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Television is indifferent to approval or love. It pursues its only goal with unblinking zeal: to be watched ... [more]
Even if the people who made cigarettes or cheap handguns were moral monsters, Wendy Kaminer argues, that wouldn't mean they were criminals ... [more]
Chance and necessity don't account for everything. Without discarded teleologies, entelechies, and vitalisms, we can still opt for intelligent design, argues William Dembski ... [more]
Computer-based learning is a high-priced sham, bound to stunt the emotional and intellectual growth of our children, argues William Rukeyser ... [more]
Playing fast and loose with Thomas Jefferson: a Library of Congress exhibit falsifies Jefferson's view of Christian theology and clergy ... [more]
Academic freedom has been twisted into a narrow, self-serving claim to privilege, power, and easy access to the public treasury, argues Thomas Sowell ... [more]
Everyday justice: a junior barrister of the Greenwich Magistrates Court helps his client apply for bail ... [more]
Riley Weston is 19 years old, though, here as elsewhere, it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. Mark Steyn reports ... [more]
Media and public have fallen in love with the hucksters of acupuncture, homeopathy, chelation therapy, herbal concoctions, magnetic placebos ... [more]
Filling in the black holes of a college education means forgetting the postmodern ironists and returning to the library, says Camille Paglia ... [more]
Nude photos of Dr. Laura mark the fall of a grasping Tartuffe. Never mind: this yenta's credibility was built on shrewish hectoring, not morality ... [more]
Escape from Pleasantville! Sven Birkerts wonders if we can ever get back to reality ... [more]
Planning that Dream Wedding? If you think the ultimate joy is a day spent being the center of a big party, you're too young to get married ... [more]
Do electronic books spell the end of paper as the preferred book medium? Any optimism on behalf of trees is premature, says the Economist ...
[more]
History belongs to everyone and to no one: hence its universal authority. This claim will be contested. But without it, we are in trouble ... [more]
Isaiah Berlin was a fox who'd rather have been a hedgehog. The themes of freedom and its betrayal were the obsessions of his life ... [more]
Corporate nomads: are the virtues of public and private life being corroded by the demands of a more ruthless economy? ... [more]
Richard Dawkins might have been a superb drill instructor, perhaps like the vicious Marine sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, murdered by a conscript he drove insane ... [more]
In their own eyes, the Stuarts were quite as modern as the Spice Girls. So what exactly is modernism? ... [more]
Was Spinoza the most lovable of men, or an emotional cripple, arrogant, consumed with sexual jealousy, and fiercely misogynistic? ... [more]
Antonia White (b. 1899) puts the sexual liberation of the 1960s to shame. Once upon a time, literary life was more fun ... [more]
The Merry Wives of Windsor is a scabrous exercise in sadomasochism, immensely popular forever on precisely that basis, says Harold Bloom ... [more]
The new anti-New York: Mayor Willie Brown's San Francisco is overrun with homeless people and criminals, its municipal budget skyrocketing ... [more]
E.O. Wilson's call for consilience between scientists and humanists has been likened to the Pope's invitation for all Christians to join the one true church ... [more]
It was the Dutch, not the English, who started the craze for tea. In 1610 the first shipment arrived in Amsterdam, turning Holland into a nation of addicts ... [more]
Monet's Waterlilies (1904), now seen in Boston, was apparently plundered by the Nazis in 1941 from French Jewish collector Paul Rosenberg ... [more]
Our kids are besieged by a cacophony of voices clamoring for attention. But the voice they must learn to hear above the din is their own ... [more]
"It is my nature's plague to spy into abuses." Kenneth Starr and the man "the rabble call lord" play out a Shakespearean drama ... [more]
From Proust's plump little madeleines to turkey and cranberry sauce, it's the next academic craze: Food Studies ... [more]
Cut, paste, and go to jail. The new copyright law may be less boon than boomerang to its entertainment industry supporters ... [more]
It's a demanding life to be an academic TV pundit for Bimblogio. But Prof. Jonathan Turley is a man for the job ... [more]
Human rights are real: the postmodern cultural theories so adored by academics and the brute fact of political oppression don't mix, argues Xiaorong Li ... [more]
American Indian journos are battling for basic First Amendment rights: free speech doesn't always sit well with tribal elders ... [more]
Ruth Sherman's third graders loved Nappy Hair, one of the books this dedicated teacher read aloud to her class. Then somebody saw a photocopy ... [more]
Kenneth Starr: America's No. 1 pornographer? And just what are high crimes and misdemeanors? ... [more]
The courts must make certain that immigrants are not reduced to pariahs, argues Owen Fiss ... [more]
When the threat of the Internet to cultural citadels was mooted at the Getty Center, docents turned away overflow crowds. No one told them they were visiting a dying institution ... [more]
In Norma Kitson's passionate Where Sixpence Lives we see everything there is to love and despise about her native land, South Africa ... [more]
The cultural origins of ideas have no bearing on truth. There's no "Jewish physics," no "bourgeois biology," and there are no "Western human rights" ... [more]
Last June, an "independent" group of scientists published a report on UFOs. The media swallowed it whole -- along with nerve-gas bombing in Viet-Nam, the death of Bob Hope ... [more]
Multicultural piety requires the norms and values of a culture to be respected. What if these include the oppression of women? ... [more]
Hitler's boyhood nemesis was no ordinary Jewish kid. It was Ludwig Wittgenstein. The latest in whacky Hitlerology ... [more]
Do parents count? Howard Gardner says that Judith Harris's new book overstates its case, is misleading and potentially harmful ... [more]
Was his mother's dissatisfaction the source of his great power and sensitivity as an illustrator? Wyeths' family secrets are revealed in this new biography ... [more]
From ancient Egypt to Garfield, cats have engaged the human imagination. Here's a history of the cat in literature ... [more]
The privilege of taking a culture for granted is not available to modern African writers. Ask Chinua Achebe ... [more]
Nobody ever claimed attaining tenure at Harvard University should be easy. But how hard is too hard? ... [more]
Art theorist and critic Arthur Danto thinks nothing is more dismal than the thought of endless philosophy ... [more]
For city folk who prefer their meat long dead, blood sport may seem cruel, primitive. But there is an argument for hunting ... [more]
An eternity of words: digital information lasts forever -- or five years, whichever comes first ... [more]
Is morality a matter of taste? If so, real ethical disagreements would be impossible ... [more]
Till death do us part? Monogamy and playing around aren't incompatible. It may even pay to indulge your cheatin' heart ... [more]
The University of Michigan's Carl Cohen was honored for his valuable contributions to his school by having a room named after him -- for a while ... [more]
A message for Dr. Andrew Weil, Inc. There's no such thing as alternative medicine. There's only medicine that works, and medicine that doesn't ... [more]
Is capitalism bad for art? Tyler Cowen argues that the free market makes for more artists and better art. Jacob Weisberg has doubts ... [more]
Elvis is really dead, the sky isn't falling, perpetual motion is bunkum, cold fusion doesn't work, and the earth is not flat. Would you believe it? ... [more]
Workfare is an idea that seems to appeal to everybody. Robert M. Solow argues that we're kidding ourselves ... [more]
Forty years after the debut of Paddington Bear, author Michael Bond is still giving pleasure to children and their parents. His and other children's books ... [more]
Irving Berlin's parody -- You're the arch / In the Rome collection / You're the starch / In a groom's erection -- wasn't typical: it was Cole Porter who had trouble with censors ... [more]
Stephen Ambrose is an "unabashed triumphalist," convinced the United States is the best and greatest country that ever was ... [more]
Can burning a Chinese herb next to the toe of a pregnant woman make her breech baby turn head-down? ... [more]
The first annual Big Brother Awards were held in London, on the 50th anniversary of Orwell's , Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who were the winners? ... [more]
From fin-de-siècle opium-smokers in silk gowns to shopping malls, theme parks, and Seinfeld, here's a study of the human desire to escape ... [more]
For Congress, the criminal law is a moral pork barrel, useful for indignation gestures. Politics becomes a sentiment competition, says George Will ... [more]
The Palestinian scholar Edward Said has a question for American Jews "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" ... [more]
Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty seemed such a safe and promising young academic ... [more]
Dreamland: it did produce UFOs, sent to us by a mysterious alien civilization -- the Pentagon ... [more]
Rita MacNeill, Nova Scotia's troubadour for all of Canada, has an exquisite voice, yet she's virtually unknown south of the border. Why? She's very, very fat ... [more]
Thomas Jefferson's face on the two-dollar bill reminds us that our heroes -- and especially presidents -- are not gods or saints ... [more]
Is the mind best likened to a Swiss Army knife, with distinct modules for various capacities? Philosopher Bob Sharpe is doubtful ... [more]
The Technorealism manifesto: the Internet is not utopian, information is not knowledge, and wiring schools will not save them ... [more]
If physics fixes all the facts there are, does it follow that all the explanations there are are physical explanations? Jerry Fodor considers E.O. Wilson ... [more]
Poets must get rid of the inner censor, says Pulitzer-winner James Tate. If the poem's about an eland watching TV in Teaneck, New Jersey, well ... [more]
While others ignored global economic meltdown and fate of the Albanians in favor of Monica and Bill, journalist Mike Hoyt explains "Why I skipped the scandal" ... [more]
How did all the pundits get the elections so wrong? They didn't have a clue about what Americans are thinking ... [more]
Sokal and Bricmont have fun with the errors and confusions of so-called postmodern science -- from Godel and chaos theory to quantum uncertainty and Einstein ... [more]
Chris Patten's Brits and their Hong Kong allies are unfailingly wise, steadfast, hard-working, honorable; his mainland Chinese are hysterical, noisy, strident, uncooperative ... [more]
In pop music, a generation lasts two years, an epoch barely fills half a decade of teenage time. Woodstock? The days of crinolines and mustache wax ... [more]
Most teachers aren't highly paid. So why did Pulitzer winner David Mamet sign on to teach English at a private school? ... [more]
He was afraid that people would laugh at him or call his work shallow? Whitman interrogates his own poetry, and finds it wanting ... [more]
Rachmaninoff lives again: newly processed piano rolls give an eerie sense of a long-dead pianist ... [more]
The Forrest Gumping of higher education: bored, insolent students, unwilling to read, not just talking, but answering cell phones during class ... [more]
Futurists: in 1983 one predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union with almost supernatural accuracy. Alas, he also warned of oil at $80 a barrel ... [more]
John Edgar Wideman, the author of Two Cities, insists if you're going to talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk ... [more]
Sexual deviants and marginalized groups thrive on the Internet, achieving self-esteem and a sense of community, a new study shows ... [more]
What is the art of Ben Shahn, a shameless apologist for Stalinism, doing in the Jewish Museum? Hilton Kramer wants to know ... [more]
It's no fun being nothing but a medium. Olivia Judson explains why she quit as science reporter for the Economist ... [more]
Is the innkeeper who pours another one for the drunk guilty of sin? It's a question of casuistry, a philosophical pastime that's ripe for revival ... [more]
Universities don't prize the free clash of ideas and argument. Today, the Right Not To Be Offended rules all, with professors and students silenced and punished ... [more]
Dramatic news events are always less important than gradual, insidious changes. The future is the unintended consequences of good intentions, claims Robert D. Kaplan ... [more]
Perhaps we dwell with miracles, writes Catharine R. Stimpson, the miracles of being on this earth, coiled with danger and shimmering with hope ... [more]
There were two Marilyn Monroes: victimzed little-girl-lost and cold-eyed ogress. Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller married the former but discovered ... [more]
"Do you realize," Helmut Kohl said to me, "that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler?" ... [more]
Saving Private Ryan is fiction, says Stephen Ambrose, but it's a story that illuminates truth rather than diminishing it ... [more]
Make your own happy ending, or kill them all off, if it's your fancy. The age of interactive television is upon us ... [more]
The Smithsonian, a dusty museum where even the buns taste pre-Columbian, is the setting for Gore Vidal's smart, shallow new novel ... [more]
What is it about the American cultural product that non-Americans find so attractive, despite their better instincts or national pride ... [more]
From his 1954 defense in Brown vs Board of Education, to his career on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall did everything with dignity, with class ... [more]
In this politicized view of today's America, one reader felt trapped on a tour bus next to an NPR commentator who wouldn't shut up ... [more]
Moscow, Inc.: with crime down and a new middle-class on the rise, Moscow is bound to take its place among the world's great cities ... [more]
Is mass media ownership by fewer corporations a genuine threat to democracy and the freedom to know? The answer is far from clear ... [more]
The target of Jessica Mitford's The American Way of Death isn't the funeral business, but that anyone (except presumably writers) should make money out of anything ... [more]
The Frank Sinatra Pete Hamill knew was intelligent and winning a reader of books, a lover of painting and classical music, gallant with women, graceful with men ... [more]
If the Supreme Court sustains affirmative action, it will be acting as a teacher explaining to the nation the true costs of our racist past, says Ronald Dworkin ... [more]
The awe and mystery of science, says Douglas R. Hofstadter, is no longer appreciated by a public more intrigued by goofy belief systems ... [more]
Isaiah Berlin on JFK: he was riveted by the thought of great men ... when he talked about Stalin, when he talked about Napoleon, Lenin ... his eyes shone with a particular glitter ... [more]
Groaning under your email load? Marianne Moore sometimes wrote fifty letters a day, some of them quite long. No keyboard, no spellchecker ... [more]
When you think of an ethnic minority group, do Portuguese-Americans come to mind? Why not? ... [more]
Are virtual universities an opportunity for excellence, or merely the Disneyfication of higher education? A British view ... [more]
Did Diana, the beauty who married a prince and died with a playboy, go to heaven or to hell? A theologian speculates ... [more]
John D. Rockefeller's empire was built on a finite physical commodity, oil, where Gates's can expand into an unlimited, virtual one ... [more]
George Gershwin -- self-made millionaire, Jewish mother's prize, sex symbol, man of the people -- played out every cliché of the American Dream ... [more]
Anton Chekhov's measure is perfect. He shared a world we know and saw as his great privilege the chance to redeem it with language ... [more]
The Marquis de Sade, once viewed as a cruel, bestial pervert, is now a hero of sexual liberation. Nonsense, argues Roger Shattuck ... [more]
It's hardly surprising that gays don't appreciate having powerful politicians cast them as the morally diseased equivalents of thieves and alcoholics, writes Virginia Postrel ... [more]
Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, a nonconformnist with a soft spot for the common man and a resolute sympathy for communists, has won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature ... [more]
From Churchill to Blair: here's a history to rank with Carlyle, Tocqueville, and Frederick Jackson Turner. Hugo Young's new book will also cause enormous offense ... [more]
C.S. Lewis's writings give us the everyday -- splendor, terror, pain, and possibility -- inviting us into that "mystical death which is the secret of life" ... [more]
Television reduced Little House on the Prairie to pablum mixed with sugar. The feminist "celebration" of Laura Ingalls Wilder has hardly improved matters ... [more]
John Paul II's latest philosophical encyclical, Fides et Ratio, attacks nihilist postmodernism, but not technology. In fact, it's on the Internet ... [more]
What if Lolita were parodied from the "other" point of view? It has been, and Vladimir Nabokov's son is suing ... [more]
"The entire Left was always talking about the Soviet Union or defending it, identifying with failure. The Soviet Union had nothing to do with us, in fact," says Doris Lessing ... [more]
Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky was born to be posthumous. Solomon Volkov does him justice ... [more]
Fierce media competition has been blamed for recent embarrassments at the New Republic, Boston Globe, and CNN. But is competition the problem, or the solution? ... [more]
Here's ammunition for both sides in the gender wars. Men and women don't have to be the same to be equal -- in opportunities, income, or love ... [more]
Nutty Professors: want to be a vampire slayer? An expert on defecation in Rome? In Boston, the whackier the course, the better ... [more]
Mothers often get blamed when children begin talking late. Why? As Thomas Sowell says, Clara Schumann, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein were all late talkers ... [more]
Los Angeles: it's Walden Pond on LSD, a profoundly inegalitarian society that is apocalyptically out of balance with its environment. Better move out ... [more]
Frank Bidart's lulling voice clashes with the horror-movie quality of his writing. He's both scholar and Weegee-like student of the macabre ... [more]
If you can read this, you must be conscious: Psychologist Susan Blackmore begins another year at a British university ... [more]
The end of global market capitalism is neigh, claims John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. At least he hopes so ... [more]
America is bereft of wisdom: triumphant, self-righteous, forgetful, complacent, self-absorbed, as unwise about the rest of the world as at any time since 1941. After all, it won the Cold War ... [more]
Delacroix's images -- pumas in Fontainebleau, Arabs in Barbizon -- lie outside both common life and Modernism. "He stands entirely on his own," argues Arthur C. Danto ... [more]
Ted Hughes, the improbable poet laureate, earned literary acclaim and ferociously avoided the celebrity's life ... [more]
Hello Dolly, goodbye Death? Genetic cloning might be the route to immortality for human beings ... [more]
The half of At Home in the World about J.D. Salinger is riveting. The rest is psychobabble, with thanks to therapists, a homeopath, and the author's "website community." Everybody but ... [more]
The British government is prescribing a "literacy hour" for all schools. In one class, 10-year-olds are learning Hamlet. It's a wild success ... [more]
The Internet's abundant paraphernalia of narcissism, the "candid" webcams, the "All About Me" pages: how deluded we are to think it can bestow being ... [more]
Daniel Dennett is the most influential philosopher now working in the philosophy of mind. A primer of his views ... [more]
The "road book" is an established American genre, with its origins in Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday. Many of these books don't work, and the latest example ... [more]
We can't have it both ways: treating women as competent, equal partners in every sphere of life except crime, where the woman criminal is cast as victim ... [more]
John Lukacs's eccentric meditation on the 20th century bristles with cranky opinions: he hates the Guggenheim Museum, New England intellectuals, Casablanca, Gaudí, and Whittaker Chambers ... [more]
For most of this century, grain elevators dotted the landscape around Olathe, Kansas. But times are changing ... [more]
To Joan Didion, it was familiar: the predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent seen during Clinton's run for president in 1992. She looks at the Starr Report ... [more]
Jean-Paul Sartre, a man who spoke of "one human history with one truth," was hardly a postructuralist ... [more]
A garage-size meteorite slammed into the heart of Arabia and flash-cooked the sand into glass. And it happened only yesterday ... [more]
"I don't have a problem with the eroticism," says performance artist Karen Finley. "I think that's sometimes a problem with feminists." She's about to appear in Playboy ... [more]
Once we see that in society everything is connected, we're freed from fruitless searches for "magic bullets" or a faith in the perfectibility of human societies ... [more]
The Starr Report has achieved stupendous bookstore sales -- in the brave new paperless world of the Internet. Why are people buying what they can get online for free? ... [more]
Hunter S. Thompson's big things are raising hell and taking drugs, and though he is now 61, neither hell nor ill-health will stop him ... [more]
"The fig in literature, the fig as metaphor," scoffs Dawkins in Climbing Mount Improbable. "People should stop wasting their time with literary criticism. There is genuine paradox and real poetry lurking in the fig" ... [more]
As Columbus said, stepping ashore, "I claim this land and these indigenous persons in the name of the Dow Jones Industrial Average." Something like that ... [more]
Even badly played, Beethoven, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff have enormous power. Does that explain the appeal of the pianist David Helfgott? ... [more]
So why does Richard Dawkins bother to get up in the morning when life boils down to the pitiless fact that we exist merely to replicate our own molecules? ... [more]
Among the watchful victims of the Holocaust, Victor Klemperer stands alone. Palestine repels him - he is outraged at the displacement of the indigenous Arab population ... [more]
Young Berkeley linguistics professor John McWhorter is an African-American with a razor-sharp mind and lots of guts. His stunning essay explains why Affirmative Action spells trouble ... [more]
With the fatwah against Salman Rushdie revoked, perhaps Cardinal O'Connor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel will reconsider their own condemnation of "blasphemy" ... [more]
If Hollywood had cast him, it would have been as Dr. Frankenstein: why toy with an invention so potentially dangerous? ... [more]
Julian Baggini expected Alan Sokal of the notorious Sokal's Hoax to be an aggressive intellectual prize-fighter. Instead, he enjoyed a cup of tea and a nice long chat ... [more]
The rich, creative Ian Frazier can be a monster: "I'm dealing on a daily basis with writing problems at a global level involving amounts of words and money of which the average person could have no grasp" ... [more]
Money is now the measure of all things in universities. Administrators pontificate about "excellence" while the bean counters in the back rooms call the shots ... [more]
Sentimentality -- a specifically Jewish sentimentality -- garnished Philip Roth's output from the start. In his newest novel, I Married a Communist, he ... [more]
Who owns the the rights to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech? A federal judge says we all do ... [more]
Is everything relative? Are there radically different knowledge strokes for culturally different knowing folks? Edward O. Wilson and Richard Rorty debate the issue ... [more]
Thomas Alva...Gates? Owning key motion picture patents, Edison tried to prevent filmmakers from using cameras and projectors made by his rivals, in an attempt to control the movie industry ... [more]
Rudolph Valentino died 72 years ago. Since then, his crypt has been continuously visited by Ladies in Black who leave flowers ... [more]
Texans Elect Gun -- Perky "Canada" Has Own Government, Laws -- Christ Announces Hiring of Associate Christ -- Marijuana Linked to Sitting Around, Getting High ... [much more]
If you prefer rigid categories (patients good, addicts bad), you may find this new book about Prozac unsettling ... [more]
At the core of the hard-drinking, hard-talking, hard-living Hunter S. Thompson is a moralist, a Puritan, even an innocent ... [more]
Nostalgia, myth-making, and outright lies are par for books about the 1960s. Here's one written with realism, style, humor, affection, and skepticism ... [more]
Does Britain need a Poet Laureate? The job once meant the creation of public poetry, but is such a thing even possible today? ... [more]
The $5 billion spent on computers in schools is actually holding back learning, according to a new study ... [more]
When Modern Language Association President Elaine Showalter confessed to a lifelong love of shopping in Vogue magazine, the feminist backlash was fierce ... [more]
Cleveland Amory, the Bostonian who wrote lovingly about animals and satirically about people, is dead ... [more]
Are blacks so hypersensitive, fragile, and immature they require taste police to decide what's funny? It's only a sitcom, says Larry Elder ... [more]
"Anything about George Orwell is interesting," said Cyril Connolly. His personality always shines through: eccentric, cussed, contrary, incurably English ... [more]
Why is Bill Moyers trying to destroy American poetry? His simpering festival of poets is full of well-meaning incompetents, nice people who unfortunately write poetry ... [more]
Flying saucers, alien abduction, quack medicine, and pseudoscience: it's all part of the curriculum at Temple University ... [more]
Just what is this thing called life? A mathematician and a physicist have different answers ... [more]
Here's a completely new view of today's economic life, with information and knowledge the prime commodities on offer, not guns and steel ... [more]
A student asks to study something her teacher knows to be intellectual garbage -- Roswell UFOs or astrology. How should a teacher deal with it? ... [more]
Move over, game theory, here comes drama theory. Going completely to pieces can have its uses ... [more]
Ever experience a really spooky coincidence? Haven't we all ... [more]
The time was when people inherited their stylistic preferences from their families. That was before Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Crate and Barrel, Martha Stewart, The Gap, and Banana Republic ... [more]
"Movies dramatize more class conflict than any other popular American genre--certainly more than TV, or politics," writes Robert Kuttner ... [more]
Frederick Crews is the psychoanalytic movement's worst nightmare made flesh: he knows the texts, is unimpressed by Freud's authority, and writes with peerless lucidity ... [more]
Food-for-the-needy programs are a feeble solution to hunger, assuaging liberal guilt and reinforcing the benighted conviction that private charity is an adequate response ... [more]
No other country has more trouble getting its own history straight than Vietnam. Robert Templer now provides a fine new guide ... [more]
Here's a new brand of feminist satire that compares dependence on Communism with dependence on Catholicism, defends fox hunting ... [more]
"Americans are surrounded by a blizzard of information. If you were inclined to lose your mind you could stay on the Internet all day," says David Remnick, the new editor of The New Yorker ... [more]
God is rapidly devolving from the awesome abstract Being of universal religion to the idiosyncratically personal construct of self-help psychology ... [more]
"Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice." Fire is the cosmological Big Crunch, ice the Big Chill, where the universe expands forever, the stars receding from each other in cold and darkness ... [more]
The late Thomas Kuhn was hero to all who prefer to describe scientific theories as social constructions, not so different from democracy or baseball. But physicist Steven Weinberg has reservations ... [more]
Angela Davis's history of the blues does sometimes gesture at the facts, but her obsession with race gets in the way ... [more]
Philosophers of music primarily concern themselves with masterpieces. Philosophers of film seem to enjoy discussing the worst ones ... [more]
Salman Rushdie understands far better than most cultural colonization, the need to refresh and reinterpret faith and tradition, the search for authenticity ... [more]
The sexy, glamorous world of opera has changed since Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi, but it's also stayed refreshingly the same ... [more]
The University of Chicago and other elite colleges are fundamentally amoral institutions, making no effort to give their students any moral guidance ... [more]
Radical feminists advocate the censorship of pornography. This will only add to the elements of mystification and the sacred that are already mixed up in pornography ... [more]
Mensa behaving badly: Lisa Jardine talks about attitudes toward gender and intelligence ... [more]
The Book-of-the-Month Club succeeded by pitting a desire for independent literary exploration against anxious reliance on advice from "an expert panel of judges" ... [more]
Intellectual Property: should we lock up copyright even tighter or, as some naive intellectuals want, abandon copyright altogether? ... [more]
The UFOs are coming, and when they take over, it will be "insectlike aliens in control, followed by other aliens, hybrids, abductees, and, finally, nonabductees" This is not joke ... [more]
In describing his marriage to Iris Murdoch, John Bayley retraces a journey of discovery made by a man and a woman ... [more]
"People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer'." Cynthia Ozick finds the question preposterous ... [more]
"You can't go to Wagner on Yom Kippur," my friends said with genuine horror. "Verdi or Mozart, bad enough, but never Wagner" ... [more]
Darkest Narnia: C.S. Lewis's books are reactionary and dishonest, argues Philip Pullman ... [more]
Soviet studies scholarship has been captured by revisionists who dismiss the idea that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian country as so much cold war humbug ... [more]
On daily radio, television, and I suppose, the Internet, it's the American way: find a fat finger to point and do anything but direct energy to sincere reflection or genuine study of any problem ... [more]
Will the synthesizer replace the orchestra? Edison was certain the real market for his gramophone was recordings of famous speeches and that musical recordings were a passing novelty ... [more]
Whiteness studies is a powder keg of a concept, clearly incendiary and potentially damaging ... [more]
Stephen J. Gould has the Burgess Shale all wrong, according to a new book that treats the guru of punctuated equilibrium with undisguised contempt ... [more]
If writers really wrote about what they know, they'd write less about sex and more about procrastination ... [more]
Could geology be the key to the authenticity of Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks? Ann C. Pizzorusso thinks so ... [more]
In 1918, a fourteen-year-old Rudolf Arnheim was lying in bed at night in his parents' home in Berlin when a bullet crashed through the window ... [more]
Did he really poison Mozart? Antonio Salieri has had a bum rap for over a century. Time to set things straight ... [more]
We live in the age of hermit terrorists like Osama Bin Ladin in his cave, or Matt Drudge in his Los Angeles apartment ... [more]
"To open William Trevor's new novel is to step into a rarefied world as of a perfect English garden where tea is served on a golden afternoon," writes Anita Desai ... [more]
"Working with light itself and using it as a painter's palette is no easy task," but it's worth the effort, writes holographic artist Rudie Berkhout ... [more]
The Carnegie-Mellon study showing Internet use causes depression has provoked the usual conclusion-jumping sweepstakes in the mass media ... [more]
Politicians and the media are obessed with giving the public what it wants. This has eradicated the language of skill, of surprise, risk, cunning and even failure ... [more]
Peter the Great took savage delight in executions and horrible tortures, and ordered spectacular excesses of debauchery. He also transformed Russia beyond recognition ... [more]
Why believe in God? Consider the immense medical benefits: greater longevity (even for believing smokers), better heart-rate, lower stress levels ... [more]
Publishing surprise: the upmarket end of British literary reviews shows the circulation of the London Review of Books within striking distance of the TLS ... [more]
Many academics adhere to a vision of scholarship baffling (at times laughable) to people beyond university walls. But cheap laughs can obscure real questions ... [more]
The American media system is spinning out of control in a hyper-commercialized frenzy, writes Robert W. McChesney ... [more]
Tampering with the words of a science-celebrity such as Stephen Hawking might not sound the most heinous of crimes, but people expect more honesty from environmentalists ... [more]
Belief in God is "a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic," writes Richard Dawkins ... [more]
Martin Gardner's mind is philosophical, at home with the most abstract concepts, yet his thinking and writing crackle with clarity -- lively, crisp, vivid ... [more]
Jonathan Freedland believes that America should be the rightful, shining city to inspire Britian ... [more]
Charles Rosen's enthusiasm for good food is nearly as boundless as his love of great music and literature ... [more]
Simone de Beauvoir's affair with Nelson Algren started with ardour and ended in bitterness--the "only truly passionate love in my life" was later repudiated as "a lie" ... [more]
Russian students have been characterized as apolitical and generally pro-market. That may be changing ... [more]
Sydney Smith once saw two women quarreling from attic windows across a narrow street. They'll never agree, he said. "They are arguing from different premises." But even sharing premises ... [more]
They didn't confuse him with Karl, but the FBI really did want to know if Groucho Marx was a member of the Communist Party ... [more]
James Murray, editor of the OED, did not know that his best contributor was incarcerated, both mad and a murderer ... [more]
The right has drawn most Darwinian ideas. It's time for the left to abandon its dream of the perfectibility of man and build on the enlightened self-interest inherent in our evolved nature, argues Peter Singer ... [more]
The U.S. is on its way to becoming a sort of economic and cultural junction point for the world's most talented peoples -- a duty-free zone for cultural interaction ... [more]
Though blacks score lower than whites on vocabulary, reading, and math tests, this gap is not an inevitable fact of nature ... [more]
Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works has been hailed as magnificent and damned with political smears and personal innuendo. Pinker answers two of his most vociferous critics ... [more]
David S. Landes argues that countries become rich through hard work, efficiency, clever management, and respect for market forces. Like the message or not, he shores it up with hundreds of pages of facts and reasoned argument ... [more]
The Supreme Court is broken into unyielding factions that have largely given up on a meaningful exchange, resorting to transparently deceitful and hypocritical arguments ... [more]
Here's a school where students are taught graffiti -- a rich artistic expression, so long as it's on someone else's property .... [more]
Madame Lewinsky: the Starr report owes much to 19th-century novels of adultery--Effie Briest, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Therese Raquin ... [more]
If the American Left could heal itself, then it might heal America. That's the belief that drives Richard Rorty's appeal for a real politics: a left-liberal politics ... [more]
Donald Foster caused a stir when he identified Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors. Now he's turning his computer skills on Shakespeare ... [more]
Love and lies in the academy. What happens when a student and her professor fall for each other? ... [more]
The New Yorker's Tina Brown will be a lot happier making movie deals and creating hype for the wiseguys of Celluloid City ... [more]
With our media culture now fair game for exploitation, we can look forward to the full-scale commercialization of ... [more]
Stephen Glass was a bright, prolific writer and prodigious reporter, with an eye for detail, an ear for language, and one fatal flaw ... [more]
Looking for an internship at an elite East Coast magazine? Read this first ... [more]
The sad irony is that liberal devotees of high-minded civic discourse have left the field almost entirely to conservatives... [more]
In nowhere but Berlin do people go so blithely and with such bad political judgment from upswing to upswing ... [more]
William Hogarth captures anticipation, regret, concupiscence, greed, delusion -- in a world of corsets and wigs, pills, prophylactics, vermin and pets ... [more]
Joyce Maynard's At Home in the World portrays J.D. Salinger as a dour crackpot, deflowering reluctant teens and tucking into frozen peas al fresco. To Ruth Shalit he seems on the contrary a prince of a man ... [more]
The Sierra Club's case against the global economy is deeply flawed, argues Jay R. Mandel ... [more]
Japanese xenophobia documented in this book is truly unworthy of a country that seeks to play a more important role in world affairs ... [more]
Praised by the New Yorker and Newsweek, The Nurture Assumption is actually a rambling, anecdotal memoir that reinforces America's lazy parenting ... [more]
If Kahlil Gibran is right about the universe, then we are all living in a banal and sentimental nightmare ... [more]
V.S. Naipaul's Beyond Belief is about "his unresolved struggles with the confusions, and, in the widest sense, the politics of his own story" ... [more]
The new film version of Lolita, writes Stanley Kaufmann, "coils and uncoils like a snake in the sun, sinuous, alluring" ... [more]
When Jerry Griffin, 49, an admissions counselor at the University of California at Davis, showed up for work wearing a skirt, he was told to take it off ... [more]
Los Angeles Times publisher Mark Willes wants to grade his editors and reporters on the number of quotes from women and minorities. Technology is now on his side ... [more]
What makes Marjorie Garber's Symptoms of Culture a worthwhile read is that in it she exhibits the best and worst of the cultural left .... [more]
"When you've seen anarchy," writes Theodore Dalrymple, "you properly value civilization." ... [more]
"Whiteness -- and I offer this more out of incredulousness than embarrassment -- was not a part of my formative awareness of myself," writes Sven Birkerts ... [more]
Harold Bloom denounces multiculturalists, camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, mock-feminists, commissars, and gender-and-power freaks. Marjorie Perloff thinks he has a point ... [more]
Labor Day isn't what it used to be, thanks to the "knowledge economy," writes Virginia Postrel...[more]
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