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In Paris one is seldom rushed out of a restaurant or a café. People eat, drink, talk, play cards, or just stare out at the action on the street... [more]
Your mission statement is ready. Those aims and objectives are set. It's time to go for excellence in learning outcomes. Or something like that... [more]
Whatever the current plight — Soviet Union, rising crime, some jihad — our pundits always view the situation as permanent. They should recall TV anchor Kent Brockman... [more]
"The ship tore on," in Moby-Dick's climactic chase. Those words capture the spirit of Herman Melville's powerful, hurtling intellect, writes Eric Gibson... [more]
Men will praise women's poetry for delicacy, sentiment, and piety, qualities they'd despise in a man's. It's a double standard, argues Germaine Greer... [more]
Dwight Macdonald thought there was nothing really wrong with being an amateur. After all, he might have said, look where the professionals have got us... [more]
The healing power of the arts? Oh, what precious twaddle, says Christopher Knight. If you want healing, try crystals or a phone-in psychic... [more]
College speech codes are based on the idea that hurting anyone's feelings is a form of assault. The codes are now being applied in unexpected ways... [more]
Art historians read so many texts they cannot respond to paintings with raw love and tears, says James Elkins. Words, words, words: they make art safe... [more]
Bow to an all-powerful being five times a day, regard the world as evil, remain ignorant of literature, art, and historical debate, and your mind rots, argues Farrukh Dhondy... [more]. Who are the real experts on Islam?
It's not that our lives will be so much transformed by a new economy, says Peter Drucker. We're actually moving into The Next Society... [more]
"I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book" is just one of the jacket blurbs for Toby Young's chronicle of failure... [more]
David Halberstam imagines that his views on U.S. foreign policy reflect a sort of universal consensus he has somehow divined... [more]
The Empire State Building towers over the midtown skyline, a rock-solid sentinel that shimmers with power and glory... [more]
Our leaders pale beside the hyperactive persona of Teddy Roosevelt. As a friend said, "Remember, the President is about six"... [more] ... [more]
Tocqueville gazed with wonder at the spectacle of an energetic America in 1830, a land blessed with natural riches, cursed by slavery... [more]
Emotions have a narrative form. Our grasp of any single emotion requires it to be part of a larger story, says Martha Nussbaum... [more]. Interview.
The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived. Master trickster P.T. Barnum was a prophet of irony... [more]
Modest soldiers, lacking all the celebrity qualities of today's culture, make it easy to forget that they are heroes, that we owe to them our freedom... [more]
Emergent systems: slime mold to ant colonies to urban plans, structure can come up from the bottom, instead of down from the top... [more] ... [more]
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave... [more]
The TLS may have called Prufrock "uninspired" and doubted Chekhov, but it has been accurate and engaging for most of its first century... [more] ... [more]
He was London's Giuliani. Or is it the other way around? And who's writing Bush's speeches? There'll always be a Winston... [more]
The Victorians were not prissy, plodding sticks-in-the-mud. They were friskily go-ahead, slept around, and put spin into politics. Just like us... [more]
Aaron's rod, banana, joystick, baby-maker, roly-poly, thorn in the flesh, sweetmeat, tool: all are terms for a certain member with a mind of its own... [more]
Edith Piaf consorted with thugs and perhaps helped the Nazis. Far from being a fragile waif, she was a woman of massive ego and determination... [more]
Baloney detection. It's not always easy to tell real science from its phony imitators, but Michael Shermer lists some useful tools... [Part 1] ... [Part 2]
Postcolonialist Homi Bhabha, guru of hybridization and other latinate buzzwords, has moved to Harvard. Everyone's thrilled. Almost... [more]
Czeslaw Milosz has had "the ambiguous privilege of knowing and standing more reality than the rest of us." And not always a happy reality... [more]
Economists vs. poets: In their mid-19th century war of ideas, it's the economists who were viewed as the good guys, says David Levy... [more]
Linguistic collateral damage: our speech has been impacted by a war-spawned, nasal-swabbed, ramped-up newspeak, a bunker-buster of words... [more]
Clint Eastwood would just say Heidegger yes, Wittgenstein no, and maybe, if he changed his mind, go back to the library stacks... [more]
Ken Kesey, charismatic writer who built a bridge from beatniks to hippies, mixing acid trips, rock, and fiction, is dead at age 66... [NYTimes] ... [Edge], also RIP Sandy Lehmann-Haupt.
Taliban is a generic word, says Robert D. Kaplan. It's like Wal-Mart. You go into Wal-Mart and you find different products, some good, some bad... [more]
Trying to dictate into a phone at the Vanity Fair Oscar party is bad enough, but when the impatient woman in line behind you is Diana Ross... [more]
Jihad vs McWorld, the war between tribalism and global values, is Benjamin Barber's apt phrase for our current plight... [more]. Another thinker of the moment: Samuel Huntington.
Ernst Gombrich, historian and theorist who argued that artists cannot draw what they see without cultural mediation, is dead... NYTimes, London Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph.
Women walk out, men cheat, trucks don't start, and good people end up dead. Disaster always lurks in the dismal world of country music... [more]
Naïve Stephen Hawking thinks that philosophy is an empty analysis of language, that the universe and our account of it are one and the same... [more]
The Simpsons: sophisticated and vulgar, brainy and populist, gleeful in its assault on our pieties while affirming family and community... [more]
In 10100 years even black holes will be gone: no earth, stars, or atoms, only creeping murmur, and the poring dark. Not a jolly picture... [more] ... [more]
Who today remembers the gas chamber execution of the remarkable Caryl
Chessman? His astonishing story needs retelling... [more]
For Northrop Frye, the Lord's work was thinking and writing beautiful ideas. That this was what Frye liked to do showed how wise the Lord is... [more]
Lewis Carroll's love for little girls was delicate, tortured, and elusive: a strange, terrified erotic passion, both intricate and complicated... [more]
Oprah Winfrey? Compared to the whining, spoiled, conceited snots of the high-art literary world, she's an exquisite, classy lady... Jonathan Yardley ... Alex Beam ... [more]. Chris Lehmann to the defense.
Flaubert in Egypt: he would have liked to travel on a divan, lying down, watching the land, people, cities, and ruins passing by... [more]
Eight hours a day of études only trains a violinist's left-hand fingers, bow arm, and tiny hand muscles. Taste? Well, it's either in you or it isn't... [more]
Science is not a religion. Scientific metaphors are not literal, revealed truth. It's time to rethink science, to rename it, says Mary Midgley... [more]
At its best, boxing can be a ballet with blood, geometry with guile. At its worst, it is fakery, burlesque, cruelty, injustice, exploitation, and death... [more]
So where is Darwinism going in the next 50 years? Ernst Mayr's view is that it will not have to do any going, anywhere: it's already there... [more]
Great English prose stylists of the past, Kipling or Waugh, had an absolute certainty of touch that's now gone. John Keegan mourns its passing... [more]
Ivan Turgenev cared for living, breathing human beings. He knew no
coming apocalypse would end human conflict. Marx, on the other hand... [more]
The meanings of life are too rich for any simple philosophy. We want
at the end to have told a good story, says Mark Kingwell, and made life
worth living... [more]
After years of phony fears -- the ozone layer, lawn sprays, food additives, fluoride, microwaves, implanted silicon, vaccines -- we at last have a real worry... [more]
Don Cupitt's cosmos has no value or meaning. It is a place where shopping is the only thing to believe in, its Sea of Faith merely a puddle... [more]
In the face of all that cheapens human experience, the prescient, unnerving Don DeLillo still believes that art can give us power... [more]
Frans de Waal is intrigued by the way that large-brained mammals, like great apes and dolphins, share a sense of empathy. But what about rats?... [more]
The collapsing Twin Towers reminded us of so many disaster movies. The unthinkable is no longer a mere object of fantasy, says Slavoj Zizek... [more]
No bore like a Tocqueville bore, no easier claim than saying he saw everything before it happened. Spare us his fans... [more]
Ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers posed for a publicity photo with the American flag crumpled in weeds under his feet. Pity about his timing... [more]
Fadiman, Trilling, Barzun: men of their time, cared little for women. But for Carolyn Heilbrun, their blessed circle of intellect was life’s glory... [more]
Critic James Wood hopes the social novel and "hysterical realism" will be casualties of recent events... [more]. Hysterical realist Zadie Smith responds.
Why couldn't I open a bar in San Francisco that says, "Smokers Welcome"? Asks Christopher Hitchens, no longer a socialist... [more]
Hardt and Negri gussy up Marx with a panoply of New Age rhetoric about globalization. It goes nowhere, it means nothing, says Roger Kimball... [more] ... [more]
Baraka was an indulgent cowboy, Wright a disgruntled tourist, Fanon favored violent cleansing. All three made white folks sit up and listen... [more]
Self-indulgent, narcissistic, nonsensical, confusing: Mark Halpern on two recent articles on language usage in Harper's and The Atlantic... [more]
The "clash of civilizations" is a gimmicky thesis. Labels like Islam and the West only mislead and confuse, says Edward Said... [more]. Umberto Eco on the roots of conflict.
Biological warfare is the perfect metaphor for our vulnerability, bioterrorist the bogeyman to trump all bogeymen, writes Kenan Malik... [more] ... [more]
Is history back from vacation? Has the end of history ended? "No," insists Francis Fukuyama, and recent events make no difference... [more]. Rome vs. modern America.
She called in sick to her office in the WTC just before the first plane hit. To spend the time in bed with her new lover. Lies, fiction, and fear... [more]
A uniquely British monster. Scholar and spy Anthony Blunt shared the moral nullity of Establishment types who did what they wanted... [more]
The genius of Jack Miles is to insist that Christ is a grotesque parody of the Messiah — else we lose the meaning of his life and death... [more] ... [more]
In philosophy's minefield any misstep can lead to doom. If we doubt doubts then we do not doubt at all. Maybe... [more]
Marjorie Garber has penned a love letter to her profession: literary theory and criticism. Not a love letter to literary art, mind you... [more]
Freedom on the Internet? The Web as Hyde Park? As this medium matures, it's looking more unlikely, argues Lawrence Lessig... [more]
Secular liberals may not care for the kind of social capital that evangelicals build, but build it they do. Take home schooling... [more]
Techno-disasters: they occur at the bloody crossroads where flawed technology collides head-on with forgetfulness, laziness, or folly. ... [more]
Naomi Wolf is not part of the monastic wing of feminism; her writing shows she actually knows some men and children, writes Mary Eberstadt... [more]. How about broken-fingernail feminism?
America's mythmaker in its times of humiliation and fear, Norman Rockwell was once an avant-garde wannabe... [more]
How did Britain come to have an empire of garrisons, slaves, and forts, instead of the empire it set out to have, of traders and farmers?... [more]
Isaac Babel's stint with the Cossacks was bloody and violent beyond belief. It made his prose even more spare and unflinching... [more] ... [more]
Winston Churchill knew how science would change life, warfare, and politics. He saw terror and fanaticism... [more]
Transformed it may be today, but the relation of the Vatican to the Jews makes a sad story, more about hatred than compassion... [more]
Racism and hatred made Black writing into a realm of lament and despair. Richard Wright looked to the day the Literature of Race would vanish... [more] ... [more]
In our insatiable desire to stay young and beautiful, we have invented endless ways to make our lives miserable. Consider the corset... [more] ... [more]
Big science has big price tag. If you want to know the path of morality in modern science, you have to only follow the money... [more] ... [more]
Picasso, bohemian, painted all night, bedded whores. Einstein, bourgeois, worked all day, came home to wife and kid. How were they alike?... [more]
Laurel and Hardy's movies are as exact and precise as a clock. A cuckoo clock, yes, but one that keeps good time... [more]
In Sam Lipsyte's world, Oprah's book club would be forced at gunpoint to read Sam Lipsyte. If writing is a crime, he's driving the getaway car... [more]
The twentieth century showed the human circus at its most grotesque. Sybille Bedford had a ringside seat throughout the performance... [more]
Wearing the same raincoat in 40 films, laconic Robert Mitchum drank, doped, pissed on the floor, and sleepwalked his way to greatness... [more] ... [more]
Emma Rothschild's Adam Smith was a closet liberal, a friend to the poor. The "invisible hand" was merely a mild and ironic joke... [more]
For Fernand Braudel, history is not of kings and dynasties, but everyday lives and constraints, across the vast canvas of time... [more] ... [more]
Paris, 1900-1930 was the closest art ever came to being a criminal activity, with artists, gangsters, and brothel-keepers on intimate terms... [more]
Libertarianism needs sweet talk, a theory of persuasion. The idea of the life and work of Friedrich von Hayek is persuade and be free... [more]
Who killed classical music? Or is it as dead as some critics say? Lionel Basney looks at three books on the serious problems of serious music... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
Brilliant and vicious, weak and tyrannical, visionary and petty, spiteful and pitiful, Richard Nixon is our Richard III, our Oedipus, our Lear... [more]
Kenneth Tynan was, alas, a literary gentleman who lost his passion. His diaries read like a long note before dying...[more] ... [more]
The greatest generation? The young people who escaped the Nazis are now profs and scientists, Nobel winners and secretaries of state... [more]
Art books can change the way you see a painter. A new book by David Hockney will change the way you see painting... [more] ... [more]
Serene and saintly, sweet hermit of letters H.W. Fowler wanted little else in life but to hone his grammar... [more]
Genre-jumper Cornel West raps into a world more concerned with Bentleys, bitches, and blunts than with black power... [more] ... [more]
Romania is at the bottom of the European heap: a per capita GDP below Namibia, low life expectancy, people eking out existence on $30/month... [more]
To be a critic, you have to look at what's in front of you, said Pauline
Kael. And what you see, alas, is a movie industry in decay... [more] ... [more]
David Lewis, metaphysician of actual and possible worlds, teacher, and model railroad buff, is dead at the age of 60... [more]
Edward Teller must be a happy man. Old enemies are long dead. The communism he hated is gone. And the market for his favorite weapons thrives ... [more] ... [more]
The moderate Islamic state? An idea cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans here and there, says V.S. Naipaul... [more]
Muhammad Ali could not be more purely an American. For that very reason his
embrace of Islam upset his fans. It's an unease still felt today... [more]
For spinning glistening webs of Billy Wilder mythology, it's the man himself who was by far the worst and most appealing offender... [more]
Events of a thousand years ago are but faint traces in the Western mind. For Muslims, they are as emotion-packed and vivid as today's news... [more]
Polaroid, RIP. The tool used by Adams to photograph trees and mountains, Warhol to snap genitals, Wegman to shoot dogs, is fading away... [more]
Generation Y kids: rebels contra rebellion, shrewd entrepreneurs, counter-counter-culturalists. It's all William Kristol's doing... [more]
By liberating dissonance, did Arnold Schoenberg drive away the audience for 20th century music?... [more]. Janacek is the third way.
On a dazzlingly sunny day, Harvard handed over a flea market’s worth of symbolic doodads to a local boy made good... [more]
Why do most guests at a party end up in the kitchen? What do ant colonies have in common with the internet? Steven Johnson has an idea... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
Life without music would be a mistake, said Nietzsche. So the Taliban, those despisers of melody and harmony, must be sorely mistaken... [more]
Nationalism doesn't feed on greed or glory, it thrives on wounded pride. It is the most dangerous force in our world, wrote Isaiah Berlin...[more]
Pigs are cleverer, far cleverer than humans at being a pig. A wood without pigs is like a ballroom without women, says James Buchan... [more]
Lionel Trilling hated modern movies, Jacques Barzun found post-1914 culture nihilistic and disgusting. They wanted a highbrow book club... [more]
Brilliant, inscrutable Stephen Hawking is a blockbuster author, a cult figure with the public. Then there are talks at the watercoolers... [more]
Adolf Hitler didn't hate gays. Killing hundreds of thousands of them was just a way to hide his own homosexuality... [more] ... [more]
G.A. Akerlof, A.M. Spence, and J.E. Stiglitz won the 2001 Nobel prize in economics... [more] . What about the philosophical edge of their theory? ... [more]
There are 3,500 prisoners on death row in America. A sobering new study says if all these sentences were carried out, 63,000 lives would be saved... [more]
Martha Nussbaum is an enigma, a mix of passion and intellect. She won't simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument... [more]
Trinidad-born British writer V.S. Naipaul won the 2001 Nobel prize for literature... press release, NY Times, Guardian, Trinidad Express, Wall Street Journal. David Brooks on Naipaul on Islam.
Southern-style speech is in as much peril as a rubber-nosed woodpecker in a petrified forest. Trouble is, most folks don't know pea turkey 'bout it... [more]
In Edward Said's post-colonial theory, says Stanley Kurtz, no Westerner can ever truly know a non-Western culture... [more]. Said is a secular Protestant.
Samuel Huntington was right: it is a clash of civilizations. What he did not address is the ways that Islam and the West wage war, says John Keegan... [more] ... [more]. Hey, where's all your Muslim support, Binny?
Slavery reparations? They are in place, says John McWhorter. We call them welfare, workfare, affirmative action, special scholarships for blacks... [more]
That letter left in the suitcase at Boston airport is no more Islam than the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity. Don't give an inch to such people, says Kanan Makiya... [more]
Intelligent design is a foolish idea found not just among creationists but among evolutionists who feel the need to prettify Darwin for public consumption... [Part I] ... [Part II]
Is New York forever changed? Was Chicago after the Great Fire? London after the blitz? Cities are more resilient than we, in our heartbroken state, can see... [more]
The genome project made it clear: only an 'omic suffix makes a biologist truly hip. These days, everyone wants an 'ome of his own... [more]
Pining for the leafy quads of college's Golden Age? Get over it, says Louis Menand. The university must wise up to a new reality... [more]
Brutal cynic and earnest sap, satirist of manners Dawn Powell was a small-town girl caught up in a glittering, big city swirl... [more]
Write about the 20th century's great minds? You'll need a strong stomach. They were mostly deskbound dreamers, ready to justify and explain away brutal tyranny... [more]
Empire is to political and social criticism what pornography is to literature. But it's all the buzz, says Alan Wolfe, the next big thing for washed-out Marxists... [more]
The Chronicles of Narnia racist, sexist, imperialist? Say it isn't so! Let's give poor C.S. Lewis a break, says Gregg Easterbrook... [more]
Honest creationists. They are as rare as pterodactyl teeth, but Richard Dawkins has at last stumbled on one, teaching down in Dayton, Tennessee. Sadly... [more]
Greatest Generation kitsch: hacks have transformed WWII into a sentimenal saga of phony heroics and cheap pageantry... [more]
The Jewish lobby has long been a target for Australia's loudest Israel-basher, Helen Darville. Now her old certainties have vanished... [more]
We are eating the fruit of an ancient bitterness between the West and an enfeebled Islam, says Martin Wolf... [more]. It's a war against modernity, said Bernard Lewis in 1990. Islamic banking is one bright spot. How awful was the Italian Premier's gaffe? Attacks are a distortion of Islam.
"Flesh out Ilsa. Add a good sex scene. And change that boring title." What would today's studio execs have said about Casablanca?... [more]
Oh, the whining ingratitude of my generation, says Bryan Appleyard, its infantile loathing of a great, witty, and infinitely clever nation that has saved us from ourselves... [more]. Letters to the editor.
Enthralled by violence, obsessed with moral purity, the forces of radical Islam are fascists for our time, says Walter Laqueur... [more]. Chris Hitchens agrees, and adds, "Damn the doves!". Chomsky vs. Hitchens.
Arthur M. Schlesinger remains our most eloquent apologist for liberalism. The faith may be in eclipse, but he's not about to yield to the darkness... [more]
Life's not boring, like 1957. Our culture is more sophisticated, witty, creative. Moms, kids, dads have more options. This is good. Now the bad news... [more]
Postcolonialism, which preaches that the West is always the evil demon, imperialism its Original Sin, has a bit of a challenge on its hands at the moment... [more]
French philosophes get all the credit, but the Enlightenment also had an English accent. We just have to listen a little more closely, says Gertrude Himmelfarb... [more]
Americans should try harder to figure out why they rile folks so much. Jews should have been more sensitive to why that Mr. Hitler was so mad at them... [more]
Music and consolation. Grief, rage, and facing a world forever changed is not optional. But music can help us through our sadness... [more]
Witchcraft? Don't laugh. An expert says, "When you've got a child sexually molested by an incubus, then you know it's not imagination"... [more]
Boastful liar, said his enemies, but the Greek seafarer Pytheas was a skillful early explorer of the British Isles... [more]
Best American Poetry? If that means there is some poetry that is less than best, don't tell the poetry workforce: they get demoralized... [more]
The British Empire was a class act. Skin color? That was no matter. In Victoria's eyes, King Kalakaua was "one of us"... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
Chain-smoking virgin and recluse, Fernando Pessoa spent his timid life filling a wooden trunk with strange, wondrous writings... [more]
Postmodern Pooh's academics, gay and straight, radical and conservative, share a desperate arrogance, and shout when they think nobody's paying attention... [more]
"Grandpapa," asked the child, "is it true you're the greatest man in the world?" "Yes," replied Winston Churchill, "and now bugger off"... [more]
Book buyers are eating up brisk, saucy tales of feisty heroines who ruled in days past. These gals could be ruthless... [more]
It's still a mystery how such a human horror as Adolf Hitler managed to make so many essentially decent people actually love him... [more]
Dashing from a Beatles photo shoot to a meeting with Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern was for the 1960s the hip king of writerly cool... [more]
Why the West has won wars, and why it will win again: democracy, an open society behind its citizen soldiers, always has the edge... [more]
Jan Morris's Trieste, Italy's Nowhere, is her memento mori, a colorless city of shabby gentility and faded power... [more]. How about Venice?
V.S. Naipaul was not always the noble Sir Vidia. No child of privilege, he had to strain mightily against permanent obscurity... [more]... [more]
Sylvia Plath, middle class and insecure, had nothing in common with the slovenly Caroline Blackwood. Except a drive toward darkness... [more]
Beset by melancholy, cursed by illness, Beethoven suffered all the time. But his broken health never broke his spirit... [more]
Charles Babbage, oddball, genius, and a man far ahead of his time, saw the future, but couldn't make it work... [more]
To the passengers of Flight 564, "This is your Captain speaking"... [more]. How to devastate the world in one easy lesson.
What gives the Mona Lisa her dark allure? An unlikely femme fatale, she was in life a homely housewife, not a sulky stunner... [more]
Excessive moralism may be no help in fighting terrorism. But neither is it desirable to go all legalistic and lose our sense of moral outrage... [more]
Manic men who left snail tracks of suffering on the Arctic ice, early explorers to the North Pole were desperate characters... [more]
In middle-class America, says Laura Pappano, screens trump people, speed bests calm, and market values beat out human values... [more]
Doris Lessing has no praise for feminists or housewives, notes Elaine Showalter. Only brisk earth mothers win her approval... [more]... [more]
Ruins evoke forfeited ambition and wasted splendor. They elicit wishes, dreams, and the finest cadences of language... [more]... [more]... [still more]. Ruins of Kabul.
Audacious fabulator of her Gaelic roots, Iris Murdoch lived in England, but fancied herself a citizen of a lost, genteel Ireland of the mind... [more]... [more]
Between the facts of physicists and the fluff of the Holocaust deniers lie the borderland sciences. Michael Shermer knows the turf... [more]
The Pokémon panic of 1997: fits and nausea among children all over Japan. Was it epilepsy caused by flashing lights? Or just mass hysteria?... [more]
Tintin's creator, Hergé, was a fanatic realist who studded his capers with real life characters. Take that nutty Professor Calculus... [more]
From Estonia to Ireland, states are getting a make-over. It's all about branding. For countries, like sneakers, cool is the rule... [more]
Sylvia Plath was not the only woman in Ted Hughes's life who killed herself. There was a dark lady: glamorous, driven, doomed... [more]
That speech. With its rolling triads, it was 2,988 vivid words that galvanized the country and changed the Presidency. Who wrote it?... [more]
Lenin's problem-solving lover, Inessa Armand was once Moscow's most powerful woman. Why has she been lost to history?... [more]
The mad messiah of modern music, Karlheinz Stockhausen combines riotous noise with Teutonic order. He's as liable to offend the mind as to hurt the ears... [more] ... [more] ... [yet more]
For Benedict Anderson, vast, turbulent Indonesia is a passion. Haunted by its past, he seeks a reckoning. But Java's troubled ghosts don't rest easily... [more]
Art museums have now become the hot pick-up spots. Under the influence of Klimt and Botticelli, frisky gallery goers are, uh, finding new friends... [more]
Wielding her pen as deftly as she might a scalpel, Joan Didion can dissect a sentence with the precision of a surgeon... [more] ... [more] ... [still more]
Vladimir Bukovsky's rich history of the Soviet Union's use of Western journalists and peaceniks is so stunning that it can't find a publisher... [more] ... [backup url]
Many died on September 11th when crews acquiesced in the hope of survival. El Al pilots take a different view... [more]. U.S. planes are pushovers. Malcolm Gladwell on flight risk.
International capitalism needs to be defended now more than ever. Who'll do it? Government and business, that's who. More's the pity... [more]
Chick-Lit? Just shallow fluff, sneer the literary matrons. Lighten up, ladies. You're missing the pleasure of cracking good reads... [more]
The merry Frederick Crews used to lob water balloons at conceited academics. Now he's back with Postmodern Pooh — but this time he's angry... [more].
Worried sick about the next wave of chemical and germ warfare terrorists? Maybe this is one issue on which you can relax a little... [more] ... [more]
For Ellen Dissanayake, art cuts to the heart of our evolved nature. Want real insight into paintings, quartets, novels? Think Darwin, not Derrida... [more]
Aesthetic agitator and idolater of pleasure, Gustav Klimt evoked a swirling world of defiant, private rapture... [more]
Restless rambler, shy scholar, and elegist of devastated lives great and small, W.G. Sebald has mastered the literature of lament... [more] ... [more]
Luciano Pavarotti, the airship of the opera, has outgrown the concert hall. The fat man's new forte? Bombastic stadium spectaculars... [more]
Ray Bradbury, sci-fi master and technophobe, doesn't drive, scorns the Internet and computers, and cares little for science — or its fictions... [more]
Artists used to be truth seekers. Today scientists have stolen that mission. Many works in science are more about "art" than in art exhibitions... [more]
Isaac Stern, warmest of violin virtuosos, musical power broker, and savior of Carnegie Hall, is dead at the age of 81... NY Times, Washington Post.
Winning words won't do it: to sell a book, you need a clever cover. The best book jackets entice us with subtly erotic effects... [more]
Mae West, a "plumber's idea of Cleopatra," is still making suckers of today's puritan apostles of race, class, and gender... [more]... [more]
Opera, like operetta, rock, or jazz, may be a dying musical form. But the fans still flock... [more]. If you think you hate opera, check WRKF's Guide.
Paleontology's first family of fossil hunting, the Leakeys are still digging into humanity's distant past. It's a passion in their bones... [more]
When the story of our own times is unbearable, it helps to lose ourselves in someone else's story. Shakespeare knew this... [more]
The inspiring altruism of NYC firemen can seem a puzzle to Darwinism. But it's not only the fittest who drive evolution: the noblest do too... [more]
In 1838 the British marched on Kabul to punish Afghanistan. Over 50,000 soldiers and camp followers walked into a deadly and humiliating debacle. Only one man survived... [more]
Dotcoms and banks don't have F-16s, and Microsoft can't fend off falling concrete. Now the nation state suddenly matters, says Francis Fukuyama... [more]
Islamic fundamentalists went into a marriage of convenience with the CIA in the Cold War. What was used against the Soviets is now turned against the West... [more]... [more]
"Take out" bin Laden? There is no law that says the U.S. can't do it, if it wants. John Dean on the legal basis for retaliation against terrorists... [more]
"I love you," said over and over again. It was all that could be done in the face of inevitable death. "I love you," and then oblivion... [painful]
The eternally gullible: let us not forget them, either. It took no time for someone to claim that Nostradamus saw it all coming... [more]
Welcome to the new theater of war. The killers are inside the house. Our utensils are their weapons. Don't bother with 911... [more]
Curled up with a pack of Silk Cuts and a bottle of Jim Beam, Michel Houellebecq attacks, provokes, insults... [more]... [more]. Is he seeking a fatwa?... [more]
In the aftermath of WWII, dealer, forger, and spy Topic Mimara sent looted art works back to Croatia. But whose paintings were they?... [more]
The little rich boy who died as a bomb-toting radical, Gian Feltrinelli published Pasternak and chewed the political cud with Castro... [more]
Corey Flintoff, Korva Coleman, Bob Edwards, Terry Gross: voices of NPR. Do they look how they sound? Slate has a little quiz... [more]
On the topic of mass murder, the somber declaration "Never again!" is often heard. But when Hutus butchered Tutsis, the U.S. just shrugged... [more]
Newspaperman Conrad Black says too many journalists are ignorant, lazy, and intellectually dishonest. He has friends, but prefers having enemies... [more]
Consider honor. That hoary, quaint, pretentious, and even perverse notion speaks volumes about today's badly behaved politicians, says Harvey Mansfield... [more]
London construction workers no longer target passing women with cat-calls and whistles. Polly Vernon is relieved. And secretly a little disappointed... [more]
A Palestinian, at war with his own brother, sits in a tent next to a wrecked toy shop watching Israelis shoot at kids' kites. It's another Gaza cameo for Robert Fisk... [more]
The great memoirists win readers with a potent mix of perspective and personality. Consider George Orwell or J.R. Ackerley... [more]. But Kathryn Hughes has had a belly full of memoirs.
It is the last taboo. One straight man says nothing frightens him more. In the year 2001, why won't men talk about the gay experience?... [more]
To be called a book lover implies you are a eunuch or old maid, dreamy, poetic, mousy, repressed. None of the above, says Michael Dirda, "I'm just a hedonist"... [more]
Penmanship was once a crucial part of young person's moral and aesthetic growth. No longer. What do educators have against good handwriting?... [more]
Having some fun at the expense of your least favorite composer takes a wicked new form at Amazon reviews. Take that, Andrew Lloyd-Webber... [more]. Ed. note: Killjoy Amazon has now removed the link. Meanwhile, the NYTimes is on the case.
CEOs in golf shirts and dot-com brats in shorts nearly did in the suit. But this relic of horsedrawn times is far from dead... [more]
Win-Win Situation! Buy the terrific new Arts & Letters Daily T-shirt. We get money, you get a fabulous T-shirt. Everybody wins!... [more]
Superhero love. The sticky, morose intimacy, weird teenage moods, and far-out narrative sprawl of Marvel Comics inspires a generation of male writers... [more]
Is your child easily distracted? Often forgetful? Doesn't listen? Makes careless mistakes? Tries to get out of homework? Whoa! We're talking a serious medical disorder... [more]
Schadenfreude: the feeling you get when you see a smash-up between two Mercedes. It's a sentiment that dare not speak its name in English... [more]
So you think Asian culture places a low value on the individual? Then consider the personal, hands-on, raw sadism of Chinese executions... [more]
Literary criticism is turning into a bizarre offshoot of sci-fi, says Terry Eagleton, obsessed as it is with aliens, wolfboys, and ape-men... [more]
Holy Touchdown! From soccer to some dubious interference in ice hockey, the Son of God works for your team. In selling religious kitsch, there is no bottom... [more]
Saul Bellow's Augie March is a vitally American character, assured, street-smart, speaking to us with a brassy eloquence. His voice echoes still... [more]
Spring Break is just one big, long tease. Beneath all the flashing, stripping, and boozing, there's a rather tense little secret: nobody is actually, uh... [more]
The lie is impressive because it is a sign of craft, it requires invention, writes Edward Rothstein. Stories, alibis, distortions are the source of art... [more]. Speaking of lies...
Poetry does not get more scary than the cornucopia of torture in Dante's Hell. It's an encyclopedic catalogue of cruelty... [more]
Nota bene, Mick: rock is music for the young, and it is best played by them, not by geezers with triple chins. It's time to unplug the oldies... [more]... [more]
The compass, okay. But mauve, canned food, the Model-T, codfish? Jonathan Yardley has heard enough about stuff that's "changed the world"... [more]
Time was when Hollywood stars were expected to have a ready gift for words. But fast, smart, deft dialogue has gone out of fashion... [more]
Thumbing their noses at workaday propriety, bike messengers are sweaty, speeding shuttles for the world of the daily deal... [more]
The Anatomy of Melancholy, a book to end all books, is crammed with Robert Burton's endless learning and insane lists... [more]
Photographer of seedy Paris streets, Brassai was obsessed with denizens of the night. Pimps, hoods, tramps, and tarts were his muses... [more]
Like a scar on the face of a stern yet handsome woman, the Berlin Wall divided a nation and disfigured a city... [more]
Tallulah Bankhead's pubic hair held in a shrine and venerated: it might seem an odd idea to most folks. But Eugene Walter was not like most folks... [more]
Britain may have won the war, but it lost the battle of ideas. The twentieth century's most important thinkers spoke German... [more]
It was Fulvia who took the severed head of Cicero, opened the mouth, pulled out the tongue and stabbed it with her hairpin. Take that!... [more]
Plagued by debt and doubt in his life, now little known, father of geology William Smith was the epitome of genius... [more]
Graham Harvey's treatise on grass is in need of cutting and more than a bit of weeding out. But there's no doubting its importance ... [more]
"My mind only works with my legs," said Rousseau, who did his best thinking on foot. Ambling excites the brain... [more]
Shy, refined FDR and his brash cousin Teddy were not so different after all, say two historians. They were both trust-busting WASPs... [more]
A malaise afflicts the recent fiction of Salman Rushdie. His irony falls flat, the puns are forced, the plots clapped out... [more]
Imagine a land where you are paid to down grog and tasty roast hens fly right into your mouth. For the medieval mind, it's the perfect utopia... [more]
Sainted in life, scorned after death, one-armed adventurer and visionary geologist John Wesley Powell showed us the Grand Canyon... [more]
Can Asians think? Maybe so, says Kishore Mahbubani, but they've still got a lot of catching up to do... [more]. Japan's science gap.
Bird-watchers are obsessed. Up at dawn, they think nothing of spending all day in the bush stalking their elusive, avian quarry... [more]
C.L.R. James, Marxist scholar, cricket buff, and class warrior, guiltlessly loved great food, fine clothes, and beautiful women... [more] ... [more] ... [yet more]
Nymphomaniac, genius, diva, cult leader, blushing maiden, homely schoolmarm: every age has its own take on Sappho... [more]
Stamp out street chaos, and crime will fall, or so Broken Windows theory goes. Big city pols love it, but does it really work?... [more]
You're a winner! Mortgage the kids! Enlarge your whatever! So many great offers on the Web, but none beats the superb Arts & Letters Daily T-Shirt... [more]
Sometimes girls just wanna have fun. Yes, sighs chick-lit scribe Jenny Colgan, we know the difference between foie gras and hula hoops... [more]. Words from Auntie Beryl.
Prettiness is so last year. Falling hard for grit, ugliness, the fashion supremos now prefer hideousness... [more]
Stephen Wolfram works late into the night to find a simple program that will generate the Universe. Might be the greatest discovery since Newton... [more]
Bureaucratic Legalism. It's the idea, says Jonathan Rauch, that if you go through enough legal process, your outcome must turn out to be right... [more]
With their fancy-pants prose and love of obscure gibberish, today's "literary" writers are highfalutin frauds, says B.R. Myers... [more] ... [more] ... [more]. Lee Siegel to the defense.
He won't kill, but you might want theologian Stanley Hauerwas around for a bar fight. He's a pacifist who talks like a bruiser... [more] ... [more]
Astronomer Fred Hoyle, the man who named the Big Bang but didn't believe in it, has died at age 86. Obits... Telegraph, NY Times, London Times, BBC.
Think nanotech, Albert. Nano mania is everywhere, from universities to federal politics. That's a lot of attention for something so small... [more]
Swedes? They find it pretty easy to be happy. For Japanese and Koreans it's harder. As for guilt-free Hispanics, they are having a grand time... [more]
Do the elite colleges that top the U.S. News rankings really offer the best education? The answer is far from clear... [more]. Ask Leon Botstein.
Aloha! Tourists think Maui is a paradise. But what kind of a place is it for the people who make beds, cook meals, and carry bags? ... [more]
Black history today deals in images of endless degradation and defeat. Such a history of horrors cannot inspire, says John McWhorter... [more]
Once an enfant terrible wise beyond his years, now a youthful grandee, William F. Buckley has mellowed. At heart, he's a liberal soul... [more]
For some children of Nazis, the long, baleful shadow of their parents is a tragic burden. For others, it's a darkness to be embraced... [more] ... [part II]
Jane Austen, prudish and prim, is the last writer you'd turn to for naughty bits. But under the white lace beat a bawdy heart... [more]
In defense of black celery and handmade cheese, Italy's Slow Food movement is a subtle, quirky riposte to globalization... [more]. Slow is good, but is organic best?
Water is wet. Dead people stay dead. To get a computer to think, first you have to teach it common sense, fact by ordinary fact... [more]
>From his youth on the Ganges to a performance at Woodstock, the soul of Ravi Shankar has always been torn between East and West... [more]
Is it auditory cheesecake that merely gives pointless pleasure, or did music help us to survive in the Pleistocene? For psych, it's one tough question... [more]
Once divided by a Babel of tongues, the Finns, French, and Poles alike are united by a new lingua franca: the English language... [more]
Freebooting titans of Silicon Valley have a not-so-new guru: Ayn Rand. For the ambitious high-tech exec, Atlas Shrugged is now must reading... [more]The governess counted plants, the butler boiled skeletons: When Charles Darwin put his household to work, the children weren't assistants, they were subjects... [more]
The carcinogens list grows longer by the day, and don't imagine you can save yourself by eating vitamin-rich broccoli. It causes cancer too... [more]
From Weimar to the Nazi era to the conformist apex of corporate America, architect Mies van der Rohe catered to any taste... [more]
Pornography auteurs now turn to Shakespeare for new material. You'll find more than a pound of flesh in A Midsummer Night's Cream... [more]
Every time George W. Bush opens his mouth, we should hear the sound of rushing air, says Mark Crispin Miller ... [more] ... [more]. What do Bush's gaffes show us?
Bertrand Russell called for the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the Russians, before they got the bomb. Lord Lawson heard it himself... [more]
Weeny, weedy, weaky? Latin dies a little more each year. The eternal verities don't seem to have much of a shelf-life these days... [more]
Civilization is not just a pageant of elite dynasties, the doings of kings and generals. Consider farmers, hunters, herdsmen, traders... [more]
New York's famed, frank, and feared intellectuals had views on every issue, but couldn't be bothered with the civil rights movement... [more]
Half Chateaubriand, half Tintin, writer André Malraux managed to insert himself into almost every momentous event of the 20th century... [more] ... [more]
Philosophers don't choose their careers over that of, say, a tree-surgeon's or a barrister's, says A.C. Grayling. It's near impossible for them to do anything else... [more]
A diary, says Joseph Epstein, gives one the best of audiences, the most loyal of supporters, closest and most understanding of friends: oneself... [more]
Like Franklin and Jefferson before him, the tough-minded father of pragmatism, William James, was a cosmopolitan American patriot who could speak to the world... [more]
"Boom Town" is the bad-taste name for Hiroshima, which turned into a muesli-munching carnival on the 50th birthday of the Big Bang. Tom Bradley watched all the fun... [more]
Call it sexist, but women make the best social historians by far... [more]. Then there are all those ladies who study apes, like that tramp, Jane Goodall.
Zadie Smith spent her U.S. book tour raiding the minibar, refusing to drop in on Toni Morrison, stuttering to Lorrie Moore, and giving out free hair-care advice... [more]
Everything in America, from War and Peace to a new toolbox, is available at 2am. For one laid-back Brit, the 24/7 culture is a living hell... [more]. An American response.
Peddling their tales of idyllic beaches or "authentic" bistros, travel writers are really no more than clever con artists, with their housebound readers easy marks... [more]
Jan Vermeer painted private realms of the human soul. The haunting luster of his work defies explanation, says George Steiner... [more]
Bored with the comforts of modern life, middle-class folks have become punishment freaks who seek out dangerous, painful adventures... [more]
Victor Hugo was good at more than just epic potboilers: he also dashed off ravishing poetry, godlike in its sweep and titanic authority... [more]
Natural resources will soon run out as our population balloons, species go extinct, and pollution chokes us to death. All wrong, says a skeptical environmentalist... [more]. The doomsayers must now answer to Bjørn Lomborg.
Hollywood could do a good job in 1923 showing Moses parting the Red Sea. How far have special effects come since?... [more]. And what makes a Truly Bad Movie?
The mysterious drive and goal of life is what Charles Jencks calls beauty. Fashion may claim it, but it is artists who push it forward on its wobbly, swerving way... [more]
To join the U.S., Utah had to get rid of polygamy, but was then allowed to carpet-bomb the rest of the country with bright, young Mormon missionaries. That's pluralism... [more]
An uncanny mix of man, beast, and god, Socrates remains wild and untamed. We may fall in love with his example, but cannot domesticate him... [more]
Gossipy scandal sheets are hardly new. We've always loved ribald tales of the rich and famous brought down low, says Caitlin Flanagan... [more]
Once sublime luxuries of the cultivated mind, Latin and Greek have all but vanished from our culture. It's time to bring them back, says A.C. Grayling... [more]
Katherine Graham was the Queen Mother of the Washington Post, a cartoon figure with a lockjaw voice that sounded like money... [more]. Some would prefer to bury than to praise her... [more] ... [yet more]
Noreena Hertz found last week in Genoa that she'd become the voice of an anti-globalization movement that she does not quite agree with... [more]
Chanel No. 5. It is the glamorous smell of women, of mothers, of fur coats. It is also a philosopher's holy grail, linking the material life and free will... [more]
Bored with your job? Want to make real money? Then become a writer. Not now a writer? No problem! All you need is a handy how-to guide to hackdom... [more]
Biographers who use pet names, novels that don't make sense, factual errors, one-sentence paragraphs: an irked Robert McCrum lists his Writer's Deadly Sins... [more]
Language a living, growing thing? No, that's a stale platitude used to stifle serious discussion about the way we use words, says Mark Halpern... [more]
TV mediums are hot. Humbug, says Michael Shermer. They not only insult the dead, but cheaply exploit the humanity of the living... [more]
Samuel Beckett, wild man? For a select few, he was an Irish werewolf, his hairdo flaring as he downed whisky after whisky... [more]
Stevedores to senators, one and all Americans are equal under Oprah, born with a shared capacity to make messes of their lives... [more]
Withholding judgment can be a fine modesty, but with Frank Kermode it's now a mannerism, covering his essays like a rash... [more]
Autodidact nation. There was a time when Britain teemed with keen, self-taught Livingstones who hacked their way through jungles of the printed page... [more]
Shy lexicographer, defiant atheist, verbal polymath, H.W. Fowler was the heroic mind behind Modern English Usage... [more]
Some see piercing visions of beauty, while others recoil from his bombast and excess. Sandro Botticelli's swagger still divides viewers... [more]
"When Bruno Walter comes to something beautiful, he melts," said Toscanini. If you're used to the brisk style, it can be unsettling... [more]
The First World War began as a little spat in a fraught corner of Europe, but soon engulfed much of the known human universe... [more] ... [more]
More hardboiled than comic, the comic book began its very American history with tales of violence and derring-do... [more]
While Hemingway shrugged off the liquidations, others more clearly grasped Stalin's betrayal of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War... [more] ... [more]
In 1932, bargain hunters flocked to the first supermarket. Thus began the era of "pile it high and sell it cheap"... [more]
Far more than any history book, gazing at a mummy's face reassures us that the distant past was populated by people like us... [more]
Situationist philosopher, social theorist, and creative extremist, Guy Debord trafficked in manifestos, montages, zany pranks, and lies... [more]
With dirty nails, muddy boots, and his stubbornly masculine failure to be practical, George Orwell expressed a seedy grandeur... [more] ... [more]
A true virtuoso in the old style, a prodigious, skilled inventor, Christopher Wren dotted the map of London with his works... [more]
James Merrill's best poems dare to flaunt their artifice: they are a kind of avant-gaud, reveling in masks and costumes... [more]
Seventeenth-century man of leisure, horticulturist John Evelyn preferred literary gardening, and clean hands, to the real thing... [more]
The Nazi genocide has now become such a cheap moral resource that it's used for any cause you can name. Why, the foot and mouth crisis is... [more]
"Let them eat cake"? In point of fact, Marie Antoinette never said it. History got this most vilified aristocrat all wrong... [more]
Einstein's scientific ideas grew despite the usual human mess of his personal life. Inevitably, we weigh love story against genius... [more]
Brooding, eloquent, and dapper, chess champ Garry Kasparov is a king who has lost his crown. Now he wants it back... [more]
Philosophy has left the ivory tower and is coming soon to a tavern near you. Beer helps Kant to go down, even if you can't spell "noumena"... [more]
Nasty homosexual who preyed on young boys is how novelist V.S. Naipaul regards E.M. Forster. A Passage to India is "utter rubbish"... [more]. Sir Vidia is the scourge of liberal pieties.
A woman with dark, knowing eyes, Wislawa Szymborska writes poems that speak with the force and insistence of urgently whispered advice... [more]
A Flushing graveyard is the last place you'd expect to find the bones of Don Giovanni's librettist. But Lorenzo Da Ponte was the toast of Manhattan... [more]
The Economist, in the spirit of John Stuart Mill's libertarianism, is calling for legalized dope. An editorial is followed by a series of powerfully argued articles.
The ultimate laptop will have vast power, far beyond what we can now imagine. Small problem: building it requires that you package a nuclear explosion... [more]
Vincent Van Gogh didn't cut off his ear after all. His friend Paul Gauguin did it, drunk on absinthe... [more]. Absinthe is wretched... [more]
A German fast-food cashier has a duty in law to hand over money to save a customer held at gunpoint by a robber. In the American legal system, well... [more]
Sai Baba is God incarnate. So if he has sex with his devotees it is in truth a wonderful blessing. Who's going to call God a child molester?... [more]
Political historian and scourge of grade inflation, Harvey Mansfield likes to escape the academic grind by translating Tocqueville and Machiavelli... [more]
Relentless scholar and stern critic, Helen Vendler views lyric poetry as a private genre, an escape from the rowdy clamor of public life... [more]
Self-important, verbose, vain, moody, and maybe mad, John Adams has been written off. Now scholars are giving him some second thoughts... [more]
Mortimer Adler's was a lucid and powerful yet coarse and deeply vulgar mind. His high IQ was like a bicep useful only to beat down people... [more]
John Berger, novelist and art critic, is a Marxist intellectual who believes in God, though he hates churches... [more]. In his own words: Vincent van Gogh.
Eudora Welty, writer who loved her characters — from Clytie, who drowned herself in a rain barrel, to the feeble-minded Lily Daw, to Miss Teacake Magee — is dead... [more] ... [yet more]
Contingency, complexity, and chaos: the hobby horses of confused scientists and suckered literary critics. Frank Miele explains... [more]
In sex as in physics, Einstein felt paradise was always just around the corner. As soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby... [ | | |
