During the Great Plague of 1665, the Common Council of the City of London decreed: “All dogs and cats should be immediately killed”... more »
The wisdom of Epictetus includes deep Stoic insights, as well as his thoughts on the unmanliness of tweezing body hair... more »
Microfiction, nanofiction, hint fiction, flash fiction, dribble, drabble, trabble: What's with writers' fascination with brevity?... more »
With funding from Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, the life-extension business is booming. Enter the biochemist Charles Brenner, the longevity skeptic... more »
Being Hayek. His life played out along three great arcs: intellectual, geographical, and emotional. In all three, his views evolved along with his fortunes... more »
“The era of bourgeois revolutions coincided with a general turn towards neoclassicism in architecture, visual arts, literature, music and theatre”... more »
Beyond eating, drinking, speaking, and smiling: 42 ways of communicating by bringing your hands to your mouth... more »
Anthropologist of filth. Chuck Berry's sexual predilections were seen as un-chic, un-romantic, and too “real” for public taste... more »
“Although they were the butt of endless Renaissance jokes, old women were also depicted as powerful, fearsome entities”... more »
Guinness World Records have always been a repository of impressively absurd feats. Does it have a place in a world where weird is commonplace?... more »
It is commonly believed that every written word by a major writer must be gathered and published. But what to make of Kafka’s diaries?... more »
From admissions to assessment, academic integrity to scholarly research, how will artificial intelligence change higher education?... more »
How sad to try to sell your soul to a dictator and find that the dictator isn't buying. Consider the case of the composer Hans Pfitzner... more »
At her best, Susan Sontag refused to simplify her thinking for easy answers. At her worst, she was dodgy and noncommittal. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
"This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble”... more »
Rules can be thick or thin, says Lorraine Daston. “Behind every thin rule is a thick rule, cleaning up after it”... more »
Derek Parfit spent most of his life cloistered within a cloistered institution. He sacrificed nearly everything to his intellectual calling... more »
Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the idea of secrets — what they are, why we keep them, and what they reveal about us ... more »
There is no such thing as color, only the people who perceive it. Sky isn’t blue, the sun isn’t yellow, snow isn’t white... more »
Birth of romanticism. When polymaths, poets, philosophers, and playwrights lived, argued, and loved in the German town of Jena ... more »
More than ever, we need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism. We need Max Weber... more »
For rationalists, nothing should interfere with apprehending the world as it is. So why are they turning to religion, ritual, and all things woo?... more »
For more than 20 years, J.C. presided over the back page of the TLS with wit, weirdness, and waspish provocation... more »
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 »
Martin Amis — novelist, memoirist, journalist, critic, caustic wit, dazzling stylist — is dead. He was 73... Dwight Garner... James Wood... Salman Rushdie... Ian McEwan... Lisa Allardice... Boyd Tonkin... James Parker... A.O. Scott... Christian Lorentzen... Terry Eagleton... Jennifer Egan... Tom Meaney... more »
Failure comes in many forms: physical, social, biological. Facing it humbles us, and so we lead better lives. So argues Costica Bradatan... more »
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 »
As a young man, Adam Kirsch didn't turn to George Michael and Madonna to learn about sex and sin. He turned to opera... more »
“The problem of the world is this,” Orwell told a friend late in life. “Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”... more »
Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley... more »
In 1928, two German mathematicians proposed the “decision problem”. Then a 23-year old graduate student in England started working on it... more »
Elias Canetti was a scholar, but not an academic. He wasn’t a novelist or poet, though he wrote that way. He was many writers at once... more »
You’ve had to deal with the sulkiness of others. Indeed, you might be a sulker yourself. But what is sulking, exactly?... more »
“Dear Thought Criminals." Where do canceled, almost-canceled, and aspiring-to-be-canceled academics and artists hang out? Pamela Paresky's parties... more »
Bruno Schulz's stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. And his death — appalling and senseless — defies meaning... more »
Parents of young children are rarely alone, and yet they report feeling lonely. How to explain? Donald Winnicott has some theories... more »
"If you go to the right, you lose your life, and if you go to the left, you lose your conscience.” The Gulag Archipelago at 50... more »
No nepo babies and no assholes — in the corny, cheerful world of Tom Hanks, moviemaking is earnest, joyous, well-compensated work... more »
The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring... more »
The daguerreotype craze began in 1839. A few silvery inches of a stranger's face gave new meaning to the idea of love at first sight... more »
The American idea of continental philosophers as speculative, irrational mystics dates to the 1953 International Congress of Philosophy, in Brussels... more »
An extreme figure even in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris, Jean Lorrain was a dandy, Satanist, drinker of ether, and highly paid writer... more »
For 30 years, Douglas Rushkoff was a believer in the digital revolution. No more. The Gen X techno-optimist is now a middle-aged Marxist... more »
Shakespeare's body of work is complex and confounding; so is the task of tracking down his biography. Who was he? Who cares?... more »
“Whereas algorithms present personalized recommendations by rank, the blurb is a one-rank system of aesthetic value: utterly awesome” ... more »
At 72, with cancer and a shattered family, the poet Jorie Graham might just have written the best book of her career... more »
Is multiculturalism an oxymoron? In an age of atomization a new book makes a case for cross-cultural transmission... more »
“Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »
"In mid-twentieth-century America, nuns were publishing widely in the finest literary publications. Something, it seems, was happening"... more »
Lauren Berlant’s writing flirts with meaning. Rhythmic and atmospheric, it’s somewhere between incoherence and poetry... more »
Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »
In search of lost time. In 1983 a thief stole 106 rare clocks from a Jerusalem museum. Investigators were stumped — until a deathbed confession showed up... more »
“They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people?... more »
Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »
Death has been humanity’s central defining experience — our deepest existential theme. Birth, by contrast, is our least-explored subject... more »
Speaking, writing, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, radio, television, PR, A.I.: How we know what we know, and how that's changed... more »
Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »
Magical realism was invented not by Márquez or Llosa, but by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. Why isn’t he better known?... more »
Too flinty and realistic to be an aesthete, Shirley Hazzard nevertheless pursued a life steeped in aesthetic pleasure... more »
Unusual writing can be eloquent writing. It can also be just plain unusual. Consider the essayist Brian Dillon... more »
If you were devising an ecosystem for advancing scientific knowledge, would you emphasize merit?... more »
Rorty vs. MacIntyre: One was an ecumenical leftist, the other a powerful critic of liberalism. What matters about their lifelong argument?... more »
Style tip from Christopher Lasch: Jettison ostentatious erudition, abbreviations, and acronyms. Initials are for desiccated bureaucrats... more »
During the Great Plague of 1665, the Common Council of the City of London decreed: “All dogs and cats should be immediately killed”... more »
With funding from Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, the life-extension business is booming. Enter the biochemist Charles Brenner, the longevity skeptic... more »
Beyond eating, drinking, speaking, and smiling: 42 ways of communicating by bringing your hands to your mouth... more »
Guinness World Records have always been a repository of impressively absurd feats. Does it have a place in a world where weird is commonplace?... more »
How sad to try to sell your soul to a dictator and find that the dictator isn't buying. Consider the case of the composer Hans Pfitzner... more »
Rules can be thick or thin, says Lorraine Daston. “Behind every thin rule is a thick rule, cleaning up after it”... more »
There is no such thing as color, only the people who perceive it. Sky isn’t blue, the sun isn’t yellow, snow isn’t white... more »
For rationalists, nothing should interfere with apprehending the world as it is. So why are they turning to religion, ritual, and all things woo?... more »
Martin Amis — novelist, memoirist, journalist, critic, caustic wit, dazzling stylist — is dead. He was 73... Dwight Garner... James Wood... Salman Rushdie... Ian McEwan... Lisa Allardice... Boyd Tonkin... James Parker... A.O. Scott... Christian Lorentzen... Terry Eagleton... Jennifer Egan... Tom Meaney... more »
As a young man, Adam Kirsch didn't turn to George Michael and Madonna to learn about sex and sin. He turned to opera... more »
In 1928, two German mathematicians proposed the “decision problem”. Then a 23-year old graduate student in England started working on it... more »
“Dear Thought Criminals." Where do canceled, almost-canceled, and aspiring-to-be-canceled academics and artists hang out? Pamela Paresky's parties... more »
"If you go to the right, you lose your life, and if you go to the left, you lose your conscience.” The Gulag Archipelago at 50... more »
The daguerreotype craze began in 1839. A few silvery inches of a stranger's face gave new meaning to the idea of love at first sight... more »
For 30 years, Douglas Rushkoff was a believer in the digital revolution. No more. The Gen X techno-optimist is now a middle-aged Marxist... more »
At 72, with cancer and a shattered family, the poet Jorie Graham might just have written the best book of her career... more »
"In mid-twentieth-century America, nuns were publishing widely in the finest literary publications. Something, it seems, was happening"... more »
In search of lost time. In 1983 a thief stole 106 rare clocks from a Jerusalem museum. Investigators were stumped — until a deathbed confession showed up... more »
Death has been humanity’s central defining experience — our deepest existential theme. Birth, by contrast, is our least-explored subject... more »
Magical realism was invented not by Márquez or Llosa, but by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. Why isn’t he better known?... more »
If you were devising an ecosystem for advancing scientific knowledge, would you emphasize merit?... more »
Dean Koontz, writer of terrifying tales of murder and mayhem, is scared of flying, fires, and gory movies. He’s the kind of guy who irons his underwear... more »
Sally Haslanger, Amia Srinivasan, and Anthony Appiah have resigned from the masthead of The Journal of Political Philosophy. What happened?... more »
For Murakami, art is not always about art, though it is about discipline. His daily goal: write 1,600 words... more »
It started as a social club for fiddlers in Tennessee. How did it become what we know as the Ku Klux Klan?... more »
Gallery walls plastered with graphs, endless artist statements, pamphlets everywhere — behold the rise of research-based art... more »
In the German capital, expats have built a new language centered on nightlife slang, expletives, and loan words: Berlinglish ... more »
Freud’s Talmudic style. Both psychoanalysis and rabbinic tradition make themselves immune to disproof by rational argument... more »
John le Carré was disillusioned "in that special way which only affects those who have had very strong illusions in the first place"... more »
The evolutionary long game. Ants, saltwater clams, and mammals waited at least tens of millions of years before exploding in number. Why?... more »
Medieval urine analysis: Reddish-gold connoted good digestion; raven-black hinted at mortification; colorless could signify brain disease... more »
John James Audubon was a killer of birds by the barrelful, a racist, and an enslaver. We turn to him not for goodness, but for “a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge"... more »
Low-rise jeans, Abu Ghraib, Gilmore Girls, a cultural fixation on eating disorders. A millennial recounts the 2000s — the Decade of Cruelty... more »
When Junot Díaz was accused of sexual misconduct, he was working for Deborah Chasman at Boston Review. When she looked into the case, things got complicated... more »
Football and hide-and-seek, sure, but also mumble-the-peg and scourge-top. The children of Tudor England had no shortage of games... more »
Roland Griffith ushered in the psychedelic renaissance. Now it's shaping how he faces his own death... more »
The music business collapsed in 2003. Now we consider the ramifications of having it all at the click of a button... more »
Would you listen to an audiobook narrated by AI? It's disrupting the voice-over industry, and voice actors aren’t pleased... more »
Consultants, algorithms, publicity teams? Barack Obama makes his widely anticipated annual book list the old-fashioned way... more »
The Phantom of the Opera is “a self-described ugly virgin who plots violent attacks on the public from his basement.” Why did anyone ever like the play?... more »
The wisdom of Epictetus includes deep Stoic insights, as well as his thoughts on the unmanliness of tweezing body hair... more »
Being Hayek. His life played out along three great arcs: intellectual, geographical, and emotional. In all three, his views evolved along with his fortunes... more »
Anthropologist of filth. Chuck Berry's sexual predilections were seen as un-chic, un-romantic, and too “real” for public taste... more »
It is commonly believed that every written word by a major writer must be gathered and published. But what to make of Kafka’s diaries?... more »
At her best, Susan Sontag refused to simplify her thinking for easy answers. At her worst, she was dodgy and noncommittal. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
Derek Parfit spent most of his life cloistered within a cloistered institution. He sacrificed nearly everything to his intellectual calling... more »
Birth of romanticism. When polymaths, poets, philosophers, and playwrights lived, argued, and loved in the German town of Jena ... more »
For more than 20 years, J.C. presided over the back page of the TLS with wit, weirdness, and waspish provocation... more »
Failure comes in many forms: physical, social, biological. Facing it humbles us, and so we lead better lives. So argues Costica Bradatan... more »
“The problem of the world is this,” Orwell told a friend late in life. “Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”... more »
Elias Canetti was a scholar, but not an academic. He wasn’t a novelist or poet, though he wrote that way. He was many writers at once... more »
Bruno Schulz's stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. And his death — appalling and senseless — defies meaning... more »
No nepo babies and no assholes — in the corny, cheerful world of Tom Hanks, moviemaking is earnest, joyous, well-compensated work... more »
The American idea of continental philosophers as speculative, irrational mystics dates to the 1953 International Congress of Philosophy, in Brussels... more »
Shakespeare's body of work is complex and confounding; so is the task of tracking down his biography. Who was he? Who cares?... more »
Is multiculturalism an oxymoron? In an age of atomization a new book makes a case for cross-cultural transmission... more »
Lauren Berlant’s writing flirts with meaning. Rhythmic and atmospheric, it’s somewhere between incoherence and poetry... more »
“They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people?... more »
Speaking, writing, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, radio, television, PR, A.I.: How we know what we know, and how that's changed... more »
Too flinty and realistic to be an aesthete, Shirley Hazzard nevertheless pursued a life steeped in aesthetic pleasure... more »
Rorty vs. MacIntyre: One was an ecumenical leftist, the other a powerful critic of liberalism. What matters about their lifelong argument?... more »
Ask a philosopher of a certain age to reflect on the state of the discipline, and the response is generally dour. Philip Kitcher is no exception... more »
Not long before descending into insanity, Nietzsche was moved to tears in Turin at a concert of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bizet... more »
Some of Osip Mandelstam’s poems are frivolous, others gnomic. Most are memorable, and hypnotically musical... more »
For decades, some bright minds have been consumed by a mundane problem: How to go viral on the internet... more »
Bach, Handel, Mozart, Schubert: All of them fell out of favor between their time and ours. But not Beethoven. Why?... more »
The new anti-anti-colonialism. The brutalities of British imperialism spur contemporary denial, guilt, trauma, and silence... more »
Tyler Cowen: "Longtermism is a radical and oft-neglected philosophy, and few people are interested in living by its implications"... more »
Is ballet a relic of outdated patriarchy, a cult-like system that conditions women to be obedient? Or is it “a laboratory of femaleness”? Both... more »
The Derek Parfit scandal. In 1981, Oxford’s All Souls College refused him a promotion unless he wrote a book. Twenty months later, Reasons and Persons was complete... more »
The critic Brian Dillon ponders: What does it mean to have an affinity for something? And is there any rhyme or reason to what catches our eye?... more »
Creativity, as a concept, was not born from the arts. Rather, it’s a product of Cold War capitalism... more »
Freud did not discover the unconscious, and many of his theories now seem absurd. But belief in the Freudian mythology might well have been beneficial... more »
Alfred Russel Wallace unnerved colleagues with his affinity for spiritualism. That iconoclasm produced his greatest insights... more »
George Eliot’s literary marriage: They would work in the mornings, dine at 3, and “read diligently aloud in the evening”... more »
The ultimate prison literature is a 40-foot-long, 4-inch-wide scroll written in the Bastille in 1785. This strange, sublime gem? The 120 Days of Sodom... more »
Zonked, bushed, pooped, hebetudinous — the effect of a new book about the history of fatigue, in excruciating detail, reflects its subject... more »
The future of college is nanocertificates, digital chips, and microbadges. Or so some entrepreneurs would have you believe... more »
“While we can detect gravitational waves, find water on Mars, and grow human organs, we still can’t claim a complete understanding of how our noses work”... more »
Microfiction, nanofiction, hint fiction, flash fiction, dribble, drabble, trabble: What's with writers' fascination with brevity?... more »
“The era of bourgeois revolutions coincided with a general turn towards neoclassicism in architecture, visual arts, literature, music and theatre”... more »
“Although they were the butt of endless Renaissance jokes, old women were also depicted as powerful, fearsome entities”... more »
From admissions to assessment, academic integrity to scholarly research, how will artificial intelligence change higher education?... more »
"This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble”... more »
Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the idea of secrets — what they are, why we keep them, and what they reveal about us ... more »
More than ever, we need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism. We need Max Weber... more »
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 »
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 »
Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley... more »
You’ve had to deal with the sulkiness of others. Indeed, you might be a sulker yourself. But what is sulking, exactly?... more »
Parents of young children are rarely alone, and yet they report feeling lonely. How to explain? Donald Winnicott has some theories... more »
The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring... more »
An extreme figure even in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris, Jean Lorrain was a dandy, Satanist, drinker of ether, and highly paid writer... more »
“Whereas algorithms present personalized recommendations by rank, the blurb is a one-rank system of aesthetic value: utterly awesome” ... more »
“Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »
Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »
Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »
Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »
Unusual writing can be eloquent writing. It can also be just plain unusual. Consider the essayist Brian Dillon... more »
Style tip from Christopher Lasch: Jettison ostentatious erudition, abbreviations, and acronyms. Initials are for desiccated bureaucrats... more »
The history of the swing. From Greece to Borneo, swinging has been a form of magic, a means of warding off evil, a form of celebration... more »
Semafor, Air Mail, Punchbowl News, Puck, Substack: Making sense of the cacophonous, paywall-inhibited online reading environment... more »
Roger Scruton wasn’t judicious about his associates. Now he’s being used by more-brutish conservatives as a shield of sophistication... more »
Libertarian critics of democracy make several valid points. But there's no evidence their alternatives are better, and much to suggest they'd be worse ... more »
Neutrality might be a fiction, but it is an essential one, says Anthony Appiah. "Performing fairness can make us fairer"... more »
Literary criticism is flourishing, says Ryan Ruby, despite – and sometimes because of – dire economic circumstances... more »
Nations and peoples fall into nostalgic moods just as individuals do. Its allure is as strong as its destructive potential. Mark Lilla explains... more »
“I’ve taken enormous walks and lived on rice and codfish tongues and I feel like a new man.” John Dos Passos was at home on Cape Cod... more »
We like clear-cut rules, but life is full of extenuating circumstances. Enter discretion, an uncomfortable yet necessary virtue... more »
“I was in the right emotional state for a nine-day (yes) wellness cruise from Barcelona to Rome. This is precisely why I really, really did not want to go”... more »
The trouble caused by desire, and by the inability to be good, are familiar problems that Andrea Long Chu explores in new ways... more »
Imagine a future in which serious publications have disappeared, and the cultural discourse is dominated by the progeny of celebrities. Is it that far off?... more »
"I am in a relationship with the internet. It is in my mind, and my mind is in it, and it causes feelings in my body. Good feelings and crazy-making feelings"... more »
What draws contemporary literary critics to Elizabeth Hardwick? Her loose, fragmentary form and resistance to easy answers... more »
“What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” Engage with it, don't quash it. Judith Shulevitz explains... more »
In this age of instrumentality, what is left to pursue simply because it’s beautiful, good, or true?... more »
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 »
The sweeping grandeur of clause upon clause, twist and turn, convoluted syntax, elaborate punctuation: In praise of long sentences... more »
The moral of forgiveness: “We should find ourselves ever open to changing our minds about people and their actions”... more »
Dunwich — the city that fell into the sea — was immortalized by Henry James, J. M. W. Turner, and other artists... more »
In 1996, Adam Gopnik shocked the art world by delimiting the scope of Picasso’s genius. His critique has won the day... more »
Joanna Biggs: “Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave”... more »
“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 »
Auden was of the same generation as Elizabeth Bishop, yet she still speaks to us, while he does not. Why?... more »
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 »
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 »
An essential part of bookselling is cataloging. But it’s a decentralized, unstandardized carnival fire... more »
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 »
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 »
New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week.
Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
Founding Editor (1998-2010): Denis Dutton
Editor: Evan Goldstein
Managing Editor: Tran Huu Dung
Assistant Editor: David Wescott
Copy Editor: Mitch Gerber
© 1998 — 2023
Arts & Letters Daily is brought to you by
The Chronicle of Higher Education