June 12, 2023 | Modernist artists were connoisseurs of uncertainty. But Keynes was the only one to carry that connoisseurship into economic thought ... more »
June 9, 2023 | Are most published research findings false? A wave of shoddy statistical practices has overwhelmed fields including psychology, economics, and medicine... more »
June 8, 2023 | “One writes fables in periods of oppression,” noted Italo Calvino in 1943. But when fascism passed, he kept on writing them... more »
June 7, 2023 | Was a tenure-track job worth the risk of getting shot? “Yes,” thought Michael Clune, “hell yes”... more »
June 6, 2023 | Edith Wharton’s domestic subjugation. The convivial excesses of Newport laid bare her dissatisfying circumstances... more »
June 5, 2023 | What happens when a stand-up comedian with a dislike for Picasso curates a museum exhibit about him? An embarrassment... more »
June 2, 2023 | Microfiction, nanofiction, hint fiction, flash fiction, dribble, drabble, trabble: What's with writers' fascination with brevity?... more »
June 1, 2023 | “The era of bourgeois revolutions coincided with a general turn towards neoclassicism in architecture, visual arts, literature, music and theatre”... more »
May 31, 2023 | “Although they were the butt of endless Renaissance jokes, old women were also depicted as powerful, fearsome entities”... more »
May 30, 2023 | From admissions to assessment, academic integrity to scholarly research, how will artificial intelligence change higher education?... more »
May 29, 2023 | "This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble”... more »
May 26, 2023 | Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the idea of secrets — what they are, why we keep them, and what they reveal about us ... more »
May 25, 2023 | More than ever, we need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism. We need Max Weber... more »
May 24, 2023 | Sontag on women. Their oppression, she came to believe, presents a problem that is aesthetic and narrative problem as well as political and economic.... more »
May 23, 2023 | For Emmanuel Carrère, writing about other people is tantamount to torturing them. But representing a life other than your own is what makes human connection possible... more »
May 22, 2023 | Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley... more »
May 19, 2023 | You’ve had to deal with the sulkiness of others. Indeed, you might be a sulker yourself. But what is sulking, exactly?... more »
May 18, 2023 | Parents of young children are rarely alone, and yet they report feeling lonely. How to explain? Donald Winnicott has some theories... more »
May 17, 2023 | The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring... more »
May 16, 2023 | An extreme figure even in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris, Jean Lorrain was a dandy, Satanist, drinker of ether, and highly paid writer... more »
May 15, 2023 | “Whereas algorithms present personalized recommendations by rank, the blurb is a one-rank system of aesthetic value: utterly awesome” ... more »
May 12, 2023 | “Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »
May 11, 2023 | Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »
May 10, 2023 | Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »
May 9, 2023 | Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »