Feb. 26, 2024 | Mid-century modern conundrum: Once American takes on Danish design caught on, Danish furniture makers started copying them... more »

Feb. 23, 2024 | Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »

Feb. 22, 2024 | As a critic, Michiko Kakutani was fearsome and discerning. As an author of inert buzzword-laden books, she's pitiable... more »

Feb. 21, 2024 | Are you a feminist killjoy? For Judith Butler, that entails the joy of struggling against injustice... more »

Feb. 20, 2024 | Few writers have so deftly distilled the cloistered sensibility of the Small Circulation Lit Mag as Lauren Oyler... more »

Feb. 19, 2024 | The legend of Byron’s libertinism was propagated foremost by Byron. The fashionable parties, seduction techniques, and knowing small talk were all carefully calibrated... more »

Feb. 16, 2024 | Copyrights and wrongs. A well-intentioned idea has become a Frankenstein that’s now out of control... more »

Feb. 15, 2024 | A memoir of an open marriage was marketed as upbeat, sassy, and liberated. In reality it was just sad... more »

Feb. 14, 2024 | We are all in favor of equality: But equality of what? Of whom? Darrin McMahon on a powerful and contested idea... more »

Feb. 13, 2024 | Terry Eagleton on Hegel’s vision of things. “The only viable future is one with its roots in the present, not one that is parachuted into it by dreams or diktats”... more »

Feb. 12, 2024 | Hannah Arendt was shaped more by Kant than anything she learned in Heidegger’s lectures or his bed... more »

Feb. 9, 2024 | “She is crazy!” Charles de Gaulle said of Simone Weil. That was a common view. Impractical and odd, she was also undeniably admirable... more »

Feb. 8, 2024 | Wolves howl, gibbons sing, dolphins whistle, cows moo, cats meow. But do animals talk?... more »

Feb. 7, 2024 | Willa Cather was nothing if not dedicated to her craft: “I could simply become a fountain pen and have done with it — a conduit for ink to run through”... more »

Feb. 6, 2024 | Frantz Fanon’s influence has not waned, even though the culture's ideological space for his ideas at large is minuscule... more »

Feb. 5, 2024 | Hope to cope with a world given over to “permanent crisis”? Modern strategies include detoxing, bingeing, filtering, and ghosting... more »

Feb. 2, 2024 | “At a moment when everything in America seemed to be accelerating, Thoreau … came up with a counterproposal: slow down”... more »

Feb. 1, 2024 | Memoir, autotheory, the personal essay — today’s first-personalism is a dark mutation of literary style, holds Anna Kornbluh... more »

Jan. 31, 2024 | A Lower East Side gallerist: “The art world is the way it is because not everyone has access to it”... more »

Jan. 30, 2024 | Rachmaninoff in America. In contrast to many of his peers, Rachmaninoff is the one who left Russia but stayed Russian... more »

Jan. 29, 2024 | Thomas Hardy is celebrated for his portrayals of women, leaving even him baffled at how he alienated the women in his life... more »

Jan. 26, 2024 | J.L. Austin brought a piercing clarity to his discussions. Among philosophers at Oxford, he wasn’t alone... more »

Jan. 25, 2024 | Russians in space. “The pantheon of cosmists includes numerous thinkers who propounded the preposterous as indubitable”... more »

Jan. 24, 2024 | Lou Reed loved misery – he embraced it, wallowed in it, and made the rest of us dance to it... more »

Jan. 23, 2024 | Frantz Fanon, foremost theorist of anticolonial struggle, was a subtler thinker than many of his contemporaries... more »