Jan. 29, 2024 | The language of Scotland was not English, but the Germanic-infused Scots, which fell out of favor in the 17th century... more »

Jan. 26, 2024 | What happened to David Graeber? Late in his career he seemed ready to reject or severely qualify his radical anarchism... more »

Jan. 25, 2024 | Bored with concrete and steel, architects are backing away from ultra-modern design. But classical design has the same flaw: predictability... more »

Jan. 24, 2024 | If listening to the same songs year after year sounds boring, get ready: That’s where we’re heading... more »

Jan. 23, 2024 | George Orwell’s father was a civil servant of the most dismal variety: He helped oversee opium production for the British Raj, in India... more »

Jan. 22, 2024 | Twenty-five uninterrupted hours of Moby-Dick being read aloud might seem hellish. To participants, it’s paradise... more »

Jan. 19, 2024 | There are more dialects of American English than you might expect, including seven in New Orleans alone... more »

Jan. 18, 2024 | Language, meaning, and perception. An old debate over linguistic relativity has new implications ... more »

Jan. 17, 2024 | Ever wondered why every coffee shop looks the same? They are beholden to sad, algorithmically-driven design trends... more »

Jan. 16, 2024 | Mansa Musa, a 14th-century West African monarch, possessed nearly half the gold known to exist in the Eastern Hemisphere... more »

Jan. 15, 2024 | A bruiser until the very end, Milton Friedman knew the value of adopting the role of the underdog... more »

Jan. 12, 2024 | The most surprising thing about a writing group at the CIA? No one is working on a spy novel... more »

Jan. 11, 2024 | The classical-music establishment’s challenge: How to foster the passionate devotion that allows an art form to survive... more »

Jan. 10, 2024 | Our punctuation, ourselves. What are we really talking about when we talk about exclamation points? ... more »

Jan. 9, 2024 | The first influencer, Beau Brummell, exuded “calculated nonchalance.” He was a harbinger of our celebrity culture... more »

Jan. 8, 2024 | Academic dishonesty, improper attribution, citational errors — why are professors so wary of invoking “plagiarism” in the case of Claudine Gay?... more »

Jan. 5, 2024 | Does the afterlife exist? Yes, thought Kurt Gödel. Where else could humans fulfill their potential?... more »

Jan. 4, 2024 | The medical-mystery genre has a familiar arc, usually punctuated by a revelatory “aha” moment. Not for Tom Scocca... more »

Jan. 3, 2024 | The first book of photography? British Algae, a binding of hundreds of cyanotypes compiled by an amateur botanist... more »

Jan. 2, 2024 | Confessions of a bookseller. The essential problem with how we talk about the job – and it is a job – is preciosity... more »

Jan. 1, 2024 | The next frontier in live musical performance? Zero gravity. What would it sound like to break the music-making conventions of earth?... more »

Dec. 29, 2023 | David Brooks on the golden age of nonfiction and his selections for this year’s Sidney Awards... more »

Dec. 28, 2023 | Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of cultural phenomena. Exhibit A: The “new” “last” Beatles’ single... more »

Dec. 27, 2023 | A writer is a creature of solitude, we’re told. Hogwash! Writing is the most gregarious of the arts... more »

Dec. 26, 2023 | Ideas of the afterlife. In the Western tradition, eternal fate is connected to one's earthly actions. Not so for the ancient Egyptians... more »