, problematics!
Camille Paglia
Yogic danger
Lactation contest
The camel trade
Agoraphobic hens
The Nature of Men
Gay television
Contagious yawns
Fukuyama on WMD
Behind great women
Gigli recomposed
WMD theory
Terror futures, okay!
Dems in trouble
Nessie no more
Pay-to-read Web
Bob Dylan undone
Outta Cuba!
George W = Henry V?
The new nun
Jerry Springer
Writers need lies
The answer is “4”
Size matters
Zadie Smith
Prostate health
Italian butt pinching
Take a siesta
Lying and deceiving
Spam without end
Drunken authors
Addictive golf
Laleh and Ladan, R.I.P.
Bob Dylan, plagiarist?
Math for Martha
Porn addiction
Email addiction
BBQ contest
“Dude”
I mow, therefore I am
Pet painting
Beethoven’s Ninth
Better googling
Milk first
Joy of math
Bond at Dieppe
Saddam: Potter fan?
“Orwellian”
Einstein’s clock
“Greatest”
Beethoven, Marxist?
Sperm counts
Doggie decor
G. H. von Wright
Name your baby
“James ossuary” fake
Beckham hairstyle
Priming the pomp
Baby watermelons
Vitamins of death
Trotskycons
Gender’s last frontier
What Hillary meant
Sun Tzu’s stock picks
Wolfowitz on oil
Saddam in Russia?
Yankees, please stay!
Rumsfeld at Denny’s
Postmodern Bob Hope
Wolfowitz in Vanity Fair
Picasso in Paris
Smell me, ladies!
Geldof praises Bush?
Uday and Qusay
Hobsbawm v. Hitchens
Ghosts
No butt-flicking!
Lying wine lovers
Famous last notes
Amazon man
U.S. tortures Iraqis
Women and wine
Passive smoke: Okay!
Forked tongue
Bible code claptrap
Neocon con job
Modern wives
Fahrenheit 451 at 50
Dog lovers, unite!
Mispronunciations
Monkeys, typewriters
PETA vs KFC
Wilde falsehoods
Orwell at 100
Copland vs. McCarthy
Brain privacy
The Leo-cons
U.N. looters
“Shut up!”
Sexy single senior
Vegetarian Delight
Dick Lit
Hula dancers wanted
Webbys canceled!
Classical pet hates
Clash of civilizations
Tobacco do-gooders
Cheap, cheap wine
Supermodel search
Civilians hanged
Theory’s death rattle
Farewell, Partisans
Sex and cooking
Iraqi marshes
Cancer as selection
Poincaré’s Conjecture
Dress patriotic
Jesus in Baghdad
Hit Saddam with a shoe
Castro’s fans
Ozymandias
Günter Grass on Iraq
School for sex
Kirk Varnedoe
Prime number pairs
Iraqis beat UK troops
Sun Tzu, Shock and Awe
Smoke, food, freedom
E.O. Wilson
U.S.U.N.
Human shields
Earth to Russell
Jargon of war
Bossy child
Drinking game
Jordan’s lucky break
Good art
“Come, Goshdarnit!”
Grassy knolls
California dreaming
Sodomists
Al Qaeda collapsing
Sex-toy salons
Lives of dictators
Trees pollute
Hitchens vs. Ireland
Luciano Pavarotti
Kinds of lit
Men only
Plain Language
Let’s eat
Stalin’s death
Sex cells
Iraq, Tchaikovsky
Life explained
Dear protesters...
Anger management
Lord of the Rings
The Stingy Brain
Lesbian monkeys
Joy of Sex
Ethnomath
Mona Lisa smile
Richard Dawkins
Matisse vs Picasso
Historians on Iraq
Peter Singer and me
Global coal fires
Toe-picking masses
The Three Stooges
France, Germany, Iraq
Darwin Day
Turntablism
Thomas Kinkade
Strauss and solitude
Spammed
P.C. foam insulation
Buchwald on Jackson
Space and ambition
Filming Derrida
Air miles for cellos!
Name game
Booing at the Met
Young and chubby
Toys for Pigs
Standing ovations
Skeptic pitied
Saddam’s murders
What the famous read
McDonald’s fat lawsuit
Lomborg on critics
Pedophile hysteria
Norman Mailer is 80
What killed Napoleon?
Qaddafi’s makeover
Blogging
Re-evolution
Mickey Mouse law
Starbucks rulz?
Chinese takeouts
The Mozart Effect
Beer’s good for you
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Baghdad ballet tots
False divide
Frum on Bush
Hershey’s fat payout
More sex, big brain
Forbidden fruits
anti-antifreeze
What kills us
Worst blurbs 2002
Junk science 2002
David Riesman
Resolution time
“Read this!”
What Godzilla means
Oh, intellectuals!
Goodbye, Tom Brokaw
Nietzsche’s brain
Detecting forgeries
Textbook disclaimers
That damn girdle
New Iron Curtain
Falluja cameraman
Mandarin and music
No apologies
It changed the world!
Faith-based nat’l parks
Bad schools
World poverty
Football physics
No, Canada!
Bush vs fanatics
Pavlov’s brother
Warming or cooling?
Hi tech in Fallujah
Kinsey, again
Leaving for Canada?
Quixotic Cervantes
On gift-giving
Derrida, Barthes, Che
Onlies
Mr. Fussy’s Paris
Sex and Kinsey
Restored Buddha
When novelists vote
Thomas Frank
Paul Wolfowitz
You’re a genius!
Cultural cold war
Arab hip-hop
When Nobelists speak
Jack Kerouac
TV turn-off
Iraq’s bloggers
Word birthdays
When novelists vote
Food for thought
American scapegoat
Coke vs Pepsi
Reagan on film
Kerry in Vietnam
Ken Bigley’s fate
Vive la France!
When novelists vote
Afghan boomlet
Stanford vs. Berkeley
Veblen’s house
Bride and Prejudice
Attack dogs
Your filthy keyboard
Bela Bartok
Driving to Baghdad
Vitamins and cancer
Strange kindness
Leaving Harvard
Art of bribery
What’s so funny?
New Hemingway story!
Chinese dyslexia
More on Cat Stevens
Arab lit
Cat Stevens
Rather irrelevant
Buddhist punks
Art and fakery
Gabo barred
The Bicycle Thief
Walleyed Rembrandt
Do animals think?
Zizek on toilets
Not true
Four day war
Goodbye Linnaeus
Smelling madeleine
Putin’s fury
Music and IQ, again
Elmore Leonard
Porn bio
Shostakovich
When chefs dream
Mozart had Tourette’s?
Muslims and heaven
Christopher Isherwood
Olympics R.I.P
A.J. Liebling
College life today
Political brain
Non-kosher worms
A general’s library
The Scream stolen
Voting behavior
It’s “web” (no caps)
More Bushisms
Marrying down
Who will rule?
James Wood
Julia Child R.I.P.
Bernard Levin R.I.P.
Hold the double latte!
Xerox power
Toe-licking?
Lolita in Tehran
I. B. Singer at 100
Is KenJen a genius?
Johan Bruyneel
Hawking was wrong
EU and game theory
Kafka
Chalabi and the press
BC’s index
No nano?
Improvised Pulitzer
Regarding Friedman
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Ernst Mayr at 100
Stop hip-hop!
Their salaries?
Patten on Huntington
National Enquirer
Mozart, unacceptably
Oppie Fest
Britain’s top 100
Dear Foodie
Bill’s Bob
Saddam and dic-lit
Medalist Podhoretz
Untranslatable!
67 percent
Wealth-speak
Indoor sunlight
Praising mandolin
ZZ’s goal
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Meet Joe Blog
Gingrich the reviewer
Diego Rivera and Mao
The smoking poor
Ingmar Bergman
Dog’s vocabulary
Wolfowitz’s Iraq
Bill’s Monica
Science fraud
Bad stats
Liberty lost
Ignoring history
French vacations
Big Mac index
Goodbye verbs
Traitor Chalabi
Michelangelo
Alliteration
Warring Freudians
Tragic Maradona
Allen Ginsberg
NY Times and Iraq
Godsend
Sontag on torture
Daily Self-Googling
Who invented Lolita?
Write your column
Kyoto? Nyet!
Try sex
Breast baring
Godot in Beijing
No, Troy is awful
Troy’s not so bad
Prussian Revolution
Gowns, gavels, Picasso
Ferguson vs Kagan
“He slapped me and cried”
What if Jimmy Carter...
Outsourcing
Dorfman on torture
Homer vs Hollywood
“Arts & Ideas” R.I.P.
Iraqi strongman?
Street retreats
Grade inflation
Hersh on Abu Ghraib
750,000? 1 Million?
Amirault free at last
Rattled in Berlin
Explanations
Larry Diamond on Iraq
Poets die young
Einstein in old age
John Maynard Smith
Scent of time
Rude conductors
More on Carl Schmitt
Murderer al-Sadr
The Time 100
China’s Internet police
Conspiracy theories
PDB in PowerPoint
Jersey Girl Fatigue
Ingmar Bergman
Lucian Freud
Einstein’s brain
Memo, 6 Aug 2001
Future terrorists
Bring back Saddam
Codes in notes
Sartre and Camus
Jesus and Socrates
Teller and the cold war
Dmitri Shostakovich
Castañeda on Huntington
Day of the cicada
Iraq’s constitution
Punctuality pays
Women’s magazines
Hundertwasser’s toilet
Unequal pay
“Hair on fire”
Lord Carey on Islam
Previewing Raines
PC sign language
Dave’s tax tips
Punks for Bush
Baghdad graffiti
Hard and soft power
Weird Science
Hitchens on Spain
Tales of the chef
Do fatties sing better?
Steyn on terrorism
Where Jack slept
Skinner’s daughter
Too fat soprano
Martha Stewart
Jorge Guinle R.I.P
Ventura at Harvard
Blair’s speech
Unsafe SUVs
Lomborg’s latest
George F. Kennan
Turner’s blindness
Hitchens on Gibson
Victor Davis Hanson
Office hours
MMR and autism
Sen on owl
Mel Gibson’s Passion
Understanding autism
X-Treme Latin
Historians slammed
Dissent
Janácek’s muse
Buchanan, Frum, Perle
William Gibson
Tricks of the trade
Janet’s nipple
Clash of civilizations
Leszek Kolakowski
Porn und Drang
Darwin Day
Doyle on Joyce
Korean Auschwitz
Unhappy endings
NYT bites back
Andras Schiff
Top ten delusions
How to read Proust
Genetic Adam, Eve
Cake sharing
Children can lie
Robert K. Merton
Lost luggage
Accidental genius
Je ne regrette rien
Pianists as showmen
Boswell’s Jackson
Rude to Osama!
DDT
Robert Silvers
Starbucks in Paris
Vandalizing art
Blocked writer
San Francisco
Aristotle, art, sex
No WMDs? So what?
How disgusting!
Immanuel Kant
Edward Albee
Cellist’s lament
Instruction manual
Cool
Endless movie credits
Love makes you crazy
No queuing!
Horowitz and Milstein
Fredric Jameson & Son
Dating an ex-wife
A-bombs: hard to make
Fairy Tales
Google’s Zeitgeist
Dave Barry’s 2003
Fruit police
New Year’s is for Bozos
Sex and silliness
Politics of autism
Carolyn Heilbrun
Mao at 110
Hip masculinity
No breaks
Gadaffi’s fear
Endgame for tyrants
Iraq’s “disappeared”
Hari vs Dawkins
Resolution time
Philip Roth
danger + opportunity
Money makers
Flush!
Roger Shattuck R.I.P.
Etiquette lessons
Pinter speech
Lead killed Beethoven
Roger Scruton
Chess discovers sex
Wikipedia liar
Koko’s nipple fetish
Lomborg on Kyoto
Staten Island Ferry
Ted Cohen on Latkes
Frida Kahlo Tequila
Good Sex Awards
Beethoven skull bits
Marlowe censored
R.A. / A.R. R.I.P.
ADHD-TV
College essay
Zizek
Bad hair day?
Very old food OK
Poet murdered
Questions for Bush
Half-baked theories
Peter Drucker R.I.P.
Dalrymple on France
Chick Lit to Quit Lit
Best UK bookshop
Singing mice
Money and IQ
Album cover art
Breaking ranks
We need sex
Mullahs’ madhouse
Mrs. Khodorkovsky
On Maureen Dowd
Sustainability?
DDT now!
Regarding Chomsky
Watson vs. Wilson
French lingerie, sigh
Arab-U.S. museum
New York Times rift
Tourist or traveler
Ba Jin R.I.P.
Aleksandr Yakovlev
Sonny Rollins
Beheading: the idea
August Wilson
Kurt Vonnegut
N.O.’s “toxic soup”
The Booker winner
Squirrel crackheads
It’s only logical...
Stoopid terrorists
Justine Lévy
Doorman science
Doctor Atomic
What @ means
E.L. Doctorow
Yankees suck
Museum of cheating
M. Scott Peck R.I.P.
Foucault and Iran
Bush in big trouble
Life with a pig
Top 100 intellectuals
Rembrandt restored
Walter Mosley
Home-churched kids
Angela’s ashes
Hitchens vs. Galloway
Hermann Bondi R.I.P.
Jack Welch on Katrina
Murdoch & Son
Kurt Vonnegut
Next fad diet
New Orleans cover-up
Sharia in Canada
Scientific sins
Philip Roth
Chernobyl toll
Pornified
Barenboim hates Jews?
Homeopathic nonsense
Witty warmongers
Men, women, IQ
Meet the zeks
Textbook competition
Equal time
Oil price bet
Global warming bet
Blogging
Fareed Zakaria
Christian physics!
Gossip is good for you
Your designer vagina
Buried in books
Podnography
Saved by Plumpy’nut
Why people laugh
Peter Jennings R.I.P.
NYC crimebusting
Steven Vincent R.I.P.
Bush’s philosophers
Blog bites man
Garrison Keillor, and...
August Kleinzahler
Not quite passing
Tenth planet
Trees make deserts
Shankar & fille
A real hovel
War of the Worlds
Castrati
How Lance is built
Wagnermania
Danica McKellar
Creationists!
Alexei Sultanov R.I.P.
Fighting words
Simone de Beauvoir
Secret Lover Collection
Fish tale
Claude Simon R.I.P
Elizabeth Smart
Is London burning?
Evan Hunter R.I.P
Pot v. pet
Yak skiing
Kakutanied!
“Rainbow parties”
Death of Egolf
Nude York!
Mouse you, buddy
Idea for Los Alamos
Finkelstein v. Dershowitz
Booming in China
Peggy on Hillary
No “couch potato”
H.G. Wells
Marx the greatest?
Father’s Day
Ruse on evolution
Einstein’s brain
Carlo Maria Giulini R.I.P.
Darwin, me and the Big C
Haruki Murakami
Miracle drug?
M.J.’s hidden accuser
Loan rangers
Fiction and social gap
Jerks at work
Postmodern Brad Pitt
In love with words
Indians can spell
Follow the money!
Samir Kassir R.I.P.
Your male/female brain
“I’m Deep Throat”
What Wolfowitz faces
Femme couvrante
Forever Beethoven
Virtuous Canada!
Brand Hillary
Pulping the Koran?
Head and heart
Iris Chang
Learning English
British skinflints
Ha Jin
Iraqi soap opera
Boyd on culture
“Sorry for Yalta”
Obit writer (audio)
Grass on freedom
PBS’s dormative virtue
New York restrooms
Twinkies at 75
Douglas Feith
Jane Eyre in Georgia
Celebrate Penis Day!
John Brockman
Sick of Harvard?
List lust
Writing wives
Pre-emptive executions?
Philip Morrison R.I.P.
Flat earth...or not
Litblogs
Have a nice day, or else
Russian airports
Fat isn’t so deadly
Roth and Bellow
Matt Drudge
Kinsley on neocons
Sy Hersh
Hippies and rednecks
Mostly Mozart? Alas...
Farewell, Hitch
Brass vs. plastic
Where are my pants?
Brenda Starr
Royal call
Andrea Bocelli
Camille Paglia
Petulant prince
Moura Lympany R.I.P.
Einstein, the writer
Top Amazon reviewer
Archivist Weinstein
Descartes & Schiavo
Worst building
O Harvard!
D.H. Lawrence
Bobby Short
Stressful job
Frantz Fanon
Neuroeconomics
Kinsley speaks up
Funny Führer
George Kennan R.I.P.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Cool pianist
Camus & Sartre
John Lukacs
Does Gödel matter?
Museum fatigue
After Rather
Hans Bethe R.I.P.
Royal schedule!
Public Interest R.I.P.
Bullshit, again
Bush misreads Camus
Chicken flu peril?
Lomborg on Kyoto
Mistaken identity
Condi’s clothes
Saving a Strad
Babe flicks flop
Butling schools
Women in physics
A big nothing
Unholy affairs
What Summers said...
“Motherese”
Not fit to print
Evil in Lebanon
Library vs. Fidel
Ayn Rand Institute
Natan Sharansky
Royal insult
What’s next?
Galbraith v. Friedman
Bacall on Hepburn
K.A. Appiah
Max Schmeling R.I.P.
Royal sensitivity
Broken cracked
Bush’s Muse
Iraq is not Vietnam
The price of oil
Blaming Camus
The Paris Review
Pushkin’s porn?
Condi Rice, Hegelian
Tynan on Carson
Crime fighting Mozart
Bush and the Rascals
Brad and Jen
Winning Iraqi hearts?
Dear Mr. Cervantes...
Dave Barry explains
Elizabeth Janeway
Victoria de los Angeles
Trouble with Harry
Why McDonald’s?
Religious illiterates
“New” van Gogh
Sontag vs Derrida
Remembering Du Pré
Guy Davenport R.I.P.
Alexander flops
Stern’s warning
Dave Barry quits
Kicking Susan Sontag
Phantom of the Opry
Classical music lives
Sharing laughter
Britain’s Sontags?
Tsunami warnings
Campus wars
How’s Rattle doing?
Quantum quackery
Too much fa-la-la
Sarcasm needed
Slate sold
Germaine Greer
Renata Tebaldi, R.I.P.
Weblogs? Well...
Filthy fraud
Intertextuality
Amartya Sen
Jane Austen Rulz!
Jane Austen quiz
We need Wagner
False fears
No public intellectuals
Dogs and chocolate
Junk Science Awards
Twisting history
Woody on Mickey
Orgasm for Peace
Are you a book sniffer?
Anne Frank’s tree
Opera on YouTube
A new insult to Islam?
Swan in love
Caruso redivivus
Is God good for you?
Landing in Baghdad
Cliché Day
The euro in tatters
Sam Harris
Why play dead?
Jewish lawyers
Red wine, fat mice
Richard Gilman R.I.P.
Gordimer robbed
Why the goose step?
Camille Paglia
Hoax
HK/Heathrow cheap
A Liberal Manifesto
Laura Kipnis
Nuclear Absurdistan
North Korean reality
On Salman Rushdie
Are video games evil?
Drink made me do it
New Frost poem
Kill us, too
Money per pupil...
Talk to your kids
The Gladwell point
Chess mess
Inconvenient scientist
Ten science myths
Alas, poor Mozart
Urban sprawl, or myth?
Supernovae
Malcolm Arnold R.I.P.
Music boosts IQ
Is Islamism fascism?
Martin Amis
Material guy
DDT comeback
Michelangelo
Joachim Fest R.I.P.
Wine chemistry
The “No Planers”
The New Criterion
Telephone telepathy?
1960s satire
Creationist math
Rattle’s battle
Brainiest cities
St. Thomas Kinkade
Naguib Mahfouz R.I.P.
Taller means smarter
Career women
Tsunami of 1700
Edward Tufte
Moralizing PBS
No more pizzas
Bush’s journal
Who’s your daddy?
Jewish jokes
Guide to rejection
Those Americans
Russians dump pianos
Bush reads Camus
Canadians in Lebanon
Oliver Stone’s 9/11
Geek speak
Jayne Mansfield
James Van Allen R.I.P.
It’s a mute point
Life on Mars? Sorry
Tim Berners-Lee
Global warming porn
Chinese justice
Suicide bombers
Those capsule reviews
Activist beer
Pay for pets
Secret Bible verse
Tool-belt man
Post-siesta
The Pynchon Post
Red card for Chirac
You need to...
Wash your hands, Doc!
Canis Inflatus
Overhyped Harvard
Failed states
Mumbai view
The cult of manliness
The Pope’s music
Anything into oil
Glacier melt disaster
Futurism
The Guerrilla Girls
Abused professor
China’s labor shortage
Tropical Stonehenge
First jewelry
But is it art? No!
Nihilistic soccer
Wind power mortality
Horowitz’s piano
Cody’s Books R.I.P.
Eco priorities
Reparations industry
It’s in your genes
Fake food
Jihadis keep coming
Gyorgy Ligeti R.I.P.
Best websites
Funniest joke ever
Extraterrestrial Rain
Using apostrophe’s
Melting pot to stir-fry
Clive James poem
Conspiracy theories
World Cup blues
Best art novels
Brits are healthier?
Boozy art openings
How gross!
Rambunctious breasts
Dig up a grave
Stanley Kunitz R.I.P.
Name your breasts
Walt/Mearsheimer
Neolithic muggers
Bernard Malamud
The Walrus was Paul
Men, women, and books
U.S. by the numbers
Colbert wasn’t funny
Turn to 1984
Osama the blogophile
Sadness and glee
Jane Jacobs R.I.P.
Climate alarmism
Protocols of Zion
Worlds within worlds
Korean slaves
Forgive not....
I’m OK, you’re biased
Jesus vs. science
Jedediah Purdy
The 9:24 P.M. Rule
Darwin and fiction
Knifing Todd Gitlin
Condi Rice, pianist
Da Vinci decision
Nina Stauffenberg R.I.P.
British intellectuals
Family meal ritual
Opus Dei defended
An atheist manifesto
Summers...and Bush
Nostradamus love jam
Amazon typos
Germans are funny
Naipaul on the attack
Australia not racist
Shakespeare’s smut
Giant tortoises
Gael Greene
Oh no, gay marriage!
Decanting Robt. Parker
Mozart and genius
Baby conservatives
Peggy Appiah R.I.P.
Sydney Opera House
Writing is memory
See blood and faint
Anna Moffo R.I.P.
The Boondocks
Gordon Parks R.I.P.
“Looted art”
Prof. Goodgrade
Speciesism
Neocon tragedy
Impeach Bush!
CUNY job offer
Jon Stewart
Theodore Draper R.I.P.
Irving backlash?
Paris Hilton
Khrushchev’s speech
Carl Nielsen
Steyn on population
Peter Strawson R.I.P.
Some kind of Denmark
Peter Benchley R.I.P.
Robert Hooke ms
Americans insulted
Arab democracy II
Arab democracy
The Gladwell Effect
Betty Friedan R.I.P.
B-H Lévy hits back!
Last telegram
Life in Mosul
A “war” museum
Wendy Wasserstein
Proust’s Franglais
Wal-Mart & academia
Electrocute your wine!
Chinese map fake
Green house gasbags
Cheap wine and cheese
Bravo Mozart!
India’s moral police
New Yorker history
Neo-Nazi, or not?
Plethora of prizes
More on Nilsson
Spitting Chinese
Birgit Nilsson R.I.P.
Frey’s memoir
Wonkette’s novel
The Producers
Fountain axed
Your Cheatin’ Heart
Free thinking?
Legal Literature
Acting up
“Antiquities gotcha”
Creationist parks
Quantum trickery
Stalin’s supermen
Zakaria’s Utopia
Galvanic smile
Reads your mind!
Jail for insult to royalty
Procrastination facts
Itzhak & Co. synched it
Striking a new chord
How not to write
Strong, silent types
Korngold: talent or genius?
Pleistocene and paint
Wilde, child abuser?
My Holocaust memoir
Art and the recession
Joy of sex
Richard John Neuhaus R.I.P.
Tintin is gay
Twilight of the color photo
Joan Bright Astley R.I.P.
Local Weirdos
Cold War classics
Karl Lagerfeld on furs
“America is finished!”
Still paging Mr. Salinger
Trash TV addict
“You know” Caroline
U.K. libel law
Dickens and white Christmas
Christmas primer
Fashionable allergies
Newton’s birthday
VHS is winding down
Risk-taking is sexy
Einstein’s wife
Obama’s speechwriter
Jane Austen addicts
9th Symphony = CD length?
Darwin’s legacy
Why publishers fail
Santa™
Rejection letters
Living next to a Wendy’s
Kids dictionary changes
India is an ally
Obama as Cicero
Jezebelism
Brainy men healthier
Tipping is down
Odetta R.I.P.
Mocking Thomas Kinkade?
Roget’s words
Emanuel Ax
Rolf Potts profile
The Bad Sex Award
In praise of the turkey
French maids
Awkward group photo
Lévi-Strauss at 100
Rude to Marion Barry
Mafia manners
Hamlet wore a bra
Classical music prefs
Immigrant women
Helvetica
Martin Amis
Barbaric or hygienic?
Antony Flew
Drinking and praying
Henry James’ “object”
Philip Gourevitch
Good toothpick?
Steak ’n’ gravy
That awful Lomborg
Scent of a Führer
Homeopathic quacks
R.B. Kitaj R.I.P.
Would-be book review editor
Childhood blindness
The Kingdom
Slutting up Vivaldi
Who’s your cousin?
Weird visual illusion
Britain’s crime cameras
Fats Domino
Atheism dustup
Hidden charms
Levittown at 60
Syphilis was chic
Italy’s big babies
Terry Eagleton
100 global warming effects
Museum of Sex
What’s a neocon now?
Glenn Gould
New art ’zine
Best newspaper books
Video games as art
Vincent van Gogh
Nice flirtatious men
Did the Bard do it?
Bollinger’s speech
Sports cheaters
The biofuel solution
Marcel Marceau R.I.P.
Happy hedonists
Rushdie on blogs
Greatest travel books
Alex wanted a cracker
The Choc Doc
Kill Larry!
Why make art?
Champagne and breasts
Wodehouse types
Compliments earn tips
Burger crime
Alex the Parrot R.I.P.
Women read more
Art and money
A new feminism?
Literary boredom
God’s algebra
Dianamania! Yawn...
The Kamasutra
Condom nations
What every home needs
Foreign words
Gut feelings
Toilet stall etiquette
Spectacular stats (video)
Diana/whore complex
Grace Paley R.I.P.
Eat an ortolan, Wiki style
Stuyvesant High School
“Bloodthirsty lesbians”
Peace through God
Bad writing (audio)
Cultures commit suicide
Richard Serra at MoMA
Hitler’s 78s
Greenhouse moralizing
Kahlo’s last secret
Bergman’s commercials
On the Road at 50
Joy of Scrabble
Theory of affluence
So-called food miles
Raul Hilberg R.I.P.
Bergman/Antonioni
They’re killing rock
Animals that “talk”
Gory lion pix
PBS & Mrs. Einstein
Unconscious brain
What else can Disney ban?
In praise of editors
Unjolly Roger
Rent an American
Phone tower dangers
Green Revolution II
Shock! Rain in Britain!
School names
Amateurs ruin the web
Tiny brain OK
Calcium cartel
Praise for Conrad Black
Stupidest fatwas
The Queen and the BBC
Don’t share that problem
Speed ticket insurance
Who killed Antioch?
Racist Jane Austen
Harry Potter hits puberty
Why I love fat men
Silent men
Human Flower Project
“She literally exploded”
Jews and IQ
Birds like new songs
Brilliant news graphics
Babies are liars
The Six Stages of E-mail
Writer in Castro’s jail
Are gays icky?
Movie credits, sigh
No bad authors
Death TV
That quixotic don
British theatre critics
Hitchens’s big hit
Dumbocracy
PowerPoint issues
Alterman on Peretz
Science and faith
Antioch College R.I.P.
eBay-nomics
Rudolf Arnheim R.I.P.
Wu’s Wu in China
Book dedications
My granny the forger
Rape accusations
Critics fired
Muhammad is No. 2
Royal Air Force pin-ups
Moving violations
“Fire Ward Churchill”
Alcohol and dementia
The time you waste
Free concerts?
Science of disgust
Limbo — seriously
FAKE BRITNEY NEWS!
Dickens meets Disney
Why have books?
On writing well
Law to help musicians
Young narcissists
Soviet military maps
Pope’s new theology
Book spines
Vacuum energy
Jewish outbursts
Patricia Cornwell sues
John Rawls
A Strauss primer
Mother’s Day is a lie
Amateur audiobooks
The Secret
Amartya Sen
Hitchens’s God
Man vs nature
Video games/violence
French bashing
Can France be saved?
Museum crowds
Happy Danes?
Vonnegut’s exit
David Halberstam, R.I.P.
Terry Eagleton
Easterly on Wolfowitz
Smart dating
Hans Koning, R.I.P.
Blaming Charlton Heston
Unsuggestions
Imus’s enablers
New Boris Godunov
Douglas Hofstadter
Militant atheists
Big Brother and Orwell
New Hatto scandal
Illiterary blogs
Met at the movies
Internship softball
Obama’s smoking
Non-power of prayer
Cat plays piano
Lucky chimney sweep
Me speak English bad
Think-tank tips
David Rattray R.I.P.
Kickboxing Geishas
Harvard’s new boss
Steve Martin’s virgins
Germany is at war
Bookstore blues
John Searle
A Supreme Court week
Colts? Bears? Huh?
Molly Ivins R.I.P.
Google’s library
Grumpy employees
Faith-based geology
Gentle sex, free money
Dear Mr. Ahmadinejad
Alfred Hitchcock
Money and newspapers
Art market stupidity
Hrant Dink R.I.P.
Tarzan’s children
Beckham’s retirement
Obama smokes
Wasting police time
Miracle parrot? No
Breathe in, girls
Historian vs cop
Bill O’Reilly
Carlo Ponti R.I.P.
Grand Canyon’s age
Historian jaywalks
Angry Norman Mailer
Monographomania
Woody Allen festival
Amazing parrot
Your shower curtain
Math in The Simpsons
Judith Regan
Russian airports
New Mozart juvenilia
Norman Mailer
Sociopath next door
God to Dawkins
Kim’s big fizzle
Monica’s MA thesis
The key to Shylock
Boot vs. Wheatcroft
Flashbulb memories
New gravity theory
YouTube vs. boob tube
Ethnic Baghdad
Pyramids and concrete
Tylenol trafficker
Philip Gourevitch
The bathtub Eureka!
An Indian problem
Mrs Adam Smith
Sleeper Cell
Hating Los Angeles
How you walk
Polonium-210 for sale
The Taliban Codex
Hitchens/Clive James
Kremlin’s revenge
Blogging nuns
Zola and the Jews
Physics legends
Thallium as poison
Stolen Goya found
Le Clézio, le backlash
Great Depression myths
Bigfoot in Texas
Dirty restaurants
Dogs and music
Relationship miles?
Art Spiegelman
Salmon don’t give a dam
Garrison Keillor poem
Tony Hillerman R.I.P.
Biker poets
Oil down? Told you so!
Indefatigable godwits
Leonard Cohen
Economic worries
Tchaikovsky hater
Wolves smarter than dogs
Pop music and the sexes
Pompeii in the Alps
Man Booker winner
Happiness pursuit
Trump buys Iceland
Kol Nidre
Publish and be wrong
Globalized yoga
Homosexuality “cure”
Big bang or big bounce?
Mrs. Woolf’s servants
Marilyn Monroe hoax
Ice cube melt alarm
Gotcha guard
Farewell, NY Sun!
Doestoevsky fan
Heart of Darwin
New prime number
Poisoned pen pals
Truth and the Rosenbergs
Obituary writer
9/11 fraud
Insomnia
Peterson’s Field Guide
Jolly Danes
Keeping Africa poor
Sharia in Britain
Happy Wagners
Applause and silence
Ebook readers
National Enquirer stories
Survival of the wittiest
Darwin apparition
Deeply informed voters
Robert Giroux R.I.P.
English music
Vaccine→autism? No!
Your horoscope
Confucian comeback
Last year in Abkhazia
Rude Britannia
Love me, love my books
Olfactory diagnostics
Chillax
R U reading?
Fake bistro
Thatcher's struggle
Nose picking
Historic conquest
Sir Penguin
Need to read music?
Literary Britain
Alexander Slobodyanik R.I.P.
Ice lingam
Mahmoud Darwish R.I.P.
Ice lingam
History of electricity
Nostalgia defended
Al Qaeda and cucumbers
Organic not better
Pletnev and Beethoven
Gender and math
Nanny Nation
Techno-doped swimmers
Chrysler Building
Desert Rat cuisine
Long live Central Park
Male generosity
Hundred best novels
Fate of the semicolon
More Naipaul dirt
Law’n order, UK style
Stolen Shakespeare
Anti-Americanism is fate
Randy Pausch R.I.P.
Musicians are sexy
Lust is blind
Information overload
Lang Lang’s lesson
Joe Queenan’s ears
New bubble needed
McDonald’s in France
New Poet Laureate
The psych revolution
Bye-bye Polaroid
He’s a proud Lesbian
Colors
New Leonardo?
Best psychiatry books
Gas in constant $
Thomas Disch R.I.P.
Miniskirt in history
Persian Gulf needs coal
Dogs “unclean”
Viagra’s new use
New Standpoint
Clay Felker R.I.P.
Sexy stubble
Take the trash out
Leonard Pennario R.I.P.
Word Museum
Man overboard
Rapture ready
Encounter Books vs NYT
Eat, memory
Things Fall Apart
Circumcision
An orderly universe
9/11 Denialism
To academic editors...
Freeman Dyson
Remnick on Russert
Are men boring?
Where’s Nelson Mandela?
Biodynamic wine scam
Obama doll! Kind of.
Music hallucinosis
Pinker & McEwan
Uncle Barack’s Cabin
Body odor OK
Typewriters vs computers
Food summit menu
Cars for comrades
Wine bluffing
Big fat books
Healthy blogging
Red sky all day
Sons of Sartre
Carbon Belch Day
UFO shocker!
Home teams do best
Great Wall 2.0
Houellebecq’s mom
Wright side of the brain
Surfing in class
Useful CIA textbook
The Art of the Fugue
The conductor knits
Global warming/kidney stones
Tintin graffiti
White Madonna’s burden
Wiki-world truthiness
“Ask the Jihadist”
Philosopher kingmaker
Why it costs $19.95
Soft college degree
The appeal of fantasy
Lonely Planet scandal
Best campus novels
End of the critic?
Berman vs Buruma
Olympics in chains
What Rushdie’s up to
“Allah” vs “God”
Jeff Jacoby on campus
Fear of snakes
Your racist self
The value of Roget
Bad curatorial writing
A bookstore at the end
Doomsday meditations
Robert Fagles R.I.P.
Übermensch undermined
PBS lies
Unhappy Knut
Africa, bananas, and CO2
Combat dictionary
Sir Vidia’s cruelty
Phone books dying?
Paul Scofield R.I.P
“Stuff White People Like”
Want a man, or a worm?
Penis restaurant
James Bond’s clothes
British misery
Celebrity masterpieces
Black Lagoon memories
Bookstore epitaph
Map mania
President on call
Gary Gygax R.I.P.
Literary sex
Italian gesture
Metrosexual manscape
Bush to stay in Africa
Most needed apologies
Rebranding anti-Semitism
T-rays see through art
How paint dries
Dutton’s Books
Airbus A380 cockpit
Hank Williams
Danish catoonist’s fate
God and Girls in Thailand
Shrinking families
Beethoven? Elitist?
Darwinian reading
Why steal art?
Night at the opera
The Archbishop’s Tale
Neocon myths
Heather’s stump
Women’s studies ends
Soldier slang
Biggest helicopter
His roving eye
ABC’s Lost
Brand McSweeney’s
Lolita who?
Martin Amis
Margaret Truman R.I.P.
Mark Morford is happy
Candidate fonts
Cursing literary theory
Why we flirt
Young Frankenstein woes
New Yorker reading
Selling sex
Tom Cruise rant (video)
2007’s big word
Machiavelli
Iranian Jewish mayor
Castrati
Columbus and syphilis
Greer on Kitaj
Lunch with Hitch
Simone de Beauvoir
Edmund Hillary R.I.P.
Zoos and death
Mamma’s boys
Brazen magpie
US bars vs UK pubs
Top NYT op-eds 2007
Bellicose oratory
About Facebook
Smoking in France
Book reviewing dead?
Britney in 2008
Best baby advice
Marriage is green
Medical myths
Oscar Peterson R.I.P.
Book flops of 2007
Best/worst lit quotes
Buzzwords of 2007
Our civil liberties
I hate Céline!
Terry Eagleton
Magna Carta sale
Meteor shotgun pellets
The marriage market
Bad taste headline
Who invited the dog?
Stocking filler books
Christmas Stollen
Martha Nussbaum questions
Libel tourism
Lévy on Time on France
Karlheinz Stockhausen R.I.P.
Oprah vs Barbra
Bioethanol boondoggle
Profs on Facebook
Gauguin’s teeth
Church of Stop Shopping
Beyond Velveeta
Khrushchev’s shoe
Salman Rushdie gossip
Glenn Gould’s legacy
The decline of declinism
Martin Amis not racist
Fat? Don’t worry.
Post-turkey drowsiness
French boar hunt
Roman cave
Jews and Wasps
Helicopter dreams
Productivity gains
Win a Nat’l Book Award
“They’re just breasts”
Best animal stories
Let’s go to Mars
Best nature photos
Zombie movies
Gladwell’s problem
Climate trade wars
Libraries and ebooks
Play guitar, attract girls
Classics they loathe
Healthy champagne
The New Gay Romance
Be an Art Woman
COP15’s empty promises (video)
In praise of big lectures
Sorry, Virginia, there is no...
Listen to Mother Earth
Paul Samuelson R.I.P.
Can Julie really cook?
Book comes to life
Kirkus Reviews R.I.P.
Women and salads
Skeptic’s Climate A-Z
Tiger Woods and physics
Climate Fight Club
Anthropology wars
Women and sex
That SkyMall junk
Chomsky half full
New Ella Fitzgerald tracks
Amy Alkon on rudeness
H.C. Landon Robbins R.I.P.
Gate crashers
Bennett on Sinatra
A new blue
Global-warming emails
Tobias Wolff
Monogamy isn’t easy
Did rats kill Easter Island?
Spectacular clouds
Norman Levitt R.I.P.
Billy Carter’s gas station
Oxford’s words of the year
No reason to tweet
Music of the castrati
Gladwell sendup
Ayn Rand freak out
Kenneth Clark
Who’s a Jew
Let’s eat bugs
Why Neanderthals vanished
Woody Allen and Prozac
A Byzantine Pax Americana
Pete Shellem R.I.P.
Golf cart stimulus
Amazon vs. Wal-Mart
Hating Mother Teresa
What to wear to sell a book
Fish friendly red wine
“Two bags of silicone”
Mad Men
Malcolm Gladwell
Battle of Agincourt
Interview with Fukuyama
Gore Vidal, again
French without faux pas
Why we need God
Bunny-heated Sweden
Can’t grow up
Margo Daly R.I.P.
Marketing your book
Tiny worlds
Hobby aquariums
They still love Berlusconi
Finding Kilimanjaro
Étant donnés
Kafka and Israel
New Metropolitan Museum
McDonald’s in the Louvre
At the end of my pencil
Online newspaper stats
Birthdays in decline
Obama/Bush thought experiment
The 237 reasons for sex
Frida Kahlo fakes? [more]
Harvard’s piles of gold
Do you speak criminal?
Alicia de Larrocha R.I.P.
Nudist hiking trail
Fun general knowledge quiz
Bloomberg’s paternalism
Banning outdoor smoking
Dan Brown’s worst sentences
Fake moon rocks
Myles Brand R.I.P.
Dan Brown plot generator
Driving Miss Lazy
“Life reeked with joy!”
The four o’clock dress
Baader Meinhof movie
Library without books
Bird-brain art critics
Baryshnikov at sixty
Kids’ imaginary worlds
Pyrocumulus clouds (video)
Pocket toilet for ladies
Most annoying phrases
Facebook exodus
Girls, snakes, spiders
Tall men get cancer?
Wrong-way Samoans
Multitasking mayhem
A greener Taco Bell (video)
How long can an airplane last?
The uses of crying
The wrath of Khan
Smart coffee mugs
Beethoven’s ukulele
Richard Poirier R.I.P.
All Twitter, no Twain
Violins left in taxis
Humans, crows, minds
The worst and the dimmest
Racetrack lessons
What happens in August
How green is your sushi?
Poodles are smarter
How will America end?
Voices of Meryl Streep (video)
Curse of the yummy
Twitter against nukes
Know your shaman
Oliver Sacks on music
Don’t text when you drive
Robert McNamara R.I.P.
Michael Jackson, bookworm
Coffee on the honor system
Atheist stand-up comics
Pop music ’zines are dying
Britney goes Jewish
Merce Cunningham R.I.P.
Academics are conformists
New Mozart discovery
Amartya Sen
The concept of duty
Leszek Kołakowski R.I.P.
Frank McCourt R.I.P.
Michael Jackson’s animals
Sickest film ever?
Hot celebrity gossip
Cats’ con games
Homeopathic A&E (video)
Culture snobs
Movie novelization
Muslim superheroes
Hitchens Q&A
Ward Churchill, cont.
Brain scrubbing
Niall Ferguson interview
Jefferson secret message
Dog “guilt”
Gladwell v. Anderson
Michael Jackson, booklover
Florida’s honeymoon
Jefferson and Monticello
Don’t forget Farrah
Subjects for a pop song
Truth about writers
Cricket will save Pakistan
Ali Akbar Khan R.I.P.
Why homosexuality?
Dr. Seuss
Dictator’s handbook
Sixty years after 1984
Vanity scholarly publishing
Cardboard better for wine
Get that book deal
Weekly Standard to be sold
Science and fraud
Doomed to be an academic?
Art or bust
Nonexistent beach reads
Nouriel Roubini
Sotomayor as prose stylist
Ladies in charge
The Berlin Wall
Girls are such bitches
Sarkozy as sex dwarf
Spooks’ Ball
Sam’s Club
Good game?
Bedbug dogs
The most beautiful libraries
Have a kosher baby!
Baseball slang
Leonard Cohen
The climate-industrial complex
Steamy stealth bomber
What flight attendants hate
Obama: Pay heed to India
Buckminster Fuller
Huntington eulogies
World’s best illusion
Evolution of music
Toby Young
It’s not the Great Depression
Geithner’s confession
Vintage port
God in prime time
Storm in a double D cup
“Americans hate puns”
Penis as Rosetta Stone
Marilyn French R.I.P.
More on Strunk and White
Those dancing parrots
Sacha Baron Cohen
In Character
Sad to junk your old car
Before you join the Amish...
Scary employment map
Twitter is bad for kids
Oprah’s school cuts back
Most hated type font
Susan Boylemania
Fatties cause global warming
World leaders on Facebook
J.G. Ballard R.I.P.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick R.I.P.
Hapsburg incest
In praise of booing
Scratch that itch
Bloomberg’s experiment
Damned lies and statistics
Madoff vs. the Lobsters
Bodice-ripper boom
Brazza in the Congo
Flogistan
Liberated or just confused?
Nelson Algren at 100
Too much kale, turnips
Shopping sprees and periods
Are shopping malls dying?
The Facebook Aeneid
Paris!
Franz Kafka Int’l Airport
John Hope Franklin, R.I.P.
In praise of YouTube
Bad jokes easier to recall
Border collies are smart
Book stealing
Departure e-mail
Brits have the best gossip
Art Linkletter
Sad yummy mummies
Jane Austen fight
Insemination fight
Hard to censor “Wang”
Red Sox and Yankees
No big eggs
Soccer is ruining America
Home teams win
Dinner with Hitler
Schuyler Chapin R.I.P.
Cut-and-paste writing
Lies and books you’ve not read
We need book critics
Favorite five composers
Dubai’s dramatic decline
Science mysteries
Gambling and dopamine
Darwinism in retailing
Greatest story ever garbled
The MMR-autism link
Cheese wars
The anti-Bono
Your inner Neanderthal
Hangover cures
Death of reading?
Stress is good for you
Plastic surgery confidential
Free speech
“Wrong” father myth
Editing is useful
Elegant evolution!
Trust your GPS?
Kissing good for you
Martini evolution
The promised land
Emotionally misshapen losers
How hooligans Bach down
How old are you? – game
How great was Mendelssohn?
European cannibalism
Super Bowl lexicon
Charles and Emma
No more Book World
Jews, jokes, France
Passenger complaint letter
Proust is damn funny
Clive Barnes R.I.P.
Journo-gurus
Best Texas BBQ
On the Road at fifty
English die soon
The audacity of spam
Great War meditation
Miriam Makeba R.I.P.
Monkey drug testing
We love fat
At the Lincoln Memorial
3-D cave paintings
Eadweard Muybridge
God-loving linguists
The origin of dogs
TNR’s favorite WikiLeaks
Skeptical fun (video)
Building Stonehenge
Vikings in America
The Wiki-obvious
Atlantic’s Best Books 2010
Cranky Saul Bellow
The coin toss
Al-Qaeda in Macy’s parade
Pilgrims vs the TSA
Look up to him
100% CGI imagery
Autistic philosophers
Kryptos
Cars that drive themselves?
Marrying beneath her
NYC as nudgocracy
30 airports in 30 days.
Henryk Gorecki R.I.P.
Two Indias
Stop Berlusconi, please!
What makes countries corrupt
Vegivores
Suckiness of a reviewer
Why philosophy?
Maps for the 21st century
War on pot
Signs for sanity and/or fear
In twenty-five words or less
Richard T. Gill R.I.P.
Useful dog tricks (video)
Why inflight meals have no taste
Turn off your cellphone?
Hockney’s iPad art
Marjorie Morningstar
McDonald’s makeover
The past was in color
Scale of the universe
Benoît Mandelbrot, R.I.P.
Big questions
Russia’s new secret weapon
Real men cry
iPad nemesis
Against hipsters
Decorative gourd season
Old paintings, new tech
The Sound of Science (video)
2010 Ig Nobel winners
Days with Tony Curtis
Margaret Atwood (video)
Construction crew food truck
Billy Collins on poetry
Today’s poem
Maps of Europe
New-found Lucian Freud
National Punctuation Day
Eat, love, pray for it to end
How fast can we run?
Supermarket Viagra
Why do we like chillies?
Jon Stewart’s March
Are video games art?
Defending football
Judge Judy (half speed)
ELIZA is alive and well
Can an e-book be burnt?
Kill a fly, kill a man
Write less badly
The idea of a yard sale
Killed for a bite mark
Koran burning
The Czar’s lost gold hoard
Creepy crawlies
Footage fetish
Ten psychology myths
Blair’s deplorable memoirs
Bach as anti-depressant
Visa-free travel
The thorium solution
3-D is dying, again
Kodak color movie, 1922
Love me, love my books
Against beach reading
John Baldessari
What they read in Gitmo
Boeing 747 gets a paint job
Bernard Knox R.I.P.
Margaret Drabble in Florence
The Mind-Set List
Stalking the wild typo
Demand a crunchier outside!
Dictating a masterpiece
Horse plays with ball
Does coffee work?
Hugo Chávez’s mental health
Obama’s economic advisors
Scariest airports
Evolutionary psych (video)
If Cheney plotted 9/11...
Hitchens on his cancer
Know the law!
Graham Greene
Verb that noun!
Cosmetic-counter makeover
Off the beaten canon
Text phobic Americans
Trivial WikiLeaks
“State of the art”
Niall Ferguson
Revenge of Conrad Black
Greek railway system
Rupert Murdoch’s paywall
Memorizing Milton
Recent human evolution
Fidel Castro, opinionator
Auschwitz dance video
Costanza’s Steinbrenner
Molehill mountains
We need a Tech Sabbath
Harvey Pekar R.I.P.
Eadweard Muybridge
Feeling Facebook fatigue?
Hopper’s Nighthawks
Online dating: Yuk! (video)
A gentler Conrad Black
Germany should win
Big, scary 15% reds
Making fun of Indians
Beryl Bainbridge R.I.P.
Harold Bloom
Christopher Hitchens is ill
2010 Bulwer-Lytton results
Noisy Louvre
Pierre Hadot R.I.P.
Watermelon art
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Beauty deception
Penn Jillette interview
My iPad day
José Saramago R.I.P.
Competition for Kindle
Airbrushed history
Where Americans move
Good-bye to New York City
Women in science
Kafka and the oil spill
And now, Lady Gaga Studies
Mysteries of the first humans
Being grumpy is good for you
How many have died in Iraq?
Yosemite: a Chinese view
Artists are crazy
Artists’ day jobs
Pacific islands not shrinking
That almost perfect game
Now, salt hysteria
Open wine bottle with shoe
France’s plot against Germany
Louise Bourgeois R.I.P.
Business card history
The armchair issue
Junk food addiction
Existentialist fireman
Really stupid questions
Black Eyed Peas tour
$100 million Picasso?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The case for men’s studies
Cultural geneaology
Your new college graduate
Food fashion
Voter coercion in Britain
Walker Percy’s weird book
Books on Paris
Red ink grades
Polanski loses support
Helping to save Newsweek
Who invented the cocktail?
Chopin too girlie?
Grandad’s beautiful mind
Cleaning oiled birds
Our Neanderthal ancestry
That zany Moammar Gadhafi
Talking with Tony Judt
Chinglish howlers
PIGS and euros
Voyager spacecraft playlist
Picasso in order
Fake Picasso
Lit theory influence (none)
Al-Qaeda needs suicide bombers
More volcano fallout
Alan Sillitoe R.I.P.
“Imam for Peace”
John Cage on a game show
Reverse graffiti
Volcano sunsets
Fun with old Soviet statues
Books and their covers
Air pollution shortage
“Freshly ground black people”
Best-dressed women in fiction
Peak everything
The new KFC sandwich
Disaster porn
Don’t change that password!
China’s tacky buildings
Women Don’t Want Macho Men
Bullshit artists
World’s ugliest statues
Smart girls drink more?
Rude audiences
Leave the Pope alone
Cross-cultural madness
The price of a woman’s egg
Writers’ working methods
Pierre Boulez at 85
Prozac for your dog
More bullshit news (video)
Karl Stead, winner
Bullshit news
Microbrew label art
Was Lincoln gay?
Grumpy Robert Hughes
Wolfgang Wagner R.I.P.
The ethical dog
Checking into prison
Leif Ove Andsnes
Green selfishness?
Four stories through history
Honey trap
Academic snobs
Computer games
Mommybloggers
Sartre and Beauvoir film
Peculiar be thy name
In praise of jet lag
Daily world air traffic
Jonathan Safran Foer
Darwin and Harlequin
Hamas traitor
Future of criticism
J. Edgar Hoover gossip
Whale rebellion
Martha C. Nussbaum
Climate science matters
Defining conservatism badly
Male/female age preferences
Sex fantasies good for you
Drunk Kerouac interviewed
New Zealand’s volcanoes
The Dresden tragedy
Descartes poisoned?
Incendiary blog post
Why Orwell endures
Chinese love consultants
Faulkner and plantation diary
Idiotic winter drivers
The Olympics? Why bother?
Duped Lévy
NYC restaurant critics
Old cars (watch to end!)
Classical top ten
Korean electric grid
The Hitler testicle joke
Renoir’s wine glasses
Writers who hate writers
Danger and memory
Last Neanderthals
Food porn
“Blonde warrior princesses”
Meeting John Wayne
Earl Wild R.I.P.
Tourists’ dumb questions
Hypochondriacs
What ailed Darwin?
George Leonard R.I.P.
P.C. never died
Blaming God for Haiti
Terry Castle
France owes Haiti
Dan Dennett on religion
Travel and smell
Grammar Can Be Fun
Wind-up laptop
Audiophoolery
Elite young pianist
The cursing mommy cooks
British book burning
Kenneth Noland R.I.P.
Stop saying that!
Smart dolphins
3-D cave paintings
Eadweard Muybridge
God-loving linguists
The origin of dogs
TNR’s favorite WikiLeaks
Skeptical fun (video)
Building Stonehenge
Vikings in America
The Wiki-obvious
Atlantic’s Best Books 2010
Cranky Saul Bellow
The coin toss
Al-Qaeda in Macy’s parade
Pilgrims vs the TSA
Look up to him
100% CGI imagery
Autistic philosophers
Kryptos
Cars that drive themselves?
Marrying beneath her
NYC as nudgocracy
30 airports in 30 days.
Henryk Gorecki R.I.P.
Two Indias
Stop Berlusconi, please!
What makes countries corrupt
Vegivores
Suckiness of a reviewer
Why philosophy?
Maps for the 21st century
War on pot
Signs for sanity and/or fear
In twenty-five words or less
Richard T. Gill R.I.P.
Useful dog tricks (video)
Why inflight meals have no taste
Turn off your cellphone?
Hockney’s iPad art
Marjorie Morningstar
McDonald’s makeover
The past was in color
Scale of the universe
Benoît Mandelbrot, R.I.P.
Big questions
Russia’s new secret weapon
Real men cry
iPad nemesis
Against hipsters
Decorative gourd season
Old paintings, new tech
The Sound of Science (video)
2010 Ig Nobel winners
Days with Tony Curtis
Margaret Atwood (video)
Construction crew food truck
Billy Collins on poetry
Today’s poem
Maps of Europe
New-found Lucian Freud
National Punctuation Day
Eat, love, pray for it to end
How fast can we run?
Supermarket Viagra
Why do we like chillies?
Jon Stewart’s March
Are video games art?
Defending football
Judge Judy (half speed)
ELIZA is alive and well
Can an e-book be burnt?
Kill a fly, kill a man
Write less badly
The idea of a yard sale
Killed for a bite mark
Koran burning
The Czar’s lost gold hoard
Creepy crawlies
Footage fetish
Ten psychology myths
Blair’s deplorable memoirs
Bach as anti-depressant
Visa-free travel
The thorium solution
3-D is dying, again
Kodak color movie, 1922
Love me, love my books
Against beach reading
John Baldessari
What they read in Gitmo
Boeing 747 gets a paint job
Bernard Knox R.I.P.
Margaret Drabble in Florence
The Mind-Set List
Stalking the wild typo
Demand a crunchier outside!
Dictating a masterpiece
Horse plays with ball
Does coffee work?
Hugo Chávez’s mental health
Obama’s economic advisors
Scariest airports
Evolutionary psych (video)
If Cheney plotted 9/11...
Hitchens on his cancer
Know the law!
Graham Greene
Verb that noun!
Cosmetic-counter makeover
Off the beaten canon
Text phobic Americans
Trivial WikiLeaks
“State of the art”
Niall Ferguson
Revenge of Conrad Black
Greek railway system
Rupert Murdoch’s paywall
Memorizing Milton
Recent human evolution
Fidel Castro, opinionator
Auschwitz dance video
Costanza’s Steinbrenner
Molehill mountains
We need a Tech Sabbath
Harvey Pekar R.I.P.
Eadweard Muybridge
Feeling Facebook fatigue?
Hopper’s Nighthawks
Online dating: Yuk! (video)
A gentler Conrad Black
Germany should win
Big, scary 15% reds
Making fun of Indians
Beryl Bainbridge R.I.P.
Harold Bloom
Christopher Hitchens is ill
2010 Bulwer-Lytton results
Noisy Louvre
Pierre Hadot R.I.P.
Watermelon art
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Beauty deception
Penn Jillette interview
My iPad day
José Saramago R.I.P.
Competition for Kindle
Airbrushed history
Where Americans move
Good-bye to New York City
Women in science
Kafka and the oil spill
And now, Lady Gaga Studies
Mysteries of the first humans
Being grumpy is good for you
How many have died in Iraq?
Yosemite: a Chinese view
Artists are crazy
Artists’ day jobs
Pacific islands not shrinking
That almost perfect game
Now, salt hysteria
Open wine bottle with shoe
France’s plot against Germany
Louise Bourgeois R.I.P.
Business card history
The armchair issue
Junk food addiction
Existentialist fireman
Really stupid questions
Black Eyed Peas tour
$100 million Picasso?
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
The case for men’s studies
Cultural geneaology
Your new college graduate
Food fashion
Voter coercion in Britain
Walker Percy’s weird book
Books on Paris
Red ink grades
Polanski loses support
Helping to save Newsweek
Who invented the cocktail?
Chopin too girlie?
Grandad’s beautiful mind
Cleaning oiled birds
Our Neanderthal ancestry
That zany Moammar Gadhafi
Talking with Tony Judt
Chinglish howlers
PIGS and euros
Voyager spacecraft playlist
Picasso in order
Fake Picasso
Lit theory influence (none)
Al-Qaeda needs suicide bombers
More volcano fallout
Alan Sillitoe R.I.P.
“Imam for Peace”
John Cage on a game show
Reverse graffiti
Volcano sunsets
Fun with old Soviet statues
Books and their covers
Air pollution shortage
“Freshly ground black people”
Best-dressed women in fiction
Peak everything
The new KFC sandwich
Disaster porn
Don’t change that password!
China’s tacky buildings
Women Don’t Want Macho Men
Bullshit artists
World’s ugliest statues
Smart girls drink more?
Rude audiences
Leave the Pope alone
Cross-cultural madness
The price of a woman’s egg
Writers’ working methods
Pierre Boulez at 85
Prozac for your dog
More bullshit news (video)
Karl Stead, winner
Bullshit news
Microbrew label art
Was Lincoln gay?
Grumpy Robert Hughes
Wolfgang Wagner R.I.P.
The ethical dog
Checking into prison
Leif Ove Andsnes
Green selfishness?
Four stories through history
Honey trap
Academic snobs
Computer games
Mommybloggers
Sartre and Beauvoir film
Peculiar be thy name
In praise of jet lag
Daily world air traffic
Jonathan Safran Foer
Darwin and Harlequin
Hamas traitor
Future of criticism
J. Edgar Hoover gossip
Whale rebellion
Martha C. Nussbaum
Climate science matters
Defining conservatism badly
Male/female age preferences
Sex fantasies good for you
Drunk Kerouac interviewed
New Zealand’s volcanoes
The Dresden tragedy
Descartes poisoned?
Incendiary blog post
Why Orwell endures
Chinese love consultants
Faulkner and plantation diary
Idiotic winter drivers
The Olympics? Why bother?
Duped Lévy
NYC restaurant critics
Old cars (watch to end!)
Classical top ten
Korean electric grid
The Hitler testicle joke
Renoir’s wine glasses
Writers who hate writers
Danger and memory
Last Neanderthals
Food porn
“Blonde warrior princesses”
Meeting John Wayne
Earl Wild R.I.P.
Tourists’ dumb questions
Hypochondriacs
What ailed Darwin?
George Leonard R.I.P.
P.C. never died
Blaming God for Haiti
Terry Castle
France owes Haiti
Dan Dennett on religion
Travel and smell
Grammar Can Be Fun
Wind-up laptop
Audiophoolery
Elite young pianist
The cursing mommy cooks
British book burning
Kenneth Noland R.I.P.
Stop saying that!
Smart dolphins
At The New Yorker
Paul Kurtz, R.I.P.
Die, die, DIY!
In defense of emoticons
Sex lives of conjoined twins
Online dating
On bullying
A novel in 30 days
Was Jesus married?
Lascaux’s Picassos
Most annoying sound
Foodie idioms
Art heist in Rotterdam
Hayek and Friedman
Genovese and Hobsbawm
Is “whom” history?
Chocolate and Nobel prizes
Useful punctuation marks
To win a MacArthur
Weird names in Hong Kong
Consider the spork
No to Michelin!
Science as art
Barry Commoner, R.I.P.
Varieties of Amazon critic
Stop pagination now
Another Mona Lisa?
Sport and politics
‘Iron man’ from space
Bionic book worm
To play a Strad
If Michael Sandel ruled
Letter to a son
On comics criticism
Biblioclasm
Scruton and the right
Art forgery 101
Open-source lexicography
Kerouac’s rise and fall
Crutch words
Darlings of the right
Meeting Naipaul
Web-addicted writers
Chinese sarcasm
Von Karajan was right
Psychology of swearing
Ellis v. Wallace
Evolution theory’s crisis
Bookworms of China
Fake reviews
Life of a fact-checker
Promiscuous reading
Remembering S.J. Gould
Reviews for sale
How Trotsky was killed
Monopolies for monks
String players
Ecstasies of parking
Botched restoration
Locations of F-bombs
Car buying
ElvisLit
Writing a bad review
Professor of burps
Rise of the nebbish
At home with Hitler
Lederhosen on fire
Helen Gurley Brown, R.I.P.
Is football wrong?
Modern economics is sick
Who wrote teen fiction?
Ten most difficult books
Starbucks of ancient America
Robert Hughes, R.I.P.
The lost art of postcard writing
How to win more medals
The cult of busyness
The Immortality Project
Autobiography of a condom
Spanx on steroids
Baudelaire’s Bordeaux
Tolkien and technology
Plagiarism in Europe
Is the Iliad non-fiction?
Writing for money
My night with éiûek
How to write erotica
Alexander Cockburn R.I.P
Space stinks
Theoretical machines
Dawkins and his mail
Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky
Abolish Law Reviews!
Words from India
Warm emotions
Brooklyn as mecca
Truthinessology
Traffic in Lagos
Letter from Ted Hughes
Thanks for killing my novel
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The case for coffee
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Is philosophy literature?
F-bomb at The New Yorker
Amis’s flick-knife
Writer’s panic
Nora Ephron, R.I.P.
“Nigerian” scammers
Secret of a mystery
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French bookstores
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God and the economy
Task of the critic
Cost of white t-shirt
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Decline of porn
History of tattoos
No brain, no mind
Guide to book tours
Virtues of daydreaming
Coffee kills monkeys
Chicken, world conqueror
Amis in Brooklyn
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Economics and happiness
Context of language
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Poetry of the Taliban
Lunch with Krugman
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On literary interviews
Typo at UT Austin
The multiverse
In praise of audiobooks
Scaling the Great Wall
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Writing flash fiction
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
TED balks
World won’t end
Birth of the taco
Maurice Sendak, R.I.P.
Did Stalin murder Lenin?
Grumpiest living writers
Breasts
Non cogito, ergo sum
God as friend
Against luxury cinema
Greatest literary feuds
Inside a reporter’s bag
International SF
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?
History of book reviews
Too ugly for TV?
Let’s do lunch
Bathroom muse
Swimming helmsman
“Hopefully”
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Life without sex
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Moving rock
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From exile to everywhere
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Why finish books?
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Tireless, tirelessly
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Why not elect scientists?
Shelf-conscious
On female conductors
Judging book covers
Canon fodder
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Literally?
What the Dickens
French parents rule
Charles Murray at home
Life of couch potato
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Sad saga of Little Albert
On bowling alone
To my old master
Homepage for Philosophy
Fukuyama on financial crisis
Putin’s reading list
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Sword swallowing
Freeman Dyson
Mystery of poetry editing
Crime-fighting Mozart
How to write
Before Big Bang
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Mathematics of serial killing
Hockney landscapes
Index of pretentiousness
God and football
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Wealthy shoplifters
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How to be a dictator
Meet the Gee-Bees
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Double-blind violin test
Center of the universe
Joy of quiet
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When China rules
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Philosophy of food
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Country with no books
Vendler v. Dove
Beer me, sommelier
A bankable title
Right and wrong
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Internet Compulsion Disorder
History of recipe cards
Microeconomics of poetry
Immigration hack
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Stalin’s daughter
Flap Rules
Free to be fat
Opera house effect
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Data furnace
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Turkeys in America
Authors and their books
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Private Eye at 50
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Atheism and morality
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Bad for K
Shakespeare, gangster
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Editing Beckett
Quitting Facebook
Keynes v. Hayek
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Marx and prostitutes
Longhand is better
Drink cheap wine
Stalking Derrida
Cover your ears!
“Last place aversion”
A sister’s eulogy
Know your wine!
Illustrating the Joy of Sex
Hacked!
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Future of punctuation
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Life of a journal
Best time and place
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The Steve Jobs I knew
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Book of illusion
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Noses know it
How to stop e-mail
Loving chain stores
Awesome
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MFA sham rankings
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Meme weaver
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Hemingway’s letters
Secret life of pronouns
Memorializing 9/11
Confessions of a typomaniac
Against Comic Sans
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Who discovered E=mc2?
Hurricane lit
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Technology and music
Beauty justifies wealth
Cartooning for The New Yorker
See like a bee
Finding fake reviews
French mind games
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Megatrends that weren’t
Write faster
Elusive big idea
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Price of publishing
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God’s Blog
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Best on booze
Writers and prisons
Afghanistan in Hipstamatic
An Uh, Er, Um Essay
Spying on Northrop Frye
Largest library in history
Iced coffee and tea
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The most misused word
Recycling butts?
Pope’s Tweets
Shakespeare for Twitter
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Just say ‘non’
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Wittgenstein’s camera
Pollock’s physics
On acknowledgments
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Happy Birthday: ‘Catch-22’
Cy Twombly, R.I.P.
Worn-out words
What does Newt know?
Museum Barbie
Free Frida!
Ancient PTSD
Nobel-winning sentences
Skinny Marilyn myth
A Rawlsian Egypt?
Author-on-author insults
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Sarah Palin, the poet
The Leary trove
Chug for growth
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Enigmatic René Magritte
Lessons from Libya?
Babies prefer Picasso
How to do a Grayling
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Reasons against E-books
Please wash your hands
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No jokes, please
Was Neruda poisoned?
Smurfs are bad people
Mao’s ghostwriter
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If Eagleton ruled the world
Dirty Talk of the Town
Writers and islands
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Faces of philosophy
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Why the Arab Spring
Hitchens’s cancer essays
Translations lost
Return of Odysseus
The Baffler is back
Why animals play
Most will be missed
(Fake) Prison diary of DSK
Picasso’s erotic code
Feminism and fiction
What happened
Today’s Steinbecks?
Logical punctuation
Kerouac’s house
Perverse incentives
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Tina Brown
Book culture
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Canon fodder
Norman Mailer’s apartment
Covering Lolita
Buying expensive wine?
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Legal untruths
Ian McEwan’s reading list
Lost Wittgenstein
Apprentices and interns
World’s best blogger?
Poetry as a career
Holy Warcraft
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Origins of language
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Lyudmila Ulitskaya
The God particle
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LOL
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Most incredible cookbook
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Worst jobs in history
Noise kills
Clowns: a eulogy
Airport carpets
Tasting durian
Da Vinci’s slip-up
Harvard boys go nation-building
Young pundits
Is God making you fat?
Genetic typo
A cure for writer’s block
Photos of the Western Frontier
Tarzan goes global
Simone de Beauvoir revival
Fukushima is not Chernobyl
Margin notes?
German plagiarist
Schlesinger’s Papers
Al-Qaeda beauty tips
End of the road
Art of police report
Daisy Buchanan's mansion
David Broder, R.I.P.
Confessions of a book slob
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Paris and Chagall
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A Seminar With Gadhafi
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Ken at 50
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House of pain
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Do islands make us fat?
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Heart-shaped history
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Pancho Villa’s finger
Céline, absolute bastard
Why are professors liberal?
A night with Salinger
Amis Out, Tóibín in
NFL: No more Roman numerals
Why Tunis? Why Cairo?
Brain Sparks Bright Ideas
Leon Uris, Macho Man
Egyptian antiquities looted
Milton Babbitt, R.I.P.
Tyranny of the alphabet
Mona Lisa, Muslim?
Reynolds Price, R.I.P.
Amazing abs
Hockney’s iPad
Melville and Hawthorne
Wilfrid Sheed, R.I.P.
Dogs in cars
Michelin sham
Heart of toilet roll
John Gross, R.I.P.
Darwin’s rape whistle
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American tragedy
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Tears and signals
Indian rat-catchers
Modern novels
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Study vs. study
Freud, by Bacon
Unmasking food critics?
No more Kodachrome
Discover Britten!
China will be next
Stalin’s super-warriors
White swans of Xmas
Wallace and Wittgenstein
Was Christmas German?
Evolutionary cannibalism
Alcohol myth
Top 14 astronomy pictures
Schama on Arianna
Philosophy of wine
How to write a student paper
Liu Xiaobo’s empty chair
Real da Vinci code
Out of the gutter
Idaho loves food stamps
John Cage’s 4'33"
Nota Bene
Meeting Naipaul
Web-addicted writers
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Von Karajan was right
Psychology of swearing
Ellis v. Wallace
Evolution theory’s crisis
Bookworms of China
Fake reviews
Life of a fact-checker
Promiscuous reading
Remembering S.J. Gould
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