Tyler Austin Harper: “White American elites … are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda”... more »
Intellectuals and the cult of seriousness. Sontag and Steiner made a performance of omniscience and moral solemnity that no one could honestly sustain... more »
“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »
Ed Ruscha’s books were so unpopular, “so doomed to oblivion,” that documenting them is an obligation... more »
To escape from boredom, we seek distraction and endless stimulation. A better path forward is leisured contemplation... more »
The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »
The pandemic, the Trump years, the mental-health crisis: What is driving the current return to Freud?... more »
Progressive political thinking has fallen into the identity trap, where race, gender, and sexual orientation trump all else... more »
“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »
In the early days of American English, “timber” became “lumber,” “autumn” became “fall,” and “shop” became “store”... more »
Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris transformed 18th-century natural science. When will the sisters get their due?... more »
“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »
In search of fresh material to mine, AI companies are hiring poets, novelists, playwrights, writers, and Ph.D.s... more »
Mom rage seems to be all about power — who has it, and who is denied it. But it is also about shame... more »
Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »
The academic book review is on life support. If it dies, a vital plank of our intellectual ecosystem will vanish... more »
As a young man, Amos Oz discovered his literary identity on a kibbutz. “The more provincial you are, the more universal you get”... more »
Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »
An essay about grief went viral in The Believer and was then adapted for This American Life. Does it matter that it was written by AI?... more »
“Loneliness,” Walter Benjamin wrote, is “a process of self-poisoning, whose anti-toxins lie in the creative attitude”... more »
Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »
Justice for Neanderthals! A quixotic campaign seeks to restore dignity to humanity’s long-dead cousins. But why?... more »
AP courses are mechanistic, superficial, and they fail to live up to the liberal, humanist ideals on which they were founded... more »
In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »
For Betty Friedan, a titan of second-wave feminism, her reputation should be secure. But in the academy it is approaching pariah status... more »
Ulysses, Don Juan, The Power Broker. What’s the book that you’ve been meaning to read for the longest time?... more »
“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »
Shelby Foote was a failed novelist until he wrote about the Civil War. He was the Jewish Proust of the American South... more »
What is “woke”? Bashing vague, undefined concepts is easy. It’s harder to unpack them in philosophically serious ways... more »
“Impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” What do the clothing, decor, and stylistic choices of the Bloomsbury set mean?... more »
The South African novelist Thando Mgqolozana made being a feminist ally central to his work. Then allegations of abuse surfaced... more »
Angsty novels by cool girl novelists reflect the student condition, not the human condition. It’s time to leave the quad behind... more »
“If some writers are hypersensitive to critique, there must be others who are hypersensitive to praise”... more »
The musicians of Terezin. How the inmates of a Nazi concentration camp managed to create art ... more »
How to lie with statistics: “In politics it doesn’t really matter what the numbers are, so much as whose they are”... more »
For Alasdair MacIntyre, doing moral philosophy from the margins is a necessary condition to seeing things clearly... more »
"Historians! Put down your tools! Your labors are at an end. The scientists have finally solved history." Or something like that... more »
Martin Peretz, who helped define the liberal establishment even as he tweaked it, is at 84 persona non grata. “It’s a sodden coda”... more »
In today’s novel, identity can be leveraged only to confirm that fiction speaks from experience; confession trumps imagination... more »
The bulk of our cultural lives plays out online. Our artifacts are preserved in the cloud. Until they aren’t... more »
For the Bloomsbury set, clothing conventions – like other customs– were meant to be broken... more »
Hunting for lost books. It’s possible to find them on the internet, of course, but that robs us of one of the things that gives life purpose... more »
Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative, makes reactionary views seem slightly ironic, and, thus, palatable... more »
For W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay’s fiction was "filth" and made him feel like taking a bath. Now a McKay renaissance is afoot... more »
Slow songs used to inspire slow dancing. Now they are more commonly the soundtrack for the sad and lonely... more »
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the toll of early ambition. "Failure was the shadow that stalked him because anything less than perfection was unthinkable”... more »
“Aside from the fact that they’re all dead, the women of Surrealism have had a banner couple of years”... more »
The case of the Crusoe Cabana. Why a lawsuit over a Miami nightclub hinged on the testimony of a scholar of 18th-century literature... more »
In South Dakota, Joseph Horowitz saw the future of classical music in America. His name is Delta David Gier... more »
Whatever you have heard about trauma — from clinical definitions to literary uses to gauzy oversimplifications — probably stems from the work of Judith Herman... more »
When it comes to DEI, it’s Ron DeSantis or Robin DiAngelo, whitewashing or wokeness — and nothing in between. There’s a better path... more »
The font industry has always been cutthroat and volatile. Now looms a new menace: a private-equity-owned aspiring monopoly... more »
What happened to Naomi Wolf is what happened to wellness culture: Its principles gave way to paranoid individualism... more »
What gives authority to a literary critic? Wit, discrimination, judgment, and advocacy, for starters. Merve Emre elaborates... more »
Elif Batuman goes looking for a half-remembered Proust quote, via ChatGPT. The algorithm recommends she read all of In Search of Lost Time... more »
J.L. Austin, military man. How the Oxford philosopher became one of the most consequential British intelligence officers of World War II... more »
Andrea Long Chu: “White Teeth remains by far the best thing [Zadie] Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24!”... more »
We imagine medieval inquisition to be all torture and confessions of Satanic activity. But a good deal of it was bland bureaucracy... more »
The trouble with genealogy: Fragments of evidence do not cohere into ironclad facts... more »
"Stories are indispensable, nourishing and delightful,” says Ian Leslie. “They are also attacks on the rational immune system"... more »
Milan Kundera has long been a cult sensation in the West. Will an array of critical charges — including misogyny — dull the passion?... more »
The quest for pocket parity. Long ago, everyone carried a purse. Then came a new feature of male dress... more »
With the right input, ChatGPT can write a strong college essay. Is this the end of take-home writing assignments?... more »
Tyler Austin Harper: “White American elites … are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda”... more »
Ed Ruscha’s books were so unpopular, “so doomed to oblivion,” that documenting them is an obligation... more »
The pandemic, the Trump years, the mental-health crisis: What is driving the current return to Freud?... more »
In the early days of American English, “timber” became “lumber,” “autumn” became “fall,” and “shop” became “store”... more »
In search of fresh material to mine, AI companies are hiring poets, novelists, playwrights, writers, and Ph.D.s... more »
The academic book review is on life support. If it dies, a vital plank of our intellectual ecosystem will vanish... more »
An essay about grief went viral in The Believer and was then adapted for This American Life. Does it matter that it was written by AI?... more »
Justice for Neanderthals! A quixotic campaign seeks to restore dignity to humanity’s long-dead cousins. But why?... more »
For Betty Friedan, a titan of second-wave feminism, her reputation should be secure. But in the academy it is approaching pariah status... more »
Shelby Foote was a failed novelist until he wrote about the Civil War. He was the Jewish Proust of the American South... more »
The South African novelist Thando Mgqolozana made being a feminist ally central to his work. Then allegations of abuse surfaced... more »
The musicians of Terezin. How the inmates of a Nazi concentration camp managed to create art ... more »
"Historians! Put down your tools! Your labors are at an end. The scientists have finally solved history." Or something like that... more »
The bulk of our cultural lives plays out online. Our artifacts are preserved in the cloud. Until they aren’t... more »
Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative, makes reactionary views seem slightly ironic, and, thus, palatable... more »
F. Scott Fitzgerald and the toll of early ambition. "Failure was the shadow that stalked him because anything less than perfection was unthinkable”... more »
In South Dakota, Joseph Horowitz saw the future of classical music in America. His name is Delta David Gier... more »
The font industry has always been cutthroat and volatile. Now looms a new menace: a private-equity-owned aspiring monopoly... more »
Elif Batuman goes looking for a half-remembered Proust quote, via ChatGPT. The algorithm recommends she read all of In Search of Lost Time... more »
We imagine medieval inquisition to be all torture and confessions of Satanic activity. But a good deal of it was bland bureaucracy... more »
Milan Kundera has long been a cult sensation in the West. Will an array of critical charges — including misogyny — dull the passion?... more »
Why is it that a clock has 12 hours, an hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds?... more »
EP Thompson’s brother was executed for his dealings with Bulgarian anti-fascists. There was more to the story than a hero’s death... more »
Ever notice that your tongue tends to stick out when you’re focusing intently? Here’s why... more »
What’s behind the blurb arms race? And can anything arrest publishings deepening dependence on inane, over-the-top praise?... more »
Radical mycology. Mushrooms have real ecological promise. But they also offer themselves as a medium of mythic truth... more »
We think of atoms as mostly empty space. But protons' and neutrons’ interior is likely the most complex place in the universe... more »
A museum at Emory University wanted only the finest antiquities. Many of them, it turns out, may have been looted... more »
The works of Murakami, Ferrante, and Atwood are being used to train AI models without permission. Is that a problem?... more »
Toni Morrison knew the monumental worth of her work and was unembarrassed to be honored for it... more »
European identity conveys a sense of cosmopolitanism, inclusiveness, and cooperation. But darker forces underlie all that... more »
Hollywood shows the "Mona Lisa" in flames, the Guggenheim in ruins. What’s behind our cinematic appetite for artpocalypse?... more »
The punk scene has never suffered a dearth of jerks. Yet even in that caustic, self-righteous milieu, Steve Albini stood out... more »
“Where once it was occasionally possible to opt out of ‘reality’ (by taking drugs, say), it is now increasingly necessary to think about how to opt in to it" ... more »
If categorization is crucial to making sense of the world, how should we classify Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy?... more »
A rich history of extravagance sustains lyric poetry. But new poets explore themes that are muted, withdrawn, and inscrutable... more »
In debates over the restitution of cultural objects, the modern left stands in support of individual property rights, and against its own past values... more »
Walter Benjamin's radio tales. He was dismissive of his work as a broadcaster. But the transcripts are more than mere ephemera... more »
Is one future of journalism a 20-page, print-only broadsheet that appears six times per year and is powered by a 19th-century business model?... more »
Bessel van der Kolk, former Harvard “traumatologist,” is adamant: He is not to be held responsible for how his work on trauma therapy is used... more »
Intellectuals and the cult of seriousness. Sontag and Steiner made a performance of omniscience and moral solemnity that no one could honestly sustain... more »
To escape from boredom, we seek distraction and endless stimulation. A better path forward is leisured contemplation... more »
Progressive political thinking has fallen into the identity trap, where race, gender, and sexual orientation trump all else... more »
Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris transformed 18th-century natural science. When will the sisters get their due?... more »
Mom rage seems to be all about power — who has it, and who is denied it. But it is also about shame... more »
As a young man, Amos Oz discovered his literary identity on a kibbutz. “The more provincial you are, the more universal you get”... more »
“Loneliness,” Walter Benjamin wrote, is “a process of self-poisoning, whose anti-toxins lie in the creative attitude”... more »
AP courses are mechanistic, superficial, and they fail to live up to the liberal, humanist ideals on which they were founded... more »
Ulysses, Don Juan, The Power Broker. What’s the book that you’ve been meaning to read for the longest time?... more »
What is “woke”? Bashing vague, undefined concepts is easy. It’s harder to unpack them in philosophically serious ways... more »
Angsty novels by cool girl novelists reflect the student condition, not the human condition. It’s time to leave the quad behind... more »
How to lie with statistics: “In politics it doesn’t really matter what the numbers are, so much as whose they are”... more »
Martin Peretz, who helped define the liberal establishment even as he tweaked it, is at 84 persona non grata. “It’s a sodden coda”... more »
For the Bloomsbury set, clothing conventions – like other customs– were meant to be broken... more »
For W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay’s fiction was "filth" and made him feel like taking a bath. Now a McKay renaissance is afoot... more »
“Aside from the fact that they’re all dead, the women of Surrealism have had a banner couple of years”... more »
Whatever you have heard about trauma — from clinical definitions to literary uses to gauzy oversimplifications — probably stems from the work of Judith Herman... more »
What happened to Naomi Wolf is what happened to wellness culture: Its principles gave way to paranoid individualism... more »
J.L. Austin, military man. How the Oxford philosopher became one of the most consequential British intelligence officers of World War II... more »
The trouble with genealogy: Fragments of evidence do not cohere into ironclad facts... more »
The quest for pocket parity. Long ago, everyone carried a purse. Then came a new feature of male dress... more »
Don DeLillo, long anointed as a prophet, is surely “anticipating the involuntary mutations that await the posthumous"... more »
Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, 20th-century Oxford: Why do certain places and times produce a clustering of philosophical genius?... more »
Kafka’s notebooks contain homoerotic passages, dreams of sausages, and his repeated self-flagellation: “Wrote nothing”... more »
Is authoritative criticism a problem? No, criticism is not a passive medium of arbitration. It is an act of creation... more »
In combating fascism, 20th-century theologians like Oskar Goldberg strove for a “politics of immortality” ... more »
Forgiveness, messy and ambiguous, encourages an expansive moral imagination. To understand it, turn to literature... more »
Chasing Agnes Martin. The painter declared that “artists must of necessity be alone” — but also that “asceticism is a mistake”... more »
“The basic error of liberalism, according to the post-liberals, is its conflation of freedom with the absence of limitation or constraint”... more »
“Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity”... more »
In 1450, an Italian monk began work on a map that took several years to complete. It was the most accurate map of the known world... more »
August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences was his most financially successful. It was also his least favorite... more »
Was it Orwell’s wife, Eileen, who persuaded him to turn an anti-Stalinist essay into an allegory?... more »
Is Jonathan Israel's decadeas-long argument for the importance of Spinoza the work of a prophet or a zealot?... more »
Kierkegaard’s engagement crisis. His philosophical career began when he broke up with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, in 1841... more »
How Harry Smith, a gnome-like polymath with a compulsive urge to document, mined his collection of folk-music records to feed the imagination of a generation... more »
If marriages are "hideously private," as Iris Murdoch said, can the study of one relationship reveal a grand theory of intimacy?... more »
“On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun”... more »
From writers like Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh, sad-girl literature presents a smorgasbord of unlikable protagonists... more »
“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »
The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »
“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »
“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »
Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »
Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »
Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »
In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »
“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »
“Impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” What do the clothing, decor, and stylistic choices of the Bloomsbury set mean?... more »
“If some writers are hypersensitive to critique, there must be others who are hypersensitive to praise”... more »
For Alasdair MacIntyre, doing moral philosophy from the margins is a necessary condition to seeing things clearly... more »
In today’s novel, identity can be leveraged only to confirm that fiction speaks from experience; confession trumps imagination... more »
Hunting for lost books. It’s possible to find them on the internet, of course, but that robs us of one of the things that gives life purpose... more »
Slow songs used to inspire slow dancing. Now they are more commonly the soundtrack for the sad and lonely... more »
The case of the Crusoe Cabana. Why a lawsuit over a Miami nightclub hinged on the testimony of a scholar of 18th-century literature... more »
When it comes to DEI, it’s Ron DeSantis or Robin DiAngelo, whitewashing or wokeness — and nothing in between. There’s a better path... more »
What gives authority to a literary critic? Wit, discrimination, judgment, and advocacy, for starters. Merve Emre elaborates... more »
Andrea Long Chu: “White Teeth remains by far the best thing [Zadie] Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24!”... more »
"Stories are indispensable, nourishing and delightful,” says Ian Leslie. “They are also attacks on the rational immune system"... more »
With the right input, ChatGPT can write a strong college essay. Is this the end of take-home writing assignments?... more »
What is the responsibility of art criticism? Is it directed at social justice? Enriching one’s sense of identity? Surrendering to the mysticism of art?... more »
Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe for liberalism, and yet its cause is championed again and again... more »
In a culture devoted to work, leisure is a lofty, slippery goal. Its fulfillment requires the cultivation of habits... more »
“We are keen to nestle into a nice category,” says Matt Feeney. “This is a lot of things besides funny, but it’s also funny”... more »
“ChatGPT and identity politics are two sides of the same coin — both represent bankrupt versions of what literature is and is meant to do”... more »
Iris Murdoch on Simone Weil’s notebooks: “To read her is to be reminded of a standard”... more »
Flaubert, the ultimate perfectionist, wrote at five words per hour, the legend goes. Perhaps he was just prone to distraction... more »
Why do we turn to psychoanalysis? For Adam Phillips, “the patient goes to an analyst to find out why he has gone to an analyst”... more »
Covid, climate change, geopolitical drama — we’re living in a “polycrisis,” we’re told. But is that just short for “history happening”?... more »
In his Confessions, Saint Augustine lamented having not enough time to figure out how to live. He, like us, is of two minds about leisure... more »
“Gen Z-ification,” “S.U.V.-ification,” “old man-ification” — we live in convoluted times, beset by the “-ification” of everything... more »
A tale of two Naomis — Klein and Wolf. The appearance of one’s double is paranoia-inducing. Especially when she's paranoid... more »
The impoverishment of our interracial imagination: Social events are now marred by white anti-racists seeking “uncomfortable conversations”... more »
The twin pillars of Gen X identity are authenticity and irony, accompanied by the belief that rock and roll will never die... more »
Dissident scientists historically have faced ostracism, censorship, and worse. As the Covid lab leak saga shows, little has changed... more »
From “A Crop of Cocks” to tales of defecation, bestiality, incest, and cuckoldry, obscene folktales thrived in Russia... more »
The subject of all great literature is either redemption or its loss, says Ed Simon. That’s also the story of his own sobriety... more »
The libraries of imperial Rome were awe-inspiring and open to all. They were also distinctly autocratic... more »
The literary marriage: Can one find a better example of the tension between larger-than-life aspirations and the banalities of everyday existence?... more »
George Orwell’s private mores are of his time. His dedication to truthfulness and public writing is eternal... more »
John Milton seems the oldest, deadest, and whitest of old, dead, white authors. Yet his radical, lyrical beauty will blow you away... more »
The new historical divide is neither academic vs. popular nor scholarly vs. presentist. It’s hagiography vs. iconoclasm... more »
Why was the pioneering analytic philosopher E.E. Constance Jones forgotten? It didn’t help that Bertrand Russell demeaned her as "motherly" and "prissy"... more »
Does Barbie’s existential crisis disrupt her brand or simply consolidate it? Leslie Jamison makes the case for the latter... more »
Milan Kundera and the dream of absolute authorship. He worked obsessively to control his writing, and to distinguish between the work and the person ... more »
How did Ian McEwan go from being a risk-taking enfant terrible to the grandfather of the well-plotted English literary novel... more »
Part sex cult, part art world coterie, the Sullivanian Institute “combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis and the musical theatre”... more »
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 »
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 »
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