July 27, 2023 | Part sex cult, part art world coterie, the Sullivanian Institute “combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis and the musical theatre”... more »
July 26, 2023 | We ought to disagree about books. We ought even to get in heated fights about books! And now we have a venue to do that: Goodreads... more »
July 25, 2023 | Is beauty an achievement or a natural endowment? If we are responsible for our own beauty, what obligations does that impose? Becca Rothfeld investigates... more »
July 24, 2023 | “No class has ever shown more deference to official qualifications and the authority of credentials than modern progressives”... more »
July 21, 2023 | The anxiety of Cormac McCarthy's influence. “Books are made out of books. The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written”... more »
July 20, 2023 | The literary-critical establishment is tired of moralizing and self-righteousness. And so, it’s time for a turn to aesthetics... more »
July 19, 2023 | There is a tremendous critical pleasure in reviving a forgotten book by an unjustly ignored author. The latest: Susan Taubes... more »
July 18, 2023 | Academic historians have shied away from writing big, popular books for too long. They should embrace their inner Howard Zinn... more »
July 17, 2023 | "Affirmation is available everywhere. Why look for it in art, when what the most valuable works offer up exists nowhere else?"... more »
July 14, 2023 | Because film studios, book publishers, and record labels dominate, the arts suffer. What happened to the avant-garde?... more »
July 13, 2023 | Johnny Cash’s hardscrabble world. He grew up in the Arkansas Delta, in a community built on government-granted land... more »
July 12, 2023 | Transference began as a theory of love, or, rather, of love’s inadequacy. Now it's turned college classrooms into arenas of discontent... more »
July 11, 2023 | Modern feminism is turning back to thinkers like Andrea Dworkin and Susan Sontag. But 50-year-old theses can take one only so far... more »
July 10, 2023 | "It should give historians pause when the common sense of ordinary American people shows more appreciation for historical complexity than trained experts"... more »
July 7, 2023 | “Things could be worse may be one of those lies that allows us to live, obscuring the truer truth: Things will be worse”... more »
July 6, 2023 | Evolution of a scene. The Iliad has been fully translated into English 100 times, reflecting a wide interpretive range... more »
July 5, 2023 | “Great” was a word Robert Gottlieb applied to art of high refinement and utter kitsch. Eclecticism was the hallmark of his taste... more »
July 4, 2023 | Stories lull. Stories entice. Stories seduce. Stories mislead. But stories are inescapable. Parul Sehgal explains... more »
July 3, 2023 | Tyler Cowen sits down with Noam Chomsky and gets to the bottom of a longstanding mystery: "Why do you answer every email?"... more »
June 30, 2023 | “War may be less contentious.” The one constant in marriage, a new book suggests: it plays host to contradictions... more »
June 29, 2023 | True Grit was so successful, it overshadowed everything else its author, Charles Portis, wrote. That’s a shame... more »
June 28, 2023 | Weaponized feces in Gulliver’s Travels, masterful flatulence in Chaucer — Dwight Garner praises excretory adventures in literature... more »
June 27, 2023 | In 1998, the neuroscientist Christof Koch bet the philosopher David Chalmers that the mystery of consciousness would be solved within 25 years. Chalmers just won. His prize: a case of wine... more »
June 26, 2023 | Being friends with a genius isn’t easy. Sometimes you are loved, sometimes you are loathed... more »
June 23, 2023 | Book bans stem from a relentless, nihilistic logic, which can find subversion anywhere. There is no way to limit reading to just-right books... more »