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How many words should a writer produce in a day? Depending on your point of view, 1000 is either pitifully idle or dangerously prolific ... [more]
Theory weary: sick of the clichés of postmodern true believers, the ALSC looks back to find the real future of the humanities ... [more]
Paul Bowles, whose name evoked dark Moroccan streets and scorching deserts, has died in Tangier at the age of 88. Obituaries: [London Times] ... [AP].
Technology, celebrity culture, pop therapies, and all that anxious mysticism: American life is even weirder than Wendy Kaminer imagined ... [more]
Had Robert Graves's female admirers and wannabe muses dared climb the hill to his house, they'd have met a surprise: his wife of 45 years ... [more]
Addicted to opium, drink, and a number of idealized and unattainable women, Coleridge was a man of extremes ... [more]
Is it the fog, the roiling sea? Those castle turrets? Why are the British so good at creating fantasy worlds like Harry Potter's? ... [more]
An embarrassed Party meeting in 1981 pronounced Chairman Mao 70% good and only 30% bad. All in all, a satisfactory report card ... [more]
While there may be deep clashes of intuition about the nature of rational inquiry, the so-called science wars are mostly just media hype ... [more]
What does she see in him? Falling in love remains a mystery, even in the harsh light of scientific analysis ... [more]
Modernism's artistic project must at last undo itself, says T.J. Clark. Still, our present is merely purgatory, not a permanent travesty of heaven ... [more]
With the economy booming and black jobless figures at historic lows, the welfare system should be in great shape. Not so, warns William Julius Wilson ... [more]
The classical nude is dead, says Linda Nochlin. She prefers newds, images that combine the idea of nude and with a sense of the lewd ... [more]
Seriously now, what would you say to a naked alien? Talk about its pretty spaceship? Ask about its mom and dad? Joel Achenbach has an idea or two ... [more]
Bad news for novelists. The fiction computers now produce is increasingly hard to tell from creations of the human mind. Matt Mirapaul explains ... [more]
Jonathan Yardley can admire Hillsdale College's refusal to be cowed by academic fashion. Too bad it hitched its wagon to a falling star ... [more]. See also Lingua Franca's classic God and Man at Hillsdale.
Some genius at Microsoft thought it logical to put the computer shutdown command under "Start." Then there's the guy who designed the Honeywell thermostat ... [more]
Jesse Jackson marched on Decatur, Illinois to fight for justice and against racism. His defeat will be a victory for America, says Alan Wolfe ... [more]
Closing in on 40, Judith Shulevitz has decided to eschew the fashion instinct toward girlishness and try to achieve the integrity of une femme d'un certain age ... [more]
Seldom has someone climbed so far so fast and collected so few enemies as David Remnick, a man who wears his ambition and erudition lightly ... [more]
Ask Oakland's tattooed punks what they think of Jerry Brown, and you'll find out that Mayor Moonbeam governs with an iron fist ... [more]
Political correctness has made taboo the very idea of beauty. Elaine Scarry wants to restore the place of the beautiful, and of trust, in the world ... [more]
Hillsdale College is a bastion of conservative tradition. But when the president's daughter-in-law loaded a .38 and blew her brains out ... [more]. Further details [here], [here], and [here]... [Further background].
Stalin liked to flick through a photo album of those marked down for arrest so he could review the NKVD's ideas for punishment ... [more]
What is the present tense of "wrought," as in the line from Judges, "What hath God wrought"? Steven Pinker has the surprising answer ... [more]
Let it be admitted that The Complete Idiot's Guide to Being Psychic at least declares its honest regard for its readership ... [more]
How thoughtful of the folks at the NY Times to have an ethicist to help us with life's moral decisions. But why is this chap giving advice at all? ... [more]
Richard Yates's elegant novels have slipped out of print. Once called the voice of his generation, he now belongs to that august, sad category: the writer's writer ... [more]
Dave Letterman isn't a jackass, he's a talented guy trapped in a jackass role, a format that is sheer self-torture. Here's some advice on an exit strategy ... [more]
James Fallows loves the free lunch of information on the Web, including an "amazing" site that dramatically shows the medium's power to surprise ... [more]
Ladies! Find happiness in dusting and sewing on buttons. Let Mrs. Mendelson help you to discover the secret pleasures of domesticity ... [more]
"Look at it this way: you're a woman and I'm a millionaire." New Yorker cartoons chart the social and sexual history of the twentieth century ... [more]
It says little for free inquiry in higher education when an anti-racist college teacher in the midst of teaching an anti-racist lesson gets fired for racism ... [more]
Of all the Disney artists to render Mickey Mouse, the best was Paul Murry, whose classic strips and comic books of the 1950s are unexcelled ... [more]
Harold Pinter's thermostat is set somewhere between a steady simmer and a rolling boil of fury. Simply mention "Margaret Bloody Thatcher" and he's off ... [more]
Mistah Eliot - he dead. That's the message the natives are sending back about the toppling of a great modern poet ... [more]
Ted Kaczynksi: both vain and cruel, he sees his role as king of the anarchists as a reward for blowing people up ... [more]
More than just pop music changed forever in the 1960s, says David Remnick. Consider sports writing and the rise of Muhammad Ali ... [more]
It was a simple story on the Unabomber. But at Talk life is complicated. You see, Disney's making a Unabomber film and owns Miramax, which owns Talk, so Tina ... [more]
Harry Keeler's mysteries give us a world that is idiotic, to be sure, but also pleasingly weird and lunatic. Here are crimes whose solutions are exquisitely unreal ... [more]
Natural childbirth purists find moral superiority in refusing pain relief. Labor is a performance, and spurning palliatives is an emblem of virtue ... [more]
The fight against poverty requires that we reject both the libertarian illusion that private charity can do all and liberal suspicion of religious social services ... [more]
We're supposed to vote with dollars, says Douglas Rushkoff. But it would be a pity if our only sense of power was the power to consume ...
[more]
It's the wealth he's achived, not his mandarin bookishness, that gives Jason Epstein authority in the publishing world. This man's made real money ... [more]
Who were the first Americans? Theories being floated today would have been laughed out of the lecture hall fifty years ago ... [more]
Jazz was accepted early on as art, though its improvised nature meant criticism and scholarship were slow to develop, and to identify its masterpieces ... [more]
When Albert Camus was killed, an unfinished novel lay in the wreckage of his car. Fifty years later, his daughter decided to publish it ... [more]
With biblical prophecy and creationist geology as his guides, Hayseed
Stevens is now only one well short of finding the greatest oil field on Earth ... [more]
P.D. James was only ten when she saw her first dead body, a drowned schoolboy. It crystallized in her a detached fascination with death ... [more]
The improvised signing of deaf children in Nicaragua shows that the capacity to generate language is hard-wired in the brain ... [more]
The absurd politics of postwar South Africa inspired Booker Prize winner J.M. Coetzee to create a body of work of enormous complexity ... [more]. News report, click here.
Testimony was accepted as the authentic life of Dmitri Shostakovich, dictated by himself, before scholarly opinion went against it. Now the tide is turning again ... [more]
It's the dirty little secret of the great auction houses: mega-buck
art sales that go sour after the crack of the auctioneer's gavel ... [more]
The Information Revolution is at the point now where the Industrial Revolution was in 1820, says Peter Drucker. The microchip is our steam engine ... [more]
It's no use moaning about shallow, dumbed-down news. The Cold War is over and it's entirely rational to be less concerned with serious news ... [more]
A colleague was stunned but relieved when an economist revealed he was changing his sex: "I thought for a moment you were converting to socialism" ... [more]
Multitainment, face-lifts for all, Star Wars a box office hit, and Asia has a lot of potential! Ad industry gurus predict your future ... [more]
Out-of-brain experience: you are having one right now as you watch a movie in your head, currently starring Arts & Letters Daily ... [more]
A lover's quarrel with America: of all the leaders who've appealed to citizens threatened by change, Eugene Debs was easily the most decent ... [more]
V.S. Naipaul immortalized his father in his work, even if it meant cheating him in life. Not pretty, but that's literature for you ... [more]
Slouching toward the Ouija Board: a new life of Yeats proves that bad seances can make great poetry ... [more]
Jonathan Glover's history of the 20th century is a catalogue of evil and a study of the psychology and politics that can drive cultures mad ... [more]
James Hewitt, who ate from Princess Diana's cat bowl, and more, is a stunningly dim chap. He now tells their story ... [more]
Why do women spend so much time with the kids, or weeping, or looking out the window? Why don't they just accept that they're responsible for evil? ... [more]
The academics who denied the Gulag deserve the same scorn, says Robert Conquest, that we heap on anti-Semites who still deny the Holocaust ... [more]
In universities of the future, the faculty will be software icons: "Click on the professor, and let him take you to the world that he knows" ... [more]
Vaclav Havel and his fellow dissidents were not politicians, but rather philosophers, writers, and misfits: oppositionist trouble makers ... [more]
Millennialism is an abiding demon of the human mind. We search for order, and find it; expect havoc, and wreak it ... [more]
Simon Schama's massive new book on Rembrandt has sizzling special effects amid its tons of verbiage. But where precisely is the argument? ... [more]
How did the Berkeley's English Department become a campus joke? Andrew Delbanco on the decline and fall of literature ... [more]
Philosophy rejects the projects of Frege, Russell, and Davidson, and yet honors them. Imagine physicists honoring the makers of failed hypotheses ... [more]
John Naughton's history of the Internet starts in exactly the right place, with the wonder and romance of seeing vast distances conquered ... [more]
If Orwell gave us the moral justification for clear writing, it was Wm. Strunk and E.B. White who showed, in their terse and elegant way, how to do it ... [more]
All that is solid melts into air. As the century comes to a close, modernism in the arts is being replaced by ... uh ... who knows what ... [more]
The sweetest gooseberries, shiny and plump, may yet be sour enough to shrivel the human soul. Theodore Dalrymple reflects on art, life, and his father ... [more]
Thomas Sowell's arguments are free of moral bullying and his tone is a model of open-minded respect. Liberals who fail to engage him do themselves a disservice ... [more]
The melting pot: it is real, it works, and it is more than ever necessary to the future health of American civil society, says Ron Unz ... [more]
Jews think any Jew who's more religious than they are is crazy, writes Philip Weiss. Give up Saturday? Pray with phylacteries, leather straps and all? ... [more]
Does American music have a heritage of greatness, or is it one of mediocrity, propped up by patriotic and moral conceits of the musical establishment? ... [more]
What do a Jesuit priest, a Canadian media theorist, and Darwin II all have in common? The meticulous Tom Wolfe constructs the answer ... [more]
Teen pregnancy is down, crime is plummeting, and jobs are plentiful. So why do we insist on being miserable? Andrew Sullivan would like to know ... [more]
The naked body, with the raw, primitive feelings it arouses, is the most difficult, unfamiliar, uncanny, and slippery of objects, writes Donald Kuspit ... [more]
George W. Bush isn't the brightest intellectual light ever to run for the White House. But are the smartest presidents always the best? ... [more]
Lingering death scenes were once common in films. Now eating and screwing abound, while thousands die quickly on screen. All we deeply care for is trivialized ... [more]
UN monitors ought to supervise American elections, which look more like a banana republic plebiscite than any true democracy, says Chris Hitchens ... [more]
It seems that Susan Faludi has gone all marshmallow on men. Is this feminist outreach, or did she just find some handsome fella to look after her? ... [more]
The real threat of the e-book is not to the paper volume. It's free access to information in the public library that's endangered, says Julian Dibbell ... [more]
Ask the public to list the greatest films of all time, and they name Star Wars first, with Titanic next. What a sorry lot the public are ... [more]
She's tiny and softspoken, and uses her unthreatening manner to deliver a radical message: why Susan Faludi should be Pat Buchanan's running mate ... [more]
Hot Air Doctorate? A grad program to train "public intellectuals" has been greeted with ridicule. But Judith Shulevitz finds it not such a bad idea ... [more]
Good politics, Hannah Arendt thought, should neither invade the fragile domain of friendship nor force into public view the shadowy recesses of the human heart ... [more]
"Why the hell should you feel anything?" she asked. "Men don't. Oh sure, I'd like to, but what's the point?" Wendy Shalit on Sex and the City ... [more]
HIV is easy to avoid. But viruses know how to find an open sore and exploit folly and the intoxicant of lust. Consider the case of Jim ... [more]
Stalin, who badly wanted the atomic bomb, ordered Beria to leave the physicists alone. "They're doing the job," he said. "We can always shoot them later" ... [more]
Philosophy won't kill theology, Albert Camus thought. Religion is best countered by a belief that one cannot, must not believe in God ... [more]
Pianist Ivo Pogorelich was booed in Philadelphia for an odd bit of Rachmaninoff. Better than being doused with Gatorade ... [more]. Earlier report, click here.
A problem endemic to our democratic republic is that citizens take freedom of choice to mean complete freedom of action, writes Herbert London ... [more]
In 1887, Edward Bellamy wrote a utopian fantasy of America in the year 2000. His vision included fine music wired into homes everywhere ... [more]
We may find it convenient to make distinctions, says Muhammad Ali, but it's like counting drops in the ocean or classifying the leaves on a tree ... [more]
A deluge of criticism: there have never been more chances than now to write and read about books. And never have reviews been more erratic, says Richard B. Woodward ... [more]
Smart, sexy, stylish: the vanguard of the conservative counter-revolution deflect the challenges of liberal feminism while pretending to speak for its next generation ... [more]
All-American wimps. How can you respect a species of manhood that is so pampered, primped, and perfumed? US macho is mostly bluff, says Andrew Stephen ... [more]
Dream on, Redmond. If Gates's guys think computer screens are ever going to supplant the bound paper book, they should think again, says John Motavalli ... [more]
Brooklyn's "Sensation" show won't let children in without an adult. Arthur Danto thinks it should have been No adult will be admitted without a child ... [more]
The supermodel reading of Keats: beauty, meaning prettiness or allure, defines truth. This idea might have convinced Hamlet, but Ron Rosenbaum has doubts ... [more]
An obsession with the purely personal is the motif of our times, says Charles Krauthammer. It is trivializing politics. Consider Nixon's "anti-Semitism" ... [more]
Tomik Straussler was born in Moravia in 1937. Mother never exactly said they were Jewish, but he managed to work out how he became an Englishman named Tom Stoppard ... [more]
Wealth on a small scale: there's a species of fly, says Stephen Jay Gould, in which the male presents his lady with a gift of food wrapped in silk ... [more]
Czech intellectuals languish in poverty, while standards of public debate in the Czech Republic are set by jumped-up, semi-literate young journalists, says Jan Culik ... [more]
Teleology, the idea of purpose in nature, has been on the back foot since the 17th century. But it's not dead yet, even in physics. Jim Holt explains ... [more]
Economic impact studies, used by enthusiasts to argue for state support of the arts, are a dangerous two-edged sword, according to Tara Zahra ... [more]
Snake oil and holy water: to an honest judge, says Richard Dawkins, the marriage of religion and science is a shallow, empty, spin-doctored sham ... [more]
Piano artistry needs more than a passion for music: there's a love of the physical sense of playing, the contact with metal, wood, and ivory, says Charles Rosen ... [more]
Rudy vs The Elephant Dung: stock characters hurl abuse and feign hurt, secretly gleeful at the publicity. Jacob Weisberg meditates on a well-staged scandal ... [more]
Since the chance of an election being decided by a single vote is almost nil, why should any citizen bother to vote? Ask your nearest rational choice theorist ... [more]
Alfred Hitchcock teases his audience with suspense while assuring it, in the manner of traditional epic, of the ultimate triumph of justice ... [more]
The position of "Honorary Academic" of the Russian Academy of Science isn't cheap, but like many other post-communist honors, it is for sale ... [more]
Return to Aida, The Heart of Darkness, or Kim after reading Edward Said and you'll find them richer and stranger than ever, says A.O. Scott ... [more] For an interview with Said, click here.
Brain wave: suppose all that was thought to happen in your left lobe took place in your right instead? Would it make any difference? Jerry Fodor's been wondering ... [more]
A jerk on the line: watching, waiting, discriminating. The art of fishing, argues Robert Hughes, is a lesson in life ... [more]
Distrust of government is endemic in American thinking. It can be healthy, or it can poison the atmosphere of civic life ... [more]
For Thomas Sowell, it's the great non sequitur of our age: if something is wrong, it's up to the government to set it right ... [more]
Though there's been no big outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe since 1720, the disease still looms large in our imagination ... [more]
The writing of the young Ernest Hemingway was wonderful. But to say it now is a mere ritual, and a stick to beat what Papa later became ... [more]
When Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer had a punch-up at a gathering, the host complained. A guest told him, "Shut up, the fight is making your party" ... [more]
A. L. Rowse, a fine historian, rose from poverty to become one of Oxford's most respected dons. He was also spiteful, boasting, and self-righteous ... [more]
The fashion industry puts more creativity into marketing clothing than into the apparel itself: the victory of consumerism over couture ... [more]
Churchill couldn't with Britain alone win WWII. But his stubborn defiance of Hitler in May 1940 made him at least the man who didn't lose it ... [more]
Hitler's Pope? Chris Hitchens (further down this column) says Pius XII should be damned. Jesuit historian Peter Gumpel thinks he should be sainted ... [more] Joe Sobran also weighs in ... [yet more]
What pathetic, sad victims men are. Colorful male behavior simply masks hidden wounds. Nurse Faludi has you diagnosed, boys. Line up for your shots ... [more]
A proper utopia has great food (fruit and veggies) and no money to cause strife. Reason governs all and the sex is as fine as the weather ... [more]
Why do some fall to heart disease and others remain healthy? Fat, smoking, high blood pressure? Matt Ridley says look at the pecking order at work ... [more]
C.S. Lewis understood the idea of divine forgiveness as simple and absolute: the noonday sun which casts no shadow ... [more]
The dark rhetoric of eugenics in China today echoes other places, other times: millions of "defectives" who are "burdens" to society ... [more]
Antonio Damasio doesn't regard language as the wellspring of consciousness. For him, the source is closer to emotion, a feeling of knowing that we have feelings ... [more]
Zeppelins may fly us into the future. Not all advanced aircraft are entirely new. Here's a prewar flying technology that's coming round again ... [more]
The Rorschach Chronicles: tests for traits of personality are as
dodgy as ever. But that
doesn't keep naive employers from believing they work ... [more]
How dark were the Dark Ages? What did the world look like at the turn of the last millennium? What can Y2K technology tell us about Y1K life? ... [more]
David Hockney claims that artists including Caravaggio and Velazquez used lenses and that art historians don't want to know about it ... [more]
The scruffy old Russian Tea Room is now a glistening Winter Palace, a dream of etched glass, mirrors, gilded candelabras, Beluga and champagne ... [more]
Out of the whorehouse and into the concert hall: tango has classical musicians trooping to Buenos Aires as if it were a musical Lourdes ... [more]
Desmond Morris once drew an absurdist picture of human beings as sexually obsessed, vain, deceitful, and aggressive. These days, he's mellowed ... [more]
The inner idiot savant: you too could learn a dozen languages or play the complete works of Bach, if only you'd stop trying to be so clever ... [more]
Extend today's trends, and Japan's population will be down to 500 people at the next millennium bash. World population decline requires a whole new outlook ... [more]
As both revolutionary and renegade, Milovan Djilas lived long enough to see his central political insights confirmed: in the end, Communism overthrew itself ... [more]
A newly discovered 1817 quartet miniature in B minor by Beethoven, soon to be sold at Sotheby's, has received its first performance. Hear it here.
Paul Kurtz has been in foxholes under fire and he's still a happy atheist. This apostle of godless morality is now leading a revolution on campus ... [more]
Americans are supposed live in a global village, but you'd never know it from the dismal sales of foreign fiction: it's publishing's black hole ... [more]
If Mozart piped into mother's womb causes baby to kick, what's the kid trying to say? Maybe, Turn off that racket! ... [more]
Despite liberal orthodoxy, Harvard still harbors a flinty right wing: contentious, mordant, and politically incorrect on a cosmic scale ... [more]
Improving the human race with genetics is a sensitive subject in Germany. Just raise the topic and you may hear shouts of "Fascist!" ... [more]
Just how new is the "new economy"? Andrew Carnegie would be a good man to ask. He soared to fabled wealth on the technology of his day ... [more]
A rag-tag volunteer army is battling Microsoft's war machine for the heart and soul of your computer. The outcome is still in doubt, says John Naughton ... [more]
The plagiarist explained he'd "internalized" a column by Bryan Appleyard. Internalized a walk Appleyard took through Newark airport? ... [more]
Charles Saatchi makes his own art world. He snaps up young artists, creating a movement. Next, he gets the Royal Academy to show his collection. Then Christie's steps in ... [more]
As he stared into a box in the Kiev archive, Christoph Wolff knew he'd found his Holy Grail: the lost musical estate of C.P.E. Bach ... [more]
Did the sickly Chopin write pornographic letters to the Countess Delphina Potocka? The truth may be unknown, but that's never stopped a filmmaker ... [more]
Günter Grass, the novelist ìwhose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history,î has won the Nobel Prize for Literature ... [AP] ... [WP] ... [AFP]... [LT] ... [NYT]
George Steiner, polymath, critic, and prophet, may well be one of the cleverest men in the world, but he is not among the most courteous ... [more]
China's wasted years: the Communist Party's path of blood began in 1930. Neither the battle against Chiang nor the Japanese war can justify the cruelty ... [more]
Fans included Clark Gable, Hillary Clinton, and Alan Greenspan. But fans weren't enough for Ayn Rand. She longed for intellectual respectability ... [more]
Trapped in his twisted car, Robert Hughes could feel the cold proximity of death: nothing pleasant, no bright light, no angelic presence ... [more]
Postmodern opera cuts off what you hear from what you see. You hear The Marriage of Figaro, but you see a Trump Tower laundry room ... [more]
Everything you know about the Littleton killings is wrong. Blacks and Christians were not targeted. There was no Trench Coat Mafia ... [more]
Judith Rich Harris says parents have less to do with the personalities of their children than most people would like to think. Is her view extremist? ... [more]
Foucault and Kerouac are two of the authors most likely to be pilfered from bookshops. Ron Rosenbaum knows what he'd steal ... [more]
American education is in crisis! Latest test results a wake-up call! Such panics are a ritual repeated in every decade since the 1940s ... [more]
Ted Hughes's pursuit of Emma Tennant, through expensive lunches and cheap hotels, was desultory. She even had to pay their last hotel bill ... [more]
Michael Frayn's Headlong views rural England as a domestic Transylvania, where normality can't survive an uneasy night or an innocuous dinner party ... [more]
Colette's hunger for life was voracious: a gauzy whirl of fabulous parties and lovers of both sexes, soaring always toward a law written by herself for herself ... [more]
The English essay began with Bacon in the 17th century, and despite the pressures of academic jargon, it is a form that flourishes still ... [more]
Biographers may make up characters to dramatize stories, but the line between fiction and fact must be kept clear. Consider the new Reagan biography ... [more]
His was a bitter hard childhood, but Jim Clark says, "I really don't give a shit about the past." With a net worth greater than Portugal's, why should he? ... [more]
If we want to meet the challenges of the future, argues Neil Postman, we need to build a bridge back to the 18th century ... [more]
Austrian girls keep apple slices in their armpits during dances and present them at evening's end for the pleasure of their chaps. But then what? ... [more]
Shakespeare's history plays: greedy, aristocratic bullies, ruthless treachery, and beheaded corpses. Here's a guide to the carnage ... [more]
What's striking about today's intellectuals, says Wendy Kaminer, is their utter failure to criticize, much less satirize, America's romance with God ... [more]
Why is Russia so unlike the West? Richard Pipes has a simple but dramatic answer: it failed to develop the Western concept of private property ... [more]
Ted Hughes's language could reek of blood, guts, and cruelty. The odor suited him well as a translator of Aeschylus ... [more]
James Gleick overrates the speed of our lives. Our fast cars get caught in traffic. We have the Internet, but still wait for sluggish downloads ... [more]
Karl Marx once fought a duel with pistols. Had the other chap been a better shot, Europe would be a different place today ... [more]
Pompeii wasn't the Marie CÈleste of the ancient world, with boiled eggs still on the table. Most people had cleared out. Those who remained are an enigma ... [more]
Faith isn't omnipotent, writes John Horgan, nor is it always benign. Religion is a fine therapy, but also foments intolerance. As for science ... [more]
Censorship always censors the wrong things for the wrong reasons and produces, after some delay, the opposite of the intended effect, writes James Bowman ... [more]
Harry wouldn't let the Reds destroy the country he loved, and so put his life where his convictions were. He died an unknown soldier of the cold war, says John Le Carrè ... [more]
When a hundred women entered the British Parliament in 1997, Fay Weldon expected a new kind of politics. But it's just "Yes, Tony ... No, Tony ... Smile at me, Tony" ... [more]
It's not vulgarity or decay that so much affects American culture, says S.T. Karnick. It's polarization: the good is better, the evil worse ... [more]
Every period has its columnist, and ours is Maureen Dowd. She is perfectly suited to the temper of the day. Hey, is that a compliment, or what? ... [more]
When Jasmina Tesanovic visited her father in a Belgrade hospital, the young man in the next bed died. "Grab his covers," her father said, "I have none" ... [more]
Catherine Breillat has created a landmark with Romance, the first movie to give a convincing account of sex from a woman's point of view ... [more]
Sentiment is a poor basis for law, and a dangerous tool in politics. Maybe some unwinnable wars are best left unfought. Andrew Sullivan on hate crimes ... [more]
Wherein lies the truth of oral history? In the raw, fresh memory of an event, or a memory bathed in the light of wisdom that comes with distance? ... [more]
School's back, and this year it's fun! No more boring books. If students can't read Shakespeare, they'll do sonnets with macaroni letters on colored paper ... [more]
In the US you get all the justice you can afford. That's why prisons aren't overrun with business executives and corporate felons ... [more]
Just when you thought it had gone as low as it can go, TV pulls its pants down and swears at you. How else to get people's attention? ... [more]
The French gladly swallow all that hops, slithers, or crawls, so long as it does so on French soil. As for Idaho beef and Florida tomatoes ... [more]
Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey, Bruno Bettelheim: the long-term value of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique is compromised by its reliance on bad authorities ... [more]
"If you write one story," Edgar Rice Burroughs said, "it may be bad. If you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor" ... [more]
She saw the implications of the Babbage computer and drew plans for flying machines: Ada Lovelace was a woman more for our time than hers ... [more]
Freeman Dyson thinks that women's freedom was set back by the advent of domestic appliances in the 1950s: no more servants to do the chores ... [more]
Bells mark out both space and time. Feelings once ran high for local village bells, symbols of rootedness, tolling life and death ... [more]
Rock & roll was born in a blinding flash in 1954, when country and western, blues, and gospel mutated in the body of a Memphis truck driver ... [more]
The Japanese were always quick to adapt. In the ruins of Nagasaki, locals joined the US military in sponsoring a Miss Atomic Bomb beauty contest ... [more]
E. M. Cioran didn't think language could get at the world's brute reticence, but he did admire the flickering beauty of the aphorism ... [more]
Poet Chris Logue's memoirs are confession, self-insult, and public nose picking: sordid stories redeemed by sly, laconic humor ... [more]
How cute! Adventures in Marxism comes with canary yellow covers, Toys 'R' Us lettering, and an adorable cartoon of Karl himself leaping with glee ... [more]
Sweeping vistas, battles packed with action, and crowds jostling for tickets: the panorama was the 19th century's movie, big and democratic ... [more]
When a scientist fakes his data, peers ought to catch him out. But in the case of the supposed link between electromagnetic fields and cancer ... [more]
If opera arose, in some measure, as the secular equivalent to the Mass, does that mean that the state shouldn't fund it either? ... [more]
Sue Leaf wanted only to build a simple, natural, solar-heated house that wouldn't harm the environment. It was a noble ideal ... [more]
A few years ago, a patrol guard's donkey slipped down a hole and revealed one of the most spectacular caches of mummies ever found in Egypt ... [more]
Margaret Drabble's tidy, hi-tech study is far from husband Michael Holroyd's book-strewn den. That way neither writer can hear the other's cries of triumph or despair ... [more]
Goethe was not just a poet, but a bureaucrat, and a rather illiberal one. He approved of police spies and the sale of prisoners to the British ... [more]
Suppose you could, for very little effort, save another's life. Would you bother? And are you certain the answer is "yes"? Peter Singer asks ... [more]
Fired in the crucible of the Civil War, Lincoln's deep and majestic Second Inaugural is work of a man at peak of his creativity ... [more]
Gender stereotypes: it turns out that we don't impose them on our children after all. They impose them on us ... [more]
Anyone who worries about having enough self-esteem is, ipso facto, a lost soul, writes Theodore Dalrymple. It's a repulsive form of egocentrism ... [more]
Nothing is more ominous in the museum world today than the announcement of a grandiose Strategic Plan in capital letters ... [more]
In the old days, says Dave Barry, we used to actually charge money for our newspapers. Ha ha! What an outdated, low-tech, non-digital concept! ... [more]
Online college courses are parodies: no real contact with faculty, no real doing, no real excitement. This won't last for long, says Roger Schank ... [more]
It's not critics who have gone soft, toothless, and uncritical, argues Norman Lebrecht, but the makers and providers of art ... [more]
For a pianist, a grand piano is an elegant black figure, a mistress or lover, flashing its teeth, saying, "Come and spend a little time with me" ... [more]
Water-stained and gnawed by rats, the record kept by the town clerk of Quercy in 1352 is a gripping account of The Hundred Years War ... [more]
If there were any logic in this world, cry the Anglo-Saxons, France ought by now to have collapsed. It does everything wrong ... [more]
Edward Albee was deeply hurt by the charge that as a gay writer he had invented "a two-sex version of the one sex experience" ... [more]
Of the more than 800 varieties of apple found in America in the mid-19th century only 30 distinct types are now being grown ... [more]
Jedediah Purdy paints an ugly picture of the ironist as a wary, shallow, and detached soul. So why does he praise Montaigne? ... [more]
Virgil's Eclogues were to be singular, elusive, and evanescent - a strange mixture of actuality and artifice, both realistic and fantastic ... [more]
Although they've a long heritage, sequels are newly popular in our post-most things age. We all want to know what happens after The End ... [more]
What drives Gore Vidal's sexual politics is a kind of haughty libertinism. Agree with him or not, he's a hard man to like ... [more]
From Susan Faludi's Stiffed to a new Frank McCourt, there's a striking feature about the upcoming fall books: they’re about men ... [more]
The difficulty that many teachers college grads have with general knowledge tests reveals their thin veneer of learning, their lack of a systematic mastery of any subject ... [more]
It was Galileo's mean and spiteful manner, his knack for enmity, that got him into trouble, and not his scientific views ... [more]
The world's most famous bank guard rescued the wartime ledgers from a Zurich shredder; angry Swiss fellow citizens have driven him abroad ... [more]
Edward Said is accused of "outright deception and of artful obfuscation" in serving up a wildly distorted account of his Palestinian childhood ... [more]
Rich countries can afford to snub GM crop technology. Small, struggling farmers in Africa can't. Take, for example, the witchweed menace ... [more]
Donna Karan's new NYC store is a living life-style infomercial and tourist theme park. Donna's taste can be your taste. If you want it ... [more]
They evacuated the city and called out the explosives experts. But surprise! The population bomb turned out to be a dud ... [more]
Of the more than 800 varieties of apple found in America in the mid-19th century only 30 distinct types are now being grown ... [more]
Jedediah Purdy paints an ugly picture of the ironist as a wary, shallow, and detached soul. So why does he praise Montaigne? ... [more]
Virgil's Eclogues were to be singular, elusive, and evanescent — a strange mixture of actuality and artifice, both realistic and fantastic ... [more]
Although they've a long heritage, sequels are newly popular in our post-most things age. We all want to know what happens after The End ... [more]
What drives Gore Vidal's sexual politics is a kind of haughty libertinism. Agree with him or not, he's a hard man to like ... [more]
Edward Said is accused of "outright deception and of artful obfuscation" in serving up a wildly distorted account of his Palestinian childhood ... [more]
Rich countries can afford to snub GM crop technology. Small, struggling farmers in Africa can't. Take, for example, the witchweed menace ... [more]
They evacuated the city and called out the explosives experts. But surprise! The population bomb turned out to be a dud ... [more]
Donna Karan's new NYC store is a living life-style infomercial and tourist theme park. Donna's taste can be your taste. If you want it ... [more]
If the factory devalued the hand, and science demoted the eye, Marcel Duchamp wanted an art where they counted for nothing at all ... [more]
That they want to fight wars to save people, not property, is a charge liberals should be happy to plead guilty to, writes William Saletan ... [more]
There was once a national popular culture, says Joseph Epstein. Not a youth culture and an adult culture, but a popular culture shared by all ... [more]
Jobs in the modern world corrode character, argues Richard Sennett: all that teamwork and challenge. Oh, for the days of the assembly line ... [more]
To foreigners, the US looks a confident, even cocky, country, with its big cars and plump people. From inside, the view is different ... [more]
Astronaut Gods, faces on Mars, secret codes in the Bible: it looks like the human race has been abducted by idiots from outer space ... [more]
Bother civility! Rude remarks have exposed the vice lurking beneath the polished surface of many a politely smiling hypocrite ... [more]
The Israeli officer was about to stamp Edmund Wilson's passport, but hesitated: "I think your date for the Dead Sea scrolls is about 50 years off" ... [more]
Life as a warm and caring telephone psychic seemed fine. All that personal drama, and besides, the money was good. Then one day, Teneecia called ... [more]
Science of adjectives: the very idea of personality is like a pointillist painting. Look closely and the clarity dissolves ... [more]
How the building would look in collapse sold Sir John Soane’s design for the Bank of England. Ruins are a paradox of decay and triumph ... [more]
Acts of vengeance are common after a war, as law and authority evaporate. They're not easy either to condemn or to condone ... [more]
George Orwell was a misfit by conviction, writes John Carey. He saw that nobody with a critical intelligence could be anything else ... [more]
Culture requires creative tumult. Masterpieces arise from amid loads of violent junk. Ban the junk and lose the genius, claims Virginia Postrel ... [more]
Animals do think, solving problems, making decisions, attaining ends. The problem is to figure out how they manage it without language ... [more]
If a judge can throw a spanner into any proposed social experiment, argues Richard Posner, how will we ever find out what works and what doesn't? ... [more]
Mediterranean hedonism is a natural, organic outgrowth of climate and culture. The northern European variety is an ideology, a deliberate reaction to puritan restraint ... [more]
If artistic success is measured in ink, a sure way to draw press notice is to hang a dead horse from the ceiling ... [more]
The mandarin, repugnant E. H. Carr's books give off a dank British chill, with their technocrat's sense of being superior to mere morality ... [more]
In villages all over India, low caste Hindus are asserting themselves, with tit-for-tat murders so common the situation is near to civil war ... [more]
Despite the posters folks will hang in their bedrooms, when it comes to shopping for religion, few really want to take the road less traveled ... [more]
Spies brag — the agents they've recruited, the documents they've swiped. Not to put too fine a point on it, they make things up ... [more]
As their parents worried over their divorces, the children of the 1970s roamed the streets of Manhattan, half-feral, half-indulged ... [more]
Karl Popper argued that values come from methods: a cautious attitude induces humility, an open hypothesis, tolerance ... [more]
Only in sport can kinds of violence and verbal abuse which would be illegal on the street be wholly within the law ... [more]
Enter a contest, mail off an entry fee, then sit around and wait. It's not glamorous, but it's your best bet to get your poems published ... [more]
When smart black students fail to perform, the explanation may be stereotype threat. Claude Steele has devised some clever experiments ... [more]
Behind the angelic smiles, the dolphin lifestyle is filled with violence and sex, kidnapping is common and gang warfare rife ... [more]
Something of a Scottish Italo Calvino, Iain M. Banks likes the "twiddly bits" of novel writing, "the cunning stuff that has hidden meanings" ... [more]
The neoliberal experiment — a naive and doomed Reagan-era vision of an ungoverned world order — is a failure, says James K. Galbraith ... [more]
Americans who watch TV and drink beer don't deserve the novelists who complain they're bad material for fiction, writes Alexander Star ... [more]
For Whom the Sell Trolls: the new Ernest Hemingway home furnishings collection! The cozy breakfast nook, inspired by the passionate writings of ... [more]
Peter Suber is a skeptic who lacks anxiety for closure, unfazed by the inability of philosophers to reach agreement or produce scientific answers ... [more]
No "curse," just some bad luck. No "destiny," just ambitions. No foiled "dream," only the hopes of an American dynasty, says Andrew Sullivan ... [more]
Functionalism was a poison pill for architects, a misreading of the design intentions of nature — which are profligately rococo ... [more]
“A middle siz’d spare man” read the WANTED poster. Daniel Defoe, inventor of the modern novel, was called a ferret, a sneak, a public menace ... [more]
Honorary survivorship — knowing one might have been among Hitler's victims — has become the most important feature of US Jewish identity ... [more]
Who but Ed Hillary would announce his ascent of earth's supreme peak with the radiant words, "Well George, we knocked the bastard off" ... [more]
If Jesse Ventura hugged a tree, he'd kill it. He probably doesn't know what tofu is. An odd politician for the land of Lutheran guilt ... [more]
Politics isn't corrupted by spin, it is spin. And lies are soldiers of freedom in a fight against the despotic character of truth ... [more]
Was a bad review to blame for Randall Jarrell's depression and even death? Authors have to be ready for ax-murder reviews ... [more]
In the Age of Exploration, a "new found land" was often moral or imaginary, as the fad for literary geography, poets' maps, took hold ... [more]
Douglas Adams — "Six foot five and worth the climb" — has stars in his eyes. Disney is to produce The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy ... [more]
Nicaraguans will use "poet" to greet friends, as Australians might use "mate." Despite illiteracy, or because of it, poetry thrives in that poor land ... [more]
That people are loyal to brands they can tell apart only by their packets doesn't make consumerism a trivial thing ... [more]
The CD re-release of all those great artists of the 1950s and 60s — Callas, Cliburn, Bernstein — seemed like such a fine idea for classical music ... [more]
The myth of the book glut hides the fact that publishers serve the mass market no better than in ages past ... [more]
Indifference to politics is a great human quality. It may be okay to just scratch along, paying no heed to public affairs, writes Ronald Elving ... [more]
When there were no movies or TV and most people traveled little, places like Frederick Olmsted's public parks were a focus of deep aesthetic experience ... [more]
Sad stories of the death of kings — anything about kings and queens, actually — are the rage in filmdom. But their travails are presented as oddly private ... [more]
Scissors of fate: a life of John F. Kennedy Jr., according to Sage, Ink ... [cartoon]
Where were the "lost violent souls"? The de Sades, the Bakunins, the Nietzsches? In England, even atheists had to be respectable ... [more]
The Arts & Ideas section of the NY Times is editorially crass: art as a peg for news issues; ideas an occasion for leisure, not conflict ... [more]
"We're really happy. Our kids are healthy, we eat good food and we have a really nice home." Suburbia is such an easy place to disdain ... [more]
Eat more toast, girls! Turn aside from boozing and smoking and credit card frenzy and upwardly mobile sex. (Courtesy of the Flour Advisory Bureau) ... [more]
Foregoing university and settling down to the life of a school caretaker was fine for Robert Morrell. He could pursue his passion for Tom Paine ... [more]
Aliteracy: the ability to read without the desire to do so. In a nation of aliterates the task of writing pales against the agony of promoting ... [more]
Stewart Gore-Browne, an opera-loving English aristocrat, fetched up in the middle of Africa by chance, and built a fantastical private kingdom ... [more]
"Goths" are silly, Gothic wasn't. The pursuit of the sublime, where awe and terror mingle, has given way to the baser desire to shock ... [more]
For Alastair MacIntyre, the moral stance of the Stalinist turned liberal is hardly any different from that of the unrepentant Stalinist ... [more]
Male sadness and suicide — and all because of feminism, or men's collusion in it. What should we do about these pitiful victims? Laugh? ... [more]
Only in America could you find an Armenian refugee who never set foot in France becoming the last great exponent of School of Paris painting ... [more]
What are the real 60s — 1963 to 1974? And is the 20th century in fact 1914 to 1991? The coherent span of history isn't by the calendar, says Garry Wills ... [more]
Like present day Americans, native or not, Indians were ecologists when it suited their needs and despoilers when it did not ... [more]
Charles Doughty's pedantic foes thought him a wayward chap, in the grip of an incurable rectitudinous fever ... [more]
When Helmut Kohl was unable to sleep in the wee hours, it wasn't that he was worrying about history: he just wanted to raid the fridge ... [more]
Hip young fogeys: writers today go for the historical, mistaking mimicry for mimesis. Take Nathan Englander, Yiddishkeit sensation ... [more]
What did Socrates and Aristotle eat? Here's a restaurant to show you. Cynics call it McPlato's, but cynics were Greek philosophers too ... [more]
Why bother to read it? If a student's essay uses most of the right words in the right order, a machine can tell you it's an A+ ... [more]
The latest in UK witch-hunts: the police look for a crime where none has yet been reported, then finger some hapless sod as the perpetrator ... [more]
What's your problem? This season's hot new diagnosis is social phobia. Read about it and you'll be convinced you've got it too ... [more]
What is worthwhile about us as individuals, groups, or societies is the inefficient part, says Edward Luttwak. "Inefficiency is where human life exists" ... [more]
Chatter! Banter! Emotion! Cold Fusion, Solipsism, and Krispie Kremes! Books for the stylish semi-literate! Viagra, movies, celebrities! It's Tina Brown's Talk ... [parody] For more on this site [click here]
Melancholy Abe Lincoln had no use for astrology and ghostly lore. But he tolerated the seances his wife found so comforting — and a legend grew ... [more]
Reagan's Star Wars defense shield was born of science fiction. It enfeebled the Soviets, but it also vastly weakened America's manned space efforts ... [more]
Rembrandt's self-portraits show a total lack of vanity. Whatever the scars of age and misfortune, he is a homely, earthy presence to the very end ... [more]
One of the most endearing traits of baby boomers, says Jonathan Rauch, is that their ideas on child rearing, like their politics, are infallible ... [more]
In a world of increasing chronic illness, good nurses are far more than doctors' eyes and ears. They are often doctors' brains ... [more]
Universities exist in strife. We must not collapse this fact, blur it, pretend it isn't there, or decorate it with alibis like "creative restructuring" ... [more]
It was the seductive promises of the camera that led Fame - once an august old fellow - into the trashy arms of Celebrity ... [more]
Poor Eudora Welty! As a cuddly dear on the one hand, and a writer's writer enamored of indirection on the other, unjust oblivion looms ... [more]
Among Theodore Dalrymple's patients are many who admit "a problem with authority." They confess it coyly, as if it were a sign of spiritual election ... [more]
The issue is whether the first person, singular or plural, lies hidden at the bottom of everything we say or think, argues Thomas Nagel ... [more]
Women can't just get on with it, because motherhood is more than a childcare issue. Susan Maushart’s new book will be a feminist classic ... [more]
Before our "nonfiction" novels, there were shockers like Confessions of a Thug, a graphic account of India. It was all the buzz in 1839 ... [more]
Bullets didn't worry the young Winston Churchill: "I do not believe the Gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending" ... [more]
"What a sorry and dreary figure he is." Siegfried Sassoon's clear-eyed war poetry stung; his later work was marred oddly by nostalgia ... [more]
"When friendships were the noblest things in the world, charity was little," wrote Jeremy Taylor. The Early Church had a revolutionary effect on intimacy ... [more]
Alan Moorhead's tales of desert fighting in North Africa in WWII are harrowing and make accounts by today's war journos seem paltry ... [more]
A culture of pessimism is not only a dead end, it is patently false. People are not stupid, nor are they lemmings, says Herbert London ... [more]
The mechanized thumps of the Pet Shop Boys aren't rhythm, Roger Scruton says. They're its last sad skeleton, stripped bare of human life ... [more]
If "intellectual" were a title like "baron" that could be inherited, few people would have a stronger claim to it than David Rieff ... [more]
In capitalist countries, people gain power because they're rich; in socialist countries, they get rich because they're powerful. Chimps are socialists, claims Matt Ridley ... [more]
Have you ever noticed, Picasso asked Brassaï, that bones are always modeled, never carved? Marked with the fingerprints of the God who made them ... [more]
The Nazis just didn't get the hang of television. The fascist aesthetic called for heroic figures gliding across the silver screen. In a small, hazy box ... [more]
Fashion entertains a wide range of vain pretensions, not the least of them a desire to be considered Art of the highest order ... [more]
Hollywood makes films that cruelly mock physical deformity while paying soppy tribute to the idea of "disability," writes Charles Krauthammer ... [more]
Genetics/ethics: please spare us the hysteria, says Peter Singer. We need to look soberly at gene research and not throw up our hands in horror ... [more]
Even more irritating than the respect given serial killer “experts” is the special wisdom granted their subjects. Take Son of Sam, Christian video star ... [more]
Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain is an unsavory book. It makes abdication from living acceptable, even charming, and sees creativity as a disease ... [more]
Goya is a paradox: a sunny 18th century artist sandbagged by French romanticism, a courtier and bleak satirist, a priest hater and religious painter ... [more]
Geoffrey Wheatcroft finds it curious that exactly a century after "the white man's burden" entered the language, it should again seem so apposite ... [more]
The Odyssey records the joyful creed of a Bronze Age aristocracy which loved life with a manic fierceness, for both its brevity and its perils ... [more]
Pain tends to arrive late and fuss around, often doing nothing useful. It's not an alarm signal, a smoke detector, a messenger ... [more]
Fiction according to The Rules: dizzy women coming up for 30 who can't hook husbands are apparently where it's at in publishing ... [more]
Sven Birkerts thinks it's the world that's gotten old. We've lost our privacy, our leisure, our silence, even our boredom ... [more]
The first European woman to reach Lhasa was given sage advice: to make a magic dagger, first take a corpse, bite off its tongue, and ... [more]
It's tragic that utopia has acquired such a bad name. Russell Jacoby bemoans those who've forgotten that life can be better than this ... [more]
Gun ownership was rare in the first half of America’s history. Firearms were costly, hard to fix, in all too much bother ... [more]
Heinrich Schliemann, the man who found Troy, was not above a little funny business, a few too convenient "discoveries." Even the Mask of Agamemnon ... [more]
American opera was long ignored by the major houses. Forced to abandon the grand idiom, it chose a more modest route ... [more]
Beauty ensnares hearts and captures minds. Asked why people desire it, Aristotle said, "No one who is not blind could ask that question" ... [more]
Dogs belong to that select group of con artists at the very top of their craft, the ones who pick you clean and leave you smiling ... [more]
What will you be calling that nasty little nerd 15 years from now? "Boss." Emotional IQ is a sweet idea, but nice guys don't finish first ... [more]
July 4th, 1862. A boat trip from Folly Bridge to Godstow. Tea in the shade. Rev. Duckworth, the Liddell sisters, and Mr. Dodgson ... [more]
Some writers tell you new things. Joseph Epstein tells you what you already know, but gives you a new way to think about it ... [more]
How ought we to regard liars? Not those who fool us, but those who delude themselves, believe in their own invented suffering ... [more]
"Be Jases, before ye inter me / I'll show ye all up! / I'll write one terrible book!" Irish verse and fiction is often incandescent with rage ... [more]
Celestial choirs and haloes all 'round. Henry Kissinger is made sick by the oozing self-love and moralism of the US and Britain in the Balkans ... [more]
We've sunk into a moral Stone Age. Maybe the Holocaust wasn't real, one student blithely remarked. Still, "it's a perfectly reasonable conceptual hallucination" ... [more]
Edward and Sophie, who chill out with the People, would have befuddled Oliver Cromwell. What's the point of a royal family if it isn't regal? ... [more]
Today's BBC regards its viewers as pudding-faced, dirty-minded morons who stare vacantly at the TV screen, sucking their raspberry licorice ... [more]
Much of the fun of going to Europe used to be the Herald Tribune. Savored with coffee and croissants, it gave the relaxed, long view ... [more]
Beauty, integrity, and genius are art's essential values, says pianist Charles Rosen. Great art sweeps all else aside and sets the terms of public taste ... [more]
For Marcel Proust the real world is like a bad novel. Fiction has things to teach life, but it offers no final core of truth ... [more]
The Salon.com IPO hit the ground — with a thud. But if only one in three of editor David Talbot's ideas work, that's not a bad average ... [more]
Phantom Menace roles are marked by class: Jedi knights sound crisply British, white slaves innocently American, while galactic bureaucrats talk like Charlie Chan ... [more]
That modern Maecenas, the CIA, financed a culture that was worth selling, Malcolm Bradbury writes. It caught the uneasy corruption of the age ... [more]
E-mail has transformed the written word into a strange new medium of meaning, something that lies between a telegram and a spell ... [more]
Cities too have bursts of genius. Like love affairs doomed to burn out quickly, creative epochs erupt and then die away ... [more]
Probability theory bends the mind around truths that go dead against common sense. For instance, the end of the world is closer than you thought ... [more]
Now and again a gifted author makes an old subject strange and new. Garry Wills has done it with Saint Augustine ... [more]
A.J. Ayer once saw Mike Tyson harassing a woman and stepped in. Tyson yelled, "Do you know who the f*** I am?" Ayer calmly replied ... [more]
Intellectuals fret about the European shadow on American music, when the real threat is the US spoiling European musical taste ... [more]
Ceasefire! Making men into the pillaging Huns and women into the forbearing nuns gets us nowhere, argues Cathy Young ... [more]
Freedom fighters of Tibet, backed by the CIA against too strong a foe, were in the end orphans of the Cold War ... [more]
Annie Proulx's punchy, elegiac style is laced with a wry, laconic humor. It rather suggests she might make an agreeable drunk ... [more]
Some of his best friends were Jews. Adolf Hitler's Vienna years saw him living with Jewish associates, often taking their help ... [more]
Freeman Dyson predicts that one day you'll turn up with your spaceship on the back of a pick-up, pay at the counter, and be blasted off ... [more]
Oceans of cash to cure baldness, impotence, wrinkles, and toe fungus in the rich countries, while TB, fatal gastric disease, and sleeping sickness rage elsewhere ... [more]
If nature wants kids to be little replicas of their parents, why do children speak in the accents of their peers? Judith Rich Harris asks ... [more]
The angry young man that was: these days, David Frost is an Establishment poodle — a bit soft, a shade too chummy ... [more]
South Africa's elections saw the rout of F.W. de Klerk's old party and the rise of a liberal one — liberal about everything except race ... [more]
Sound-bite science: poorly informed media crusades that target the comfortable on behalf of the afflicted can in the end be bad news ... [more]
Poverty is also crippling. It's not that Special Ed is too expensive, rather that it's being used to help all the wrong people ... [more]
Steven Pinker views the mind not as a mysterious mess, but as a coherent system, a place where order and function rule ... [more]
Who are the maestros who'll carry the baton into concert halls next century? Simon Rattle is off to Berlin; other podiums are up for grabs ... [more]
What do gentlemen prefer? Why do blondes like tall chaps with V-shaped torsos? It's not just what culture tells us, says Nancy Etcoff ... [more]
So what's your favorite lobe? Don't ask your cerebral cortex for an answer till you've read the Feed issue on the new science of the brain ... [more]
The design argument says you need God to create life in an inhospitable universe. The anthropic principle says the universe is peculiarly suited to life. Come again? ... [more]
When men had it all their way, says feminist Rosalind Coward, gender was central to women's experience. Take off the specs. It isn't like that any more ... [more]
So much bad music has been called good in the 20th century, says Terry Teachout. It's astonishing, a cultural tragedy of the first order ... [more]
Leonardo's realism — uncanny, superhuman — changed the course of art. His paintings, which made other artists "tremble and lose confidence," still draw crowds ... [more]
White, bourgeois, Protestant Florence Nightingale wasn't a "very bad" person, just a fairly bad one. Not a suitable icon for a rebranded Britain ... [more]
Guessing the identity of Deep Throat is such an amusing game that perhaps by now no one actually wants to find out ... [more]
An economy scaled to human beings rather than giant profits is the way to go, argues David Morris. Small is efficient, dynamic, democratic, and cost effective ... [more]
The life of Henry James was a long non-event: no lovers, overt passions, or exciting escapades. What he had was a life in letters ... [more]
Killing in wartime can give feelings of pleasure and even induce creativity. In war there are willing executioners all over the landscape ... [more]
Vegetarianism, as George Orwell saw, is easily made elitist. The working class has no business to be mixed up with "food cranks" ... [more]
Carr the biscuit baron, Borwick the baking powder king, Ashton the emperor of linoleum: they may be English, but nouveaux riches is French ... [more]
Senator McCarthy was a bully and a crook; he said there were Soviet spies about; ergo, there were no Soviet spies. The fallacy of a generation ... [more]
A man of manners and taste, Hannibal Lecter preferred, when it was feasible, to eat the rude. "Free-range rude," he called them ... [more]
What is art and when is it money? There's the aesthetic value of art, the market value, and now at last, the face value ... [more]
What does film critic Pauline Kael say to people who claim she's obsessed by sex and violence? "That's what movies are about" ... [more]
Choco Krispies or Coco Pops? A million Britons voted to settle this vexed question. But when it came to voting for the European Parliament, well ... [more]
For people with skills and a fondness for risk, says Lester Thurow, there has never been a better time to venture into new business ... [more]
Marx admired Darwin, but so would Jefferson and Madison, had they known his science. There's no conflict between Darwinism and the moral claims of liberalism ... [more]
"A voice from heaven should be ignored if it is not on the side of justice." For Kant, it's a given, but for Jewish thinkers, it's a deep problem ... [more]
Did Primo Levi kill himself? It's been said that when he died, Auschwitz claimed yet another victim. That idea is now less clear ... [more]
Pushing stiff fabric past the moving needle of an old sewing machine is hard work. But when it's the only job in town, you push ... [more]
Seek truth at all costs? Maybe this moral demand, Robert Solomon writes, is just one more ethnocentric oddity, a dangerously unsociable conception ... [more]
Political wives, writes Katha Pollitt, must spend decades smiling in the shadows of the egomaniacs they married when they were too young to know better ... [more]
Deep, dark, lying mirrors: your reflection is a mere slave, an imitating jape. It gives you little idea of how you look to others ... [more]
Jared Diamond looks at human societies globally — what makes one civilization rich, another poor. The lessons can be applied to business as well ... [more]
Velázquez doesn't judge his creations. He lets them be, leaves them with their inborn grace. Trade a glance with Don Sebastian de Morra, the dwarf ... [more]
Michael Korda knew back in the 1960s that the real money was not in writing and publishing books, but in buying and selling publishers ... [more]
Bad news about Ireland: no leprechauns, decaying landscape, too much traffic, steep income tax, no work, and nobody says begorrah ... [more]
Gloomy Victorians: why did a loss of faith pitch 19th century Britons into a dark night of the soul? A.N. Wilson considers the question ... [more]
Ralph Ellison agonized over Juneteenth, but it still barely exists as a novel: too homiletic and rhetorical, a false sunset, says James Wood ... [more]
Lord Byron led a life of glamour and scandal. The toast of a new era of mass readership, he was also its first and greatest victim ... [more]
The colorful memoirs of Josie Earp have been called the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Old West. Maybe that should be the Hitler Diaries ... [more]
In 1994-95, the drop in New York City crime accounted for more than half the crime decline of the entire US. How did it happen? ... [more]
The hideous idea of the snuff film was fine ammo in the war on porn. Just like those tales of satanic rituals in the crusade against sex abuse ... [more]
Christina Foyle, the iron lady of London's dowdiest bookshop, is dead. Her style was not so much autocratic as deeply feudal ... [more]
Language, Truth, and Lovers: "Even logical positivists are capable of love," said the British empiricist A.J. Ayer, whose private romantic life proved it ... [more]
Writing a history of the present may seem an odd business, says Timothy Garton Ash, but it preserves what couldn't be known at the time ... [more]
A John Updike book review upholds a genteel tradition of disdain for homosexuals present at the New Yorker since the days of E.B. White and James Thurber ... [more]
Annie Proulx's need to know takes her from coal mines to fire towers, to agate-studded hills, a beached whale skeleton, or the sunny side of an iceberg ... [more]
Rainer Fassbinder viewed sex as something brutal, nasty, colder than death. Phillip Lopate found his movies perfect for a date ... [more]
Years of the therapy that passes as pedagogy have created a generation of students whose deep ignorance is coupled with shining self-esteem, writes Mark Goldblatt ... [more]
Ezra Pound will always intrigue cultists seduced by the allure of a master cryptographer. But next to his great contemporaries, he is a minor poet ... [more]
The Safire Conditional — used in invoking possibilities that one badly wishes to happen — is located just to the right of the factual ... [more]
Oscar Wilde sold the exclusive rights to his last play, Constance, a half dozen times. Once thought lost, it now awaits its world premiere ... [more]
In 1945, a young, aspiring cartoonist named John Updike so loved a cartoon by Saul Steinberg that he wrote the artist to ask him for the original ... [more]
We should listen to great scientific minds because they are great. When they tell us they really have no minds at all, we can safely ignore them ... [more]
Gottfried Wagner travels the world, obsessed by his family's past and the | | |
