April 14, 2023 | “What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” Engage with it, don't quash it. Judith Shulevitz explains... more »
April 13, 2023 | In this age of instrumentality, what is left to pursue simply because it’s beautiful, good, or true?... more »
April 12, 2023 | It is tempting to view Bruno Schulz's art through the lens of his murder by the Nazis. But that would be a mistake... more »
April 11, 2023 | The sweeping grandeur of clause upon clause, twist and turn, convoluted syntax, elaborate punctuation: In praise of long sentences... more »
April 8, 2023 | The moral of forgiveness: “We should find ourselves ever open to changing our minds about people and their actions”... more »
April 7, 2023 | Dunwich — the city that fell into the sea — was immortalized by Henry James, J. M. W. Turner, and other artists... more »
April 6, 2023 | In 1996, Adam Gopnik shocked the art world by delimiting the scope of Picasso’s genius. His critique has won the day... more »
April 5, 2023 | Joanna Biggs: “Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave”... more »
April 4, 2023 | “I’ve lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and I’m glad my suicides failed”... more »
April 3, 2023 | Auden was of the same generation as Elizabeth Bishop, yet she still speaks to us, while he does not. Why?... more »
March 31, 2023 | The “Seventh Letter” could be a gold mine of Platonic thought. But is it the work of one of antiquity’s greatest minds, or of a hack impostor?... more »
March 30, 2023 | What is the role of Christianity in American literature? It leads us to focus on morality and justice, but also on evil and hypocrisy... more »
March 29, 2023 | An essential part of bookselling is cataloging. But it’s a decentralized, unstandardized carnival fire... more »
March 28, 2023 | If magical thinking is core to our sense of self, then our experiences are acts of imagination that can’t be sustained solely by rational thought. Consider coincidences... more »
March 27, 2023 | NIST, the federal agency tasked with the science of measurement, is an acropolis of the average, a Parnassus of the prototypical. Tom Vanderbilt explains... more »
March 24, 2023 | T.S. Eliot and the study of power. The drama that takes place across the span of his poetry seems more vital than ever... more »
March 23, 2023 | What is the proper relationship between art and morality? One answer lies in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, a filthy book about an intolerable man... more »
March 22, 2023 | To take to heart Awakenings, published by Oliver Sacks 50 years ago, is to embrace the possibility of an awakening of our own common humanity... more »
March 21, 2023 | Leonardo was drawn to youth and beauty. He was also obsessed by strange, diseased, "monstrous" faces, which he sketched in caricatures... more »
March 20, 2023 | After 23 years and 2,293 published reviews, A.O. Scott is hanging it up as a film critic. Time for his exit interview... more »
March 17, 2023 | “The history of art is the history of the underrated and overlooked, as well as the overblown and over-sold”... more »
March 16, 2023 | A dearth of deep talk. College was once for airing out one’s views completely. Now students — and professors — choose their words very carefully... more »
March 15, 2023 | Diane Arbus’s photography of the socially marginalized is not revolutionary, but it does have a leveling effect... more »
March 14, 2023 | Distraction, then and now, is driven by sweeping societal changes. So why do we insist that it does private damage to the mind?... more »
March 13, 2023 | The worse things get, the more we want to know: What role has critical theory played in getting us into a democratic crisis?... more »