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Henry James shows that Wellesley grads who try to save the world by becoming self-righteous lawyers are a long American tradition... [more] Anthropologist Colin Turnbull was smart and charismatic, but often cruel and distant — a scholar devoted to social justice yet blind to his own power... [more] Aristophanes refers to the male member as a tip, neck, finger, flesh, skin, biggy, sinew, muscle, pole, ram, oar, beam, punt-pole, bolt, spit-roast, axe, club, soup-ladle... [more] McSweeney's is like the old Partisan Review without the politics, says Michael Wolff. Or maybe it's Partisan Review meets Friends... [more] George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were foul-weather friends, united only by a common distaste for the philistine Englishman... [more] Time travel to the future? That's easy, says physicist Paul Davies. It's actually been done already. Traveling to the past is the tough part... [more] Jacques Derrida has worked out a set of ideas about faith that Christians can ignore only at their own peril, says Bruce Ellis Benson... [more] Why does a mirror reverse left and right, but not up and down? Why does it treat its vertical and horizontal axes differently? Jim Holt wonders... [more] Faulkner was right: those who can, do. Those who cannot, and who suffer because they cannot, learn to write about it, says Czech novelist Josef Skvorecky... [more] Biographers have become more acute and nuanced as critics, no longer treating the relation between life and art in a simple way, says Jay Parini... [more] Anti-Communists on the left found a noble middle ground between the violation of civil liberties and softness towards tyranny, says Ronald Radosh... [more] Willfully unaware of the facts of her life, music fans persist in thinking that Billie Holiday felt their pain, says Francis Davis... [more] Is philosophy a subject that judges must learn? In some crucial sense yes, and in some practical sense no, says Ronald Dworkin... [more] Soren Kierkegaard is the man we need to listen to today, when relations are so shaky between leaders and led, press and people, corporations and consumers... [more] George W. Bush has a bad habit of saying things that don't mean anything. So why hasn't it cost him public support? Steven Pinker explains... [more] "Did you actually like that?" a man asked some students after a Homi Bhabha lecture. "It was great!" they replied. "Well," he challenged, "then what did he say?"... [more] "I never liked Richard Avedon's photos of Samuel Beckett," says John Minihan. "I think they're cold. In my photos I tried to show the man"... [more] That either Bush or Gore holds the "high moral ground" is dubious, yet their claims to this phantom venue dominate the campaign, says Joan Didion... [more] Philosopher Peter Singer wants to be on the side of the weak and poor against the rich and mighty. It's just one of his many, uh, novel ideas... [more] Everyone may think that utopia is an idea whose time has gone. But history has a nasty way of overtaking you just as you bid it farewell... [more] All good science leaves open a window of doubt, and in that crack of uncertainty we cram ESP, ghosts, UFOs, cell phones that cause cancer, God... [more] Despite the late outpouring of love for Saul Bellow, there is a hard truth to swallow: the days of the Great Jewish Novel are over... [more] If Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were writing The Vital Center today, he would tone down the rhetoric. There is too much hortatory lushness... [more] Living in North Africa shaped the life and work of Paul Bowles in ways that we are just starting to grasp, says Brian Edwards... [more] ... [more] A world with no booksellers is hideous to contemplate, writes Jason Epstein... [more]. Jonathan Yardley finds the romance of the bookstore overrated. As philosophy becomes more scientific, there's reason to celebrate artists like Milton Babbitt and John Cage, whose work preserves a sort of visionary philosophy... [more] In today's world, Ben Franklin would be a techno enthusiast, arguing for the Internet and biotech, says David Brooks... [more] The animal rights movement wants to elevate the status of animals. But contrary to its best intentions, it may turn out to degrade humans... [more] Tom Wolfe was shocked when his attack on The New Yorker was treated as a crime against humanity... [more] The real problem with Wolfe is that he recycles himself, says Judith Shulevitz. Thomas Wolfe remains a yokel despite his learning. He can't escape the ideas he brought from home, says Elizabeth Hardwick... [more] Beauty and Justice. We love them both, but do they actually help and support each other? Elaine Scarry believes that they do... [more] For a young country, Canada has so many novelists oddly fascinated by history. Fred Stenson is case in point... [more] Far from being a fascist, the young Richard Wagner was in fact a utopian socialist, argues Bryan Magee... [more] In the past two decades, we've met Soloflex man, Calvin Klein man, and WWF wrestlers on steroids. Call it the Buff Revolution... [more] For Serbian writer Jasmina Tesanovic, keeping a diary is a political act. But she also does it because she's helpless... [more] James Atlas wanders into the realm of ideas, but he doesn't seem to know that he's in it, or how to find his way out... [more] ... [more] ... [still more] When John Ashbery is on, he is clever and charming. When he's off, he writes oblique poems that sound like nonsense... [more] Nothing much of great interest in the way of urban fabric or form is being proposed these days, laments Nathan Glazer... [more] At a time when conformity to the winds of fashion is passed off as subversion, Roger Kimball is a truly radical figure... [more] Reading Philip Roth, you can't help think of all the nice books that merely confirm the politics of right-thinking people... [more] ... [more] Kenan Malik argues that we are more than just evolved beings. Language and culture turned our brains into minds... [more] ... [excerpt] Frank Kermode says that the English short story is now mostly an American form. Just look at the work of Raymond Carver... [more] Philosopher George Santayana was also an eclectic man of letters, with a gift for vivid essays, poetry, novels, literary criticism... [more] "Men can only be happy," said George Orwell, "when they don't assume the object of life is happiness." That's how saints talk... [more] Reading soccer star David Beckham's memoir is a bit like munching your way dutifully through yard upon yard of muslin... [more] If you ever hope to write like Stephen King, try to become a tall Maine resident named Stephen King. Avoid getting hit by a van... [more] Marguerite Duras has all her life sought love and affection, using the only language she had for it: the poetry of sex... [more] ... [more] For years, Martin Gardner has trained his vision on every kind of science: the good, the bad, and the bogus... [more] Norman Lebrecht must confess to a dirty little habit before the tabloids get wind of it and ruin him: he collects postcards... [more] Rather like Graham Greene, Gloria Emerson captures the feel of places relegated by other journalists to the status of lost worlds... [more] Frances Stonor Saunders knows which cultural projects got CIA money in the Cold War. But does she know if the CIA got what it paid for?... [more] Some anthropologists did secretive work for the CIA in the 1950s. And they may still be doing so today, reports David Price... [more] Amnesty International has reached deep into the heart of Africa, deep beyond the cities of Africa, deep into the people of Africa, reports Jonathan Power... [more] Was Pablo Picasso a Cold Warrior for the Evil Empire? Was he a weapon in the arsenal of Stalin's culture czar, Andrei Zhdanov?... [more] Modern medicine has made little progress since the butchery of Victorian times. Surgery and drugs are still crude. But now that the genome is mapped... [more] Literature has hit a dull patch, so a bunch of young writers have banded together as the New Puritans and produced a manifesto... [more] Welcome to the Slamdome: a world of smoky bars where poets are the brawlers and the crowd lusts for word blood... [more] "I'm happy to carry people from realism to science fiction and back," says Ursula K. Le Guin. "If I'm a stepping stone, walk on me"... [more] Nobel scandal? It seems that a member of the Swedish Academy is both translator and advisor to this year's laureate, Gao Xingjian... [more] Philosopher Roger Scruton has long been the target of criticism and abuse from the left. But his new book has won him some unlikely allies... [more] For fifty years, Sai Baba has been seen as India's most famous and mighty holy man. But he may just be a sex maniac on an ego trip... [more] Someone should have informed art critic and general smart-arse Robert Hughes that it's bad form to tell volunteer firemen where to shove a tuna... [more] Patrick Tierney's sensational claim that U.S. scientists started a genocidal epidemic in the Amazon is false, says John Tooby... [more] The New Yorker replies. Fingerprints: everyone knows that no two are alike, but no one has ever proved it. Just how reliable is fingerprinting? ... [more] The Holocaust has been made to seem trivial. Its horrors are an integral part of American infotainment, says Detlef Junker... [more] The Dead Sea Scrolls continue to bring Jews and Christians closer together. It now appears that Jesus Christ styled himself after a messiah named Menahem... [more] We all know that English is fast becoming the global language. Or do we? The spread of English won't happen the way we expect it to... [more] More art house films are made each year than anyone could ever want to see. So why do we bemoan the decline of small-scale cinema?... [more] Hacktivism is a term that refers to the politics of the geek world, a covert attack on the growing political power of tech CEOs... [more] Linda Waite believes marriage is good for you, and she's got numbers to prove it. Can a social scientist succeed where moralists have failed?... [more] Three women have won the Nobel chemistry prize, compared to 129 men. Does this give us a true view of women's abilities in science?... [more]. Cambridge University is looking at the problem. Updike, Bellow, Roth: the mighty phallocrats of American letters were supposed to be past it, packed off to rest homes. But look, says Charles McGrath... [more] "Am I able to write while on a book tour? Are you kidding? I can't even eat. Do you know what an author tour is?" asks Kazuo Ishiguro... [more] Was Beethoven's anguish the simple result of lead poisoning? Scientists have found high levels of the metal in strands of the composer's hair... [more] Cannibalism hardly raised any eyebrows, but when Jared Diamond talked of circumcision with New Guinea friends, they were horrified... [more] The Hispanicization of U.S. society? More and more, we're hearing a strange tongue called Spanglish, a.k.a. McLengua... [more] "Well, what do you want? To do some nudes?" asked Marilyn Monroe. A pretty good idea, he thought... [more] So-called shock art is in fact the safest, least daring kind of art that anyone can make in today's art world, says Lynne Munson... [more] Gore Vidal's mother's anatomy made giving birth a difficult task. He came out fairly squashed in the process... [more] Would you settle for a lower income if in return you could be assured that others were making even less than you? "Yes" seems a spiteful answer, but... [more]. NYT Mag special on spending. When a Polish Jew spoke at an emotional seminar in the squalor of Gaza, a faulty translation of his speech nearly caused a riot... [more] Few scientists believe that we have a "theory of everything." But modern physics is basically done, and none knows what the next step should be... [more] It's a miracle, says the exiled Chinese writer Gao Xingjian, who has just won the Nobel Prize for Literature... [more] ... [more] Is the decline of intellect a matter of age, like slowing reflexes and thinning hair? Consider prodigies in math and chess... [more] In Raymond Carver's stories nothing much ever happens at all. But somehow, something somewhere is always going on... [more] Look Homeward, Angel was edited so as to excise 60,000 offensive words on religion, patriotism, and Southern mores. Those words are back... [more] "Choking" sounds like a vague term, but it describes a very specific kind of failure. Panic is something else entirely, says Malcolm Gladwell... [more] Iowa State University Press has shed its nonprofit status and merged with a commercial publishing giant, raising scholarly eyebrows... [more] "I shouldn't lay my ethnicity on a novel when it doesn't warrant it. My sensibility as an Indian writer emerges in ways I can't see," says Vikram Seth... [more] Anthropologists once studied people who eat each other. Now the anthropologists eat each other. They're making a meal of Napoleon Chagnon... [more, plus response] Twenty ways the world could end: asteroid impact, giant solar flare, global war, robots run amok, you wake up and, like wow, it was all a dream... [more] Why do the rich work so hard getting richer if it isn't making them happier and maybe even makes a few crazier? Robert Wright wonders... [more] Thomas Bayes's work on stats has altered our notions of evidence and cause over the last ten years. Not bad for an 18th-century minister... [more] Ethnomathematics is just math from a cultural point of view. But critics fear it means "so long to Euclid, and good-bye to Pythagoras"... [more] Why do we grow old and die? The human life-span has shot up over the past century, despite our ignorance of the underlying biochemistry... [more] Combine the political rage of a Seattle protester with the cultural despair of Hilton Kramer, and you have Morris Berman... [more] Not only did George Orwell get the politics and morals of his century right, he did so unaided, says Chris Hitchens... [more] ... [still more] Onassis and Callas: like bad opera, this story of their dark, sad fate is laborious without being exhilarating... [more] Kazuo Ishiguro drifts between a sense that childhood is lost and a sense that childhood is something we rediscover all too often... [more] In her latest collection of short stories, Alice Walker inserts her political views with all the subtlety of a hurled brick... [more] Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza says that human history, traced through language, matches human history, traced through genes... [more] ... [more] Freud's therapies often left his patients' emotional lives untouched. His saving graces were humor and intelligence... [more] Genius with a dirty mind. How could the composer of Don Giovanni or the great G minor Symphony write letters so vulgar?... [more] ... [more] Bob Dylan saved pop music by showing that rock is capable of chronicling more than dancing, driving, and making out... [more] Politicians, academics, and judges hold so many bad ideas about poverty, responsibility, and race. It's bad news for all of us... [more] A cold, nervy, brittle egoist, with opinions rather than instinct, Virginia Woolf's views on war and her feminism were at best chaotic... [more] How pretty it would be to think bribes and corruption happen only in communist countries. Ha Jin shows us life's not so simple... [more] Bertrand Russell was all for humility, socialism, and science. But he suffered from vanity, loneliness, and a fear of madness... [more] ... [more] ... [still more] William Lloyd Garrison comes to life in one of the most realistic, authentic bios anyone has had the pleasure to read... [more] It was fighting to the death that appealed to Hitler, not victory. The only peace that for him was the peace of the grave... [more] Roger Scruton's view of England is an attempt to dignify dogma and prejudice with long words and circular logic... [more]. In his own words. Just before her scheduled lobotomy, Janet Frame won her nation's highest literary award. They decided to put off the surgery... [more] ... [more] Queen Victoria once asked a comic actor to show how he "did" her. "Very funny," she pronounced when he'd finished. "Don't ever do it again"... [more] How did Sydney, a city not noted even in Australia for elegance or charm, manage to snare that beautiful Opera House?... [more] The grand, sensational, and often grandiose genre that Hector Berlioz made his signature style also propped up his self-image... [more] Because of his views on big time athletics and Bobby Knight, Murray Sperber has been vilified. But it hasn't shut him up... [more] ... [in his own words] For Kingsley Amis, it was hard to tell the difference between making an adult stand for freedom and mere adolescent ego-indulgence... [more] Most of the languages of the world will vanish in the next hundred years. Do we need to cultivate more biolinguistic diversity?... [more] Hubert Burda knows the cultural and business models of Germany's postwar success are obsolete. Germans are hardware people trying to make it in a software world... [more] For an English Ph.D. at Yale, liking literature is a stage that one grows out of. The critic is far superior to those who actually enjoy reading... [more] There will be a market for ebooks, but they'll be for gadgeteers who wear calculator watches and ride solar-powered bikes, snorts Dave Eggers... [more] ... [review] A new era has begun in Serbia, but can those who once backed Milosevic be trusted to help lead the way? Laura Secor wonders... [more] Retributive justice may come to seem merely quaint someday, as modern science discovers the springs of criminality in genes and chemistry... [more] At 98, she's a little old lady with a colossal and unforgiving past. Leni Riefenstahl is both proud and ashamed... [more] Jodie Foster's plans. "People learn from stories in a different way than they learn from generalities. When writing, I start out with jargon and then purge it," says Mary Catherine Bateson... [more] Hardly a small band making a brave stand against patriarchal schools, many scholars in women's studies are well-situated, influential, and very busy... [more] Is the American Midwest a rural paradise and Eden? Or a hard place of factory towns and industry? Artists are struggling to paint its proper image... [more] The flamboyant Oscar Wilde put genius into his life and talent into his work. The reclusive P.G. Wodehouse put it all into his work... [more] Susan Wise Bauer teaches the work of black authors. She picks up black hitchhikers. Her adopted sister is black. And yet something is adrift in her life... [more] The period from 1900 to 1928 was a time of storm and deep stress during which Russian literature recaptured its greatest heights, wrote Isaiah Berlin... [more] For a lone crusader, the Web once promised a return to the days of muckraking. But today's Net types ruined all that with their business models... [more] Martin Heidegger infuses the lexicon of rap music. Hiphop stars are "within the world," never rapping or observing from a distance... [more] Since Alain Ducasse opened his New York restaurant in June, it's been scorned by food critics. They're guilty of truculent ignorance, says Steven Shaw... [more] Shakespeare still unsettles the best of critics. His challenges to liberalism, democracy, and equality have remained radioactive, says Adam Kirsch... [more] Alan Cabal didn't used to think much of Nietzsche, or Jimmy Buffett. Now it all makes sense. Women are easy. He'll pack a .45 and learn French... [offense advisory] Cartoonist Ben Katchor is in touch with the seedy world of today's underground, as well as the Jewish streets of New York in the 1910s... [more] Author Hubert Selby, Jr. thinks of himself as a "scream looking for a mouth." He is the literary godfather of the inner demon... [more] The fall of communism is a story that needs to be told properly. It wasn't about the free flow of capital, but rather the free flow of information... [more] Culture warrior Lynne Cheney is also a feminist who uses popular literary genres to wrestle with serious ethical and political issues, says Elaine Showalter... [more] ... [still more] The rock band Radiohead is now poised to be the one brand and logo that might possibly win over the anti-brand, anti-logo generation... [more] ... [more] ... [still more] How stunning that the universe, for all its complex diversity, can be described with precision and power by a small number of equations... [more] Democrats should let the GOP groan on about rapper Eminem. Parents may be upset, but they don't believe politicians are going to do anything about it... [more] Want equality? Then let's use a lottery to elect leaders and manage society, says Alan Ryan. The ballot box offers only the most feeble kind of equality... [more] Why did Friedrich Hayek, who spent his life studying politics and economics, end his career with a reflection on religion and tradition?... [more] It's easy to poke fun at Oprah's book club, but her impact on the reading habits of the English speaking world rivals that of Samuel Johnson ... [more] Cybernetic eschatology is the label Jaron Lanier gives to our newest totalizing ideology. As with Marxism, it could cause the suffering of millions... [more] The deepest and perhaps sole taboo that yet remains on freedom of speech in the US is any criticism of the press, says Renata Adler... [more] Pity the poor nation-state: too small to compete in a global economy, too big to handle its domestic problems. But it's here to stay... [more] Provincial life is dead. As we laud the end of its repressive conformity, let's not forget the passing of security, self-reliance, and rootedness... [more] Central Europe groans under the weight, not of its history, but of its distorting national myths. The same goes for Greece... [more] Why do memoirs about J.D. Salinger so enrage people, while other authors are remembered with impunity? Judith Shulevitz asks... [more] Salman Rushdie has left London? Good riddance, says Yasmin Alibhai-Brown... [more] London just doesn't spur the imagination, Rushdie explains. Trying to separate the roles played by nature and nurture is like trying to separate the roles played by length and width in shaping a rectangle... [more] Scientists now tell us we deteriorate from birth. We fail to fulfil our embryonic potential. But some of us knew that already, from personal experience... [more] If a novel is to have no plot, says Emily Barton, it must still carry the reader along. Mere moments of fine writing may not always cut it... [more] David Brooks skewers the foibles of intellectual life, yet concludes that it's even better today than it was in the past... [more] Ten books and ninety articles on Arthur Rimbaud appear yearly. A century after his death, one in five French schoolboys identifies with him... [more] ... [yet more] Latin American sociologists write huge tomes that consist of nothing but stats showing disparities of wealth, followed by, "See?"... [more] Leon Wieseltier is right when he says that what makes Lionel Trilling endure is his commitment to the intellect... [more] ... [yet more] The law of Nobrow is simple: "the best that is known and thought" is long gone, and what rules is the Buzz... [more] A spectacle of people making more than ever, at the same time being more broke than ever, is the measure of our age, says Rick Perlstein... [more] When Kazuo Ishiguro's pitch perfect style gives way to plot, it's like the Creamsicle has fallen off and you're left holding the stick... [more] .... [still more] Gilbert Bland is a map slasher, a man guilty of the closest thing to rape that a library can experience... [more] When Princess Eugénie decided that mauve matched her eyes, all of Paris went mad for the new color. Then Queen Victoria wore it... [more] As memoirist, Margaret Salinger is, quite frankly, no Salinger. Much of her hatchet job on Dad is tedious reading... [more] New Labour, Oasis, Damien Hirst, and the Diana cult. What's common to all these irritants? Ultra-democracy, says George Walden... [more] ... [more] ... [still more] Arguing the World takes us back to a vivid time when debates were essential, passions fierce, and intellects first-rate... [more] Was Richard Nixon far worse as both man and president than we ever imagined? John Dean is made to wonder... [more]. Did Nixon have a drug problem? David Stove's notion of reason is austere and pessimistic: the universal madness of the human race is a fact... [more] Errol Flynn, bad actor and worse chap, laid everything, of every sex, within sight. By page 57 of this new bio, he's got VD for the third time... [more] Truth may be strange, but fiction can be freer and more vivid, at least in the hands of a skilled writer like Stephen Harrigan... [more] Bosie is remembered mostly as Oscar Wilde's lover, but he had a later career as an editor, litigant, jailbird, and poet... [more] Dave Eggers has a recipe for success: scorn of elders, smug apoliticality, dismissal of race issues, messianic leanings, stylized bitterness... [more] Clone Jesus Christ? The DNA and the technology are there, says a California outfit. So let's get this Second Coming on the road... [more] Raped or not, Andrea Dworkin is hurting. But sympathy for her pain cannot obscure an ugly lesson behind her story... [more] Did Jean-Paul Sartre profit from the wartime dismissal of a Jewish instructor — none other than Alfred Dreyfus's great-nephew?... [more] James Lovelock was the man who first saw the biosphere as an organism: Gaia. Now he's back with a shocking message for the world's Greens... [more] ... [more] ... [still more] Did scientists start a deadly epidemic among the Yanomami as an experiment, or is the charge merely a politically correct smear?... [more]. Prof. Chagnon's response. True art is hard to grasp, and takes time to understand. Faux art is just coded, so art-world insiders can feel smug and superior... [more] Americans are wildly out of sync with the opinions of their elected leaders on the drug war. Some deep-pocket libertarians are hoping to exploit this gap... [more] When Hitler left the room, it was as if some essential element was suddenly missing: electricity, oxygen, an awareness of being alive... [more] Julian Barnes's persnickety Oxbridge wit declares, "I am idle, well-read, and have esoteric but marvelous trivia at my fingertips"... [more] Twice the work, half the pay, and no one can recall your name: who would ever want to a career as a piano accompanist? ... [more] Has America's reduction in crime come at too great a cost in liberty? And how does race affect whose liberties are violated?... [more] A new study suggests that Arts & Letters Daily readers live longer, are less likely to suffer senile dementia than hoi polloi... [more] Preethi Nair owes heaps to her alter ego, Pru Menon, a fictitious PR exec whom she concocted to get her first novel published... [more] When you write a biography of Gore Vidal, you get to know him well. You discover, for example, his talent for a nice literary spat. With you... [more] ... [more] Judy Blume is the most banned author in the US. "It's about fear," she explains... [more]. Nonsense, says Kathryn Lopez: you want passages like this in a children's library? Consider a black college prof, says John McWhorter, who sits in a trendy restaurant emoting, between forkfuls of gourmet pasta, about how oppressed he is... [more] Evangelicals rank dead last among believers in terms of intellectual stature, says Alan Wolfe. But that's beginning to change... [more] ... Judith Shulevitz's view. New York's latest crop of literary journals is hip, young, and stylishly packaged, with a mix of famous names and diamonds in the rough... [more] He died in the electric chair with flames and smoke rising over his head, nodding back and forth as they switched the power on and off... [more] Shall I compare thee to a sperm whale, sperm? Thou art more tiny and more resolute. And naught diverts thy uterine commute... [more] The return of Proust? In one little corner of our cultural Balkans, the magus of the cork-lined room is making his presence felt... [more] ... [earlier story] ... [still more] As literature slowly drifts from imaginative sympathy toward the cold consolation of fact, many novelists prefer to dabble in journalism... [more] Once upon a time, Harvard stood for excellence. These days it stands for advancement: it's not a place for learning, but a club for rather more pragmatic and vulgar values... [more] With his love for vodka and his courteous recall of strangers' names, Clement Greenberg might have made a better bartender, since few could stand his art criticism... [more] Brenda Maddox has a few rules for her dinner table: don't pray, vomit, talk about cholesterol, your air miles, or discuss e-anything... [more] The time has come to take video games seriously as a new and different art form to shape the aesthetics of the coming century... [more] Every writer must decide whether to be an aesthete or a prophet. Martin Amis needs to realize that he is only an aesthete, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft... [more] Being taken seriously by someone else is like rocket fuel for the spirit, but taking yourself too seriously is like a poison, says Hugh MacKay... [more] The "Old Man" loves his sports and swills beer; he's inarticulate and unfeeling. The New Man? Oh, you know: more like Tony Blair... [more] Sex is at once the most lying and truthful, most alienating and intimate, most fantastic and real thing we do, says Wendy Doniger... [more] Frog-voiced Leonard Cohen has done it all: Prozac, psychedelia, grad school, Scientology, India, the Talmud, You Are My Sunshine... [more] People have the ridiculous idea that if you don't like the "ideological implications" of a science, then you're free to reject it, says Helena Cronin... [more] "What have you done for me lately?" That's the question that Americans ask today of religion and politics alike, writes Alan Wolfe... [more] Music on the Internet isn't all pop tracks courtesy of Napster. There's Viktoria Mullova's sublime Bach Chaconne, or Anner Bylsma's dramatic Cello Suites... [more, with audio links] Thomas Kuhn took a dazzling yet simple idea and tossed it into epistemic stew that was seasoned to almost everyone's taste... [more] ... [still more] Boys need to be tamed and guided, to be sure, but it's in no one's interests that they be feminized, argues Christina Hoff Sommers... [more] When weaker, less erudite minds than Edward Said's imitate his political approach to literary studies, the results are often shallow... [more] The decline of higher ed owes much to the 1970s, that age of grade inflation, lax discipline, and King Kong replacing King Lear in the classroom... [more] Ronald Dworkin's liberalism is rather too smooth, too slick, and too elusive for its own good, says Richard Epstein... [more] Norman Finkelstein wants to let Holocaust victims "rest in peace." His own rage and dogma will hardly help that... [more] ... interview. Hegel was a genius, and so much the worse for philosophy. For when it comes to writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius... [more] Václav Havel drinks, smokes, is fat and conceited, and can't work a stick shift. Worst of all, he prefers whiskey to his own biographer... [more] Joyce Johnson was 21 when she fell for Jack Kerouac. With his brilliant, erratic character, she knew loving him would be hard... [more] The woozy subjectivity of art, the cold neutrality of science: different standards apply. Or do they? There is, we are told, a new fusion of the two... [more] Boys are such a worry. They like action, competition, rough play. They don't talk enough about their feelings. Can't someone rescue them from masculinity?... [more] What makes a great Warhol painting great? It's both tragic and sublime. A Jasper Johns? It changes our pictorial syntax. A Richter?... [more] Academic historians no longer write the most widely read histories of America, nor do they produce the freshest historical theories... [more] "What I'm doing is precisely what Shakespeare was doing in his age," explains Gore Vidal, a man never praised for his humility... [more] Israel's future is not made safer by arm-twisting, boycotts, and unjust humiliation of European states in the pursuit of Holocaust reparations... [more] "I am the star of French literature," slurred literary sensation Michel Houellebecq, drunk. "How would you like to be in my erotic film?"... [more] Is the e-book a way to use the backlist to enrich publishers, or will they lose gems of content in the process? And what do authors get?... [more] Black and white have played a big part in Derek Walcott's life, but it's the colors in between that have defined the man... [more] ... [yet more] ... John Carey's review. The logic of capital, Karl Marx said, was to create a world market and propel science and social progress. Was he a prophet of globalization?... [more] NewsWatch is back, and begins its new life with Trevor Butterworth's look at Renata Adler, a writer oddly immune to her own critical insights... [more] Tunku Varadarajan recalls the vulgar, gaudy grief that swept Britain three years ago on the death of a banal and empty-headed woman... [more]. She was a tool of the elites, says George Walden. Playful, oracular, and Gallic, French theory says language bears no fixed relation to the world. Austere, rigorous, and Teutonic, modern logic agrees... [more] From savage distortions to the most fragile and gentle rendering of the human face, Picasso showed himself perhaps the greatest sculptor of his time... [more] When Elizabeth Abbott researched A History of Celibacy, she was not celibate. After all, you don't need to kill to write about murder. And yet... [more] Matthew Mirapaul's arts@large column gave the most savvy coverage of the new world of Internet art available anywhere. Why was it killed?... [more] Armchair evil: George Bernard Shaw liked Stalin more than Hitler, or even Mussolini. Who cares if millions die, so long as the cause is worthy? ... [more] Usually disappointed by performing arts events, Wendy Lesser was struck three times in a row by the aesthetic equivalent of lightning... [more] Few sports have an image and a reality as far apart as fox hunting does. It's not pomp and privilege; it's an inner struggle against dashed hopes... [more] If you look at it closely, the sequenced genome does not support the idea that there are simple recipes for people. Indeed, it erodes it... [more] Criminologists, the New York Times, activists, and law professors all have spun a distorted history of New York's crime revolution... [more] Whatever you made of his sex, magic, and "vile practices," Aleister Crowley had a gift for getting mentioned in other people's novels... [more] Leo Strauss has been viewed as everything from a dogmatic theocrat to a closet Nietzschean. It's time for a correction... [more] The profoundly human voice of F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories is a joy and a blessing -- fragments of an American sublime... [more] When Zadie Smith is writing well, she is capable of a great deal. But she can also descend into cartoonishness... [more] Harold Bloom was once a good literary critic. He was never right, but at least he was original, says Terry Eagleton... [more] ... [profile] Paris is no longer cheap enough to be a movable feast. Manhattan is for the young of wealthy parents. What would the Beats do today?... [more] Four new books, countless new recordings: is there such a thing as too much Mahler? If so, it is upon us... [more] Cross-dressing, scandalous novels, love affairs: George Sand wrote what she lived and lived what she wrote... [more] The House of Gucci is a nonfiction book, so you can't blame the writer for the melodramatic plot turns... [more] Confession is a practice encouraged by police, priests, psychoanalysts, talk show hosts, and the critics of President Clinton... [more] The Romans thought it was good to watch people being killed. Not just good as public entertainment, but that it made morally better Romans... [more] Biographers enjoy a giddy sense of power. They hobnob with the great, joining in dinner parties they'd never have been invited to in real life... [more] Why does Vermont have more writers per capita than any other state? Cheap overheads and a cool climate, plus an excess dose of literary myth... [more] What might it take at last to get Robert Hughes to become a US citizen? The answer is, seven months back in Australia... [more] Evolutionary Psychology: for many it's the way forward in the study of the mind, while others distrust it. Now they can all get together... [more] Friedrich Nietzsche's whole point is to make you believe that you are a superior being... [more]. N is for Nietzsche, Nazis, Neuroses, Nihilism. A well-meaning person asked Ruth Tapia very slowly, "Do you speak-ee English?" "No," she shot back, "I speak English"... [more] How quaint, noble, and pitiful that we so yearn for the politician who can make a grand and eloquent speech, writes Michael Wolff ... [more] A farmer gawks at rows of corn plants: not only are kernels of corn growing in the ears, but granules of plastic are sprouting in the stalks... [more] "It was perhaps because I knew Penelope Fitzgerald as a teacher that I took as long as I did to see how very good her novels were," says AS Byatt... [more] In his trumpet solos, Louis Armstrong asserted an Olympian identity that thrilled and galvanized his culture, and started something unstoppable... [more] One-Dimensional Man meets 60 Minutes: TV producer Lowell Bergman, played by Al Pacino in The Insider, was Herbert Marcuse's student... [more] The year: 2000. The place: Earth, a desolate planet, its resources depleted. Remember this? It's how the Left twenty years ago imagined the world today... [more] But remember too: Stephen Moore has goofed with his own predictions. The sad saga of the Cherokee Indians shows that judicial decisions alone are not enough to bring about the rule of law, says Justice Stephen Breyer... [more] "There isn't too much originality there beyond the books I translated," says Gregory Rabassa about the later work of Gabriel García Márquez... [more] Norman Mailer fails to see how stupid and wrong he was to confuse the terrifically good time he had in the sixties with universal sexual progress... [more] American Psycho is a satirical reflection on the art of the monologue, yet few of its original critics saw it as other than a deadpan slasher novel... [more] Jeffrey Rosen argues that privacy in America is under grave threat, but his case rests entirely on anecdotes and solemn pronouncements... [more] "Why does she have to be so god damned snooty?" asked one of Mary McCarthy's friends. "Is she God or something?"... [more] Steven Pinker says that his theory of language is not "a sappy attempt to get everyone to make nice and play together"... [more] Given two things that look alike, one of them art and the other a plain object, what's the difference? This is Arthur Danto's obsession... [more] Everything distinctive about the US made socialism a hard sell. Not to mention the pigheadedness of the American Socialists... [more] The pressure to be a happy member of Disney's town of Celebration is enormous. Residents watch each other like hawks... [more] The many eminent graduates of Yale's American Studies program have spent the last half-century turning Old West "traditions" inside out... [more] Strung out on a rich stew of dope and overwork, Anthony Bourdain and his sous-chefs re-enact the opening scene of Apocalypse Now... [more] Greenwich Village bohemians were easy to parody: tin pot revolutionaries, H.L. Mencken called them. Still, at their best... [more] To consider black culture as an entity apart from a so-called mainstream is self-defeating and illogical, argued Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray... [more] It was a bright new era that welcomed student thugs, academic hucksters, and sheer narcissism: Roger Kimball on the impact of the 1960s... [more] Shopping can be a bribe, a pastime, a way to trawl for lovers, an entertainment, a form of education or even worship... [more] The appalling Liberace, that deadly, winking, sniggering, fruit-flavored, chrome-plated, giggling, ice-covered heap of mother love... [more] Babies are tyrants. They're designed by evolution to be irresistible, and their mothers love them: but only up to a point... [more] Dave Eggers pastes together a family tragedy, a bachelor-pad comedy, and a magazine-office morality play, and hopes it all sticks... [more] "Kiss the girl" is a popular game in Kyrgyzstan: a man chases a woman on horseback, trying to catch and kiss her. If he fails, she horsewhips him... [more] For Slobodan Milosevic, it's scarier than NATO: Otpor, a student movement that favors anarchic street theater and mock soccer matches... [more] As a boy, Darius Brubeck sat at the feet of jazz greats like Armstrong, Ellington, and Davis. As an adult, he brought American jazz to South Africa... [more] Guru Rick Haskins offers easy self-help advice: think of yourself as a product to be branded. Some people regard him as a personal savior... [more] The great British literary editor Diana Athill has at last recorded her lifetime of involvement with lovers, writers, and writers who were lovers... [more] Several apostate urban theorists feel that Los Angeles is less an anomaly than an archetype. In fact, they argue, it's the future of urbanism... [more] Ventriloquism is vaudeville's last living art form, and it dearly needs to escape the image of a guy with a puppet telling woodpecker jokes... [more] Every marginalized human group has fought for its liberation. So why not animals? Science, philosophy, and law are all asking that question... [more] Polish literary critic Jan Kott dreamed of writing a great novel that would register the horror of the human condition in the twentieth century... [more] Cyber-guru Jaron Lanier predicts computers will soon be asking all the questions that have vexed Western philosophy... [more] When Mark Twain and U.S. Grant first met, they sat in silence. "Mr. President," Twain said at last, "I seem to be a little embarrassed. Are you?"... [more] It's clearly unethical to probe, prod, or palpate human research subjects without proper oversight. But what if you just want to talk with them?... [more] Literary darling Dave Eggers is launching a book publishing effort under the title McSweeney's Books. It could mean a lot to young writers... [more] Hugh Hefner's support for liberal causes in the sixties brought him into the world of politics. So why is he now being attacked by the left?... [more] If Al Gore wins the election, will Martin Peretz sell The New Republic? Will Peretz want to keep a magazine that will have to criticize his dear friend?... [more] Harlequin is the McDonald's of popular publishing. Its romances are cheap, quick, fatty. Billions and billions are served... [more] Long before Metallica vs Napster, there was Gilbert and Sullivan vs the sheet music pirates. If anything, back then it was harder for musicians... [more] Jane Campion's film The Piano won her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. But did she swipe her ideas from an obscure New Zealand novel?... [more] Chasing a mouse into the depths of his wife's closet, Woody Hochswender discovered her darkest secret: a collection of shoes... [more] The world's oldest man credits tears, pasta, lamb shank, red wine, and quiet. You see, chaps, we could be happy if they'd just let us alone... [more] Psychiatry after Freud is like Russia after Marx, writes Paul McHugh. Trying to rehabilitate Freud is as pointless as trying to revive to communism... [more] ... giving up on therapy. There was a time when any decent magazine editor would protect his star writers from making fools of themselves. Now, to sell a few more copies, Harper's is willing... [more] The rhetoric of cultural genocide treats the survival of small cultures as an absolute good. Is it? What about people, and their life choices?... [more] Thomas Babington Macaulay saw liberty as built up over long agonies like a mass of scar tissue, abuse by abuse and resistance by resistance, says Walter Olson... [more] When a nation replaces the rule of law with rule by lawyers, the only ones who really win are the lawyers. Consider Erin Brockovich... [more] ... earlier story. The ancients thought the good life started with the material life. And right they were: Things 'R' Us is a slogan for freedom and democracy... [more] When a poet determines to write coherently and fails, the result is an accident. When the poem is meaningless on purpose, you know you're reading a Language Poet... [more] William T. Vollmann is cheerfully pro-death. He's for capital punishment, suicide, and voluntary euthanasia. Photos of vivisected frogs don't bother him... [more] Condemned forever to feeling inadequate and under-read, the modern book-lover visits a large bookshop as much in despair as exhilaration... [more] Two photographers took a decade in Africa to record a world soon to be lost. Some book reviews need words; here, pictures are enough... [more] Nymphomania is a term in need of a euphemism — maybe "love addict." But what's addiction? And how much love is too much?... [more] While many on the left can only whine or accuse, John B. Judis resists the bitterness to defend intellectual elites in a robust democracy... [more] Jeffersonian, rather than Pavlovian, democracy might result if television could stir itself to give us broader, deeper political coverage... [more] Early restaurant menus were made incomprehensible on purpose. Pigeon à la crapaudine? A delicious kind of sheep disease... [more] Behavioral economics is making a big impact because it gives us a more vivid and complicated sense of what people want... [more] President Vaclav Havel was a chubby and awkward child, nicknamed chrobak after a type of cumbersome beetle... [more] Tall, dark, and beautiful, with a name that a press agent might have invented, Susan Sontag could have been famous even without her brains... [more] William Randolph Hearst may be called an exuberant juvenile, but that would be a coherent explanation, and for him there was no such thing... [more] The irascible David Stove was a genius of modern philosophy who combined horse sense with the most nimble reasoning this side of Hume... [more] Raymond Carver called it "gravy" — to spend his last ten years "alive, sober, working, loving and being loved by a good woman"... [more] Sir Alec Guinness, the best and most subtle actor the Brits ever gave to the movies, has died at the age of 86... Obits: Guardian ... Times ... NYTimes ... Telegraph memoir Nijinsky's last dance was for rich doctors, bankers, and their ladies: "Now I will dance you the war," he said, "the war which you did not prevent"... [more] Purdy and Eggers, Kiefer and Koons, Gore and Dubya. One of these prophets wants us to please get serious; the other says, Lighten up, dude... [more] The visions, fainting, and frenzy of the St. Vitus dance was an early version of what seems a uniquely modern activity: the rave... [more] When Touretter Amy Wilensky first noticed her ticcing, "It felt familiar, like my head and neck had practiced the move without telling the rest of me"... [more] A falsified teaching dossier, death threats, and a hunger strike. Relax, it's just another university tenure review... [more] American academics look to France for an intellectual high, the rush of radical ideas. Which means they miss today's most interesting French scholars... [more] While the New Yorker never gave up charm and wit, its later engagement with morality and politics made it shiny, fat, serious, and complacent... [more] With conscientious workers and a wired governor, Utah shows that Mormons and the Internet go together like vanilla ice cream and hot apple pie... [more] Chimps regularly use leaves and stems as tools, but can't be taught to flake a flint. There's only one primate that ever achieved that feat... [more] Seymour Martin Lipset tells us Marx may have been right: the coming of an advanced society follows a logic. But the U.S. shows the logic doesn't lead to socialism... [more] Dress it in veneers or stuff it with microchips, the piano remains the perfect embodiment of an idea that can't be improved... [more] Stephen King has excited reader interest in electronic books, but that's only a start... [more]. Random House dips a cautious toe in the e-book pond next year, while a another new e-book publisher is heading straight upmarket. The world's electricity comes from big, dirty power plants. But Thomas Edison's different vision of power generation is about to change that... [more] Who, Joseph Epstein wonders, invented the sandwich of bacon, lettuce, and tomato, slathered in mayo? "That person brought much more happiness into the world than any modern poet"... [more] If you're an Amy, Freya, or Tiffanie, publishers snap you up. If you've the unfortunate name of Nicholas and you're on the wrong side of 70, they become rather cool... [more] For efficient newspaper reading the first rule is: never waste time on stories headlined with may, vow, threat, urge, undertake, or bid... [more] What's wrong with men? Never enough for the men-in-crisis industry, which wants to transform men into sniveling victims, just like women, children, and pets... [more] ... [yet more] ... [still more] When people hear their own religion advocated by someone who crudely and literally believes it, they become uneasy, says Christopher Hitchens... [more] The global-warming debate is by nature a question of science, and yet the combatants tend to be polarized along clear political lines... [more] Walter Benjamin's genius lay in his ability to balance the mystical and the Marxist in an open philosophy of the future, writes Declan Kiberd... [more] September 10, 2000 is the day Julian West awakes from his long nap in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. It's well worth revisiting the book today... [more] News flash: A jury has ordered Hershey's to pay obese Americans $135 billion. "Verdict sends a clear message to Big Chocolate." Company knowingly added nuts... [more] Scholarly publishing has hit a new low with a professor's naïve, confused advocacy of psychic hokum... [more] Julian Barnes wears his brilliant, throwaway cleverness out in the open, like a vibrant rose on his lapel... [more] ... [still more]... [third view] ... [profile]. Joshua Freeman writes in the new labor history style. From the dry world of trade unions, he opens onto a richly layered urban milieu... [more] Richard Powers has a basic mistrust of technology, but his worries never overcome his genuine curiosity about it... [more] Do assassinations make much of a difference in history? For Gandhi, Malcolm X, Yitzhak Rabin: no. But for Caesar, Lincoln, and MLK, Jr... [more] Logos, brands, marketing: tools of mind control? Hardly. It's the almighty consumer who turns brands into superstars or casts them into the gutter... [more] A global free market is good for rich people everywhere, good for poor people in poor countries, but bad for poor people in rich ones... [more] Preserving perfect English is a lost cause. So what? What truly noble quest is not a lost cause?... [more] There's much to be said for drinking songs. Songsters who drink are quite another matter. Take Modest Mussorgsky... [more] The history of restaurants can make delicious reading, but not if it's served up in the empty, jargonized manner of cultural studies, says John Carey... [more] Pale imitators and feeble sequel writers won't leave Jane Austen alone. They should. She's not a mouthpiece for today's sexual politics... [more] The Telegraph calls it the most intellectually nutritious search engine yet devised, while Brill's Best of the Web has named it the Most Highbrow Site on the Internet. Naturally, it's... Aline Baehler's scholarship made her an unusual choice for Vanderbilt, but she was also hired without the consent of her department's leading light... [more] At a time when most young pianists worked on bloodless technique, Van Cliburn was an instinctive, honest, ardent musician... [more] "The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency: 1947 to 1969" was the title of Al Gore's undergrad thesis. Could be all too prophetic... [more] Casanova's dictum may be old advice, but it seldom fails: "Praise the beautiful for their intelligence and the intelligent for their beauty"... [more] The OED is looking for a few good slang words. For the first time in its austere history, it's combing through Marvel Comics, Seinfeld, and South Park... [more] Fearsome critic, teacher, and linguist, the late poet A.D. Hope was a ringing voice in the creation of post-war Australian culture... [more] Suspicions about hundreds of van Gogh fakes have spawned a cottage industry of van Gogh experts. Few of them agree on very much... [more] Arthur Miller is a great writer, but as a political thinker he is confused and as an historian plainly can't get his facts right, says Ronald Radosh... [more] Larry King leans toward his guest, Adolf Hitler, and asks, "Why did you do it?" "Whooo boy!" exclaims the media-savvy Führer. "The $64,000 question!"... [more] George W. Bush would be the first president with an MBA. Not a bright bulb, but we like him 'cause he's the guy who brings beer to the party, says Michael Wolff... [more] Like ripples on a deep and turbulent pool, calculation and other feats of thought are possible only when the chaos is quelled, says Hans Moravec... [more] Will print culture values fade into the past? Hardly. The Web is a neat new delivery device, but it leaves facts and credibility as important as ever to journalism... [more] Curse of the Chinese menu: our lives as consumers are beset with a numbing variety of choices. Except that not to choose would be far worse... [more] Does Jhumpa Lahiri have a tunnel vision of India, as her critics charge? Maybe, she replies, but only because her life in India was tunnel-like... [more] Are you a British subject with a theatrical background? If so, you may qualify to play Hollywood's next sneering, urbane Euro-villain... [more] Geoff Dyer has reader's block. Call it the Mir Syndrome, after the cosmonaut who gave up reading in order to gaze out of the window... [more] What's known to all is scarcely worth knowing: salacious gossip, like all luxuries, is valuable only if