Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »
The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »
“Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »
Kafka's dark humor is apparent in his weirdest, longest, and most underappreciated short story ... more »
Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »
Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »
Beatrix Potter wasn’t just a children’s book writer — she was a framer, sheep breeder, and conservationist... more »
In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »
The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »
100 pages a day. No exceptions. That’s how much Matthew Walther reads. You're skeptical?... more »
“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »
We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »
Why read novels? To recognize our preoccupations and escape from them; to be intellectually engaged and emotionally devastated... more »
Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »
Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »
Roger Scruton became a conservative in Paris, but refined his thinking in the “bohemian blur” of 1970s Britain... more »
“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »
When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »
Whose Aristotle? Ideologues of all varieties claim him as their own, distorting and even falsifying his views... more »
Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »
AI and democracy. Had early technologists paid attention to John Dewey, we’d be in a much better place. Evgeny Morozov explains... more »
The Simone Weil resurgence seeks to makes her “relatable” — by stripping away her eccentricity and religiosity... more »
What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »
Literature professors gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to traditionalists and provocateurs... more »
“I’d go to see Las Meninas and it was very eerie to be there alone”: John Banville on the spookiness of the Prado after hours... more »
Jackson Lears is among the most original historians of our time. He chronicles cranks and conjurers... more »
“In search of solid ground, any number of artists have opted to return to first principles: technique, color, and, above all else, visual pleasure”... more »
She rubbed shoulders with celebrities and art-world royalty. Her paintings sold for $200,000. Then, in a flash, Jamian Juliano-Villani was brought low... more »
Perry Anderson, pillar of Britain's Marxist left, tackles a thorny question: What really caused World War I?... more »
Thirty years ago, Sven Birkerts derided digital reading. He was dismissed as a curmudgeonly Luddite, but he was right... more »
Derek Parfit was odd. Very odd. Were they charming eccentricities? Psychological limitations? Or something more alarming?... more »
Many atrocities have been committed in the name of communism. But communism is not an atrocity. It is a tragedy... more »
An array of contradictory modern movements claims the mantle of decolonization, seeking moral authority from the now-distant 20th century ... more »
At the first Thanksgiving, turkey was very likely overshadowed by goose, duck, or even swan and passenger pigeon... more »
Nostalgia, greed, and streaming have taken hold of the music industry. Do we even want new music anymore?... more »
“Appreciationgiving” doesn’t have the same ring to it but might be a more philosophically accurate approach to the holiday... more »
Nietzsche first landed in American bookstores in the 1890s. He’s maintained a unique hold on the American mind ever since ... more »
The power of ignorance. “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Mark Lilla explains... more »
Whether cancel culture is a moral panic or a genuine scourge, are the words and deeds of American colleges students really so consequential?... more »
“An increasingly competitive spiritual marketplace.” Modernization spawned Mormonism, Caodaism, Rastafari, and other new alternative faiths... more »
Walter Benjamin in Capri. An extended holiday helped shape one of the most influential diagnoses of modernity... more »
In place of the the monastic cell of the Middle Ages, Renaissance-era scholars had the studiolo — a place to converse with the dead... more »
To hone his prose style, Haruki Murakami wrote his first novel in Japanese, rewrote it in English, then translated it back to Japanese ... more »
Nostalgia began not as an emotion but as a disease. Now it afflicts us all, with great political consequence... more »
The Duolingo delusion: It’s fun — but absurd — to think that five minutes of language-learning a day will make us fluent... more »
Noel Parmentel Jr., “a man who attracted women by insulting them,” was Joan Didion’s first great love... more »
Richard Dawkins has long been the doyen of grandiloquent science writing. His new book feels like the end of an era... more »
Barre, Pilates, the Alexander technique: Is our quest for straighter spines a moral panic or a legitimate concern over back pain?... more »
Jordan Peterson has wrestled with God and himself to confront the specter of nihilism, falling into the same pitfalls as Nietzsche ... more »
America’s “Bone Wars”: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns... more »
The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas, yes, but also a fairy-tale of illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy... more »
A drilling project at the moon's south pole has academics and activists wondering: Does outer space need environmentalism?... more »
In the absurd guise of Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire took devastating aim at his real foil: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz... more »
Art is about selection and omission. Melville goes on and on about whales; another writer would sum it up with “etcetera”... more »
For 10 years, academics have fruitlessly bent their expertise toward the goals of left-wing political activism... more »
Milton, dismembered. In 1790 his coffin was pillaged. Several thousand people bought what they believed to be one of his teeth... more »
“When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?”... more »
The marketing of olive oil suggests artisanal traditions from the Mediterranean. The flavor is actually produced by heavy machinery... more »
The love affairs of Thomas Hardy followed a pattern: He would give his beloved a ring and then break off the engagement when he met someone else... more »
Democracy dies in darkness? Journalists’ aspiration to save democracy is counterproductive, argues Yascha Mounk... more »
Violet Powell, a first-class nitpicker, loved nothing more than picking at the writing of her husband, Anthony... more »
No matter how brilliant or original their work, environmental historians face a challenge: Are they just doomsayers?... more »
Modern museums are designed to focus attention. But now our attention is fractured, and our art is changing... more »
Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »
Kafka's dark humor is apparent in his weirdest, longest, and most underappreciated short story ... more »
Beatrix Potter wasn’t just a children’s book writer — she was a framer, sheep breeder, and conservationist... more »
100 pages a day. No exceptions. That’s how much Matthew Walther reads. You're skeptical?... more »
Why read novels? To recognize our preoccupations and escape from them; to be intellectually engaged and emotionally devastated... more »
Roger Scruton became a conservative in Paris, but refined his thinking in the “bohemian blur” of 1970s Britain... more »
Whose Aristotle? Ideologues of all varieties claim him as their own, distorting and even falsifying his views... more »
The Simone Weil resurgence seeks to makes her “relatable” — by stripping away her eccentricity and religiosity... more »
“I’d go to see Las Meninas and it was very eerie to be there alone”: John Banville on the spookiness of the Prado after hours... more »
She rubbed shoulders with celebrities and art-world royalty. Her paintings sold for $200,000. Then, in a flash, Jamian Juliano-Villani was brought low... more »
Derek Parfit was odd. Very odd. Were they charming eccentricities? Psychological limitations? Or something more alarming?... more »
At the first Thanksgiving, turkey was very likely overshadowed by goose, duck, or even swan and passenger pigeon... more »
Nietzsche first landed in American bookstores in the 1890s. He’s maintained a unique hold on the American mind ever since ... more »
“An increasingly competitive spiritual marketplace.” Modernization spawned Mormonism, Caodaism, Rastafari, and other new alternative faiths... more »
To hone his prose style, Haruki Murakami wrote his first novel in Japanese, rewrote it in English, then translated it back to Japanese ... more »
Noel Parmentel Jr., “a man who attracted women by insulting them,” was Joan Didion’s first great love... more »
Jordan Peterson has wrestled with God and himself to confront the specter of nihilism, falling into the same pitfalls as Nietzsche ... more »
A drilling project at the moon's south pole has academics and activists wondering: Does outer space need environmentalism?... more »
For 10 years, academics have fruitlessly bent their expertise toward the goals of left-wing political activism... more »
The marketing of olive oil suggests artisanal traditions from the Mediterranean. The flavor is actually produced by heavy machinery... more »
Violet Powell, a first-class nitpicker, loved nothing more than picking at the writing of her husband, Anthony... more »
Sanora Babb had big talent and the worst luck. The wonder isn’t that she wrote so little, but that she managed to write anything at all... more »
The Soviet Union's Plant Institute stored seeds to safeguard against famine. Amid a famine in Leningrad, did scientists eat the seeds to save themselves?... more »
The Magic Mountain turns 100. Thomas Mann’s novel captured an era of humanism and nihilism — one that parallels our own... more »
Theater tickets and copies of Playbills are by definition ephemeral. But they also serve as a history – a record that’s vanishing... more »
The pedagogy of Paracelsus. The Renaissance physician thought little of canonical texts: “Not even a dog-killer can learn his trade from books”... more »
Science is the stuff of empiricism and skepticism. But don’t overlook the role of magic in scientific progress... more »
Are smartphones and social media harming Generation Z? The statistics are frightening. But are they true?... more »
Novels are increasingly employing hyper-specific references to flatter plugged-in readers. Where does that leave the rest of us?... more »
Given enough time, would a monkey eventually type out all of Shakespeare? The "infinite monkey theorem" is most certainly wrong... more »
Why did John Bumpass Calhoun's rodent utopia — 16 apartment buildings with 256 units and unlimited food and water — turn into a mouse hell?... more »
The first chatbot therapist made its debut in 1966. Observed its creator: “A certain danger lurks there.” Still does... more »
Three facts to understand Bruno Latour: He was from a wine-growing family; he was from Burgundy; he was Catholic... more »
Evgeny Morozov envisions a futuristic socialist technology-policy that emphasizes “human enhancement” — not “human augmentation”... more »
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon is “the most promising — and the most disappointing — fragment in American fiction”... more »
How do we know there’s political bias in what gets published by academics? Scientists, reviewers, and journals explicitly say so... more »
Six centuries ago, Italy boasted hundreds of varieties of every fruit. Can Renaissance paintings help bring them back?... more »
Formaldehyde, takeaway containers, and plastic bags: A 35-year-old former mortician has amassed the world’s largest collection of ancient brains... more »
“In the mundane, nothing is sacred.” Even as an obscure religion in Myanmar fades, its scripts and symbols are being more widely adopted... more »
Are psychedelics good for your health? A wave of recent research making that case has now fallen under suspicion... more »
The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »
Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »
In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »
“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »
Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »
“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »
Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »
What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »
Jackson Lears is among the most original historians of our time. He chronicles cranks and conjurers... more »
Perry Anderson, pillar of Britain's Marxist left, tackles a thorny question: What really caused World War I?... more »
Many atrocities have been committed in the name of communism. But communism is not an atrocity. It is a tragedy... more »
Nostalgia, greed, and streaming have taken hold of the music industry. Do we even want new music anymore?... more »
The power of ignorance. “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Mark Lilla explains... more »
Walter Benjamin in Capri. An extended holiday helped shape one of the most influential diagnoses of modernity... more »
Nostalgia began not as an emotion but as a disease. Now it afflicts us all, with great political consequence... more »
Richard Dawkins has long been the doyen of grandiloquent science writing. His new book feels like the end of an era... more »
America’s “Bone Wars”: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns... more »
In the absurd guise of Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire took devastating aim at his real foil: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz... more »
Milton, dismembered. In 1790 his coffin was pillaged. Several thousand people bought what they believed to be one of his teeth... more »
The love affairs of Thomas Hardy followed a pattern: He would give his beloved a ring and then break off the engagement when he met someone else... more »
No matter how brilliant or original their work, environmental historians face a challenge: Are they just doomsayers?... more »
“Gluttony is the forechamber of lust.” In premodern Europe, how to eat was a way to answer questions about how to be... more »
“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Joan Didion infuriated Eve Babitz... more »
Plunder and provenance. The origins of many museum collections are scandalous, criminal, and impossible to reduce to any one story... more »
The bubonic plague’s origins were in the Tien Shan mountains in modern Kyrgyzstan. It spread not via rats and ships, but with gerbils... more »
Cynicism and despair make one seem sophisticated. David Graeber taught intellectuals a riskier commitment: hope... more »
The Grimm brothers, living under French occupation, despised the Gallic plagues of industry, development, and general effeteness... more »
The political theorist Richard Tuck tells progressives: Instead of condemning opponents, resolve to live with them more humbly... more »
Oxford at war. The town’s inhabitants, “dim and wildly eccentric and totally out of touch with all reality,” were essential to victory in World War II... more »
“Why can’t you be funny again?” Dorothy Parker chafed at her reputation as a reliable wit... more »
Life in a rock band. “Today I feel like a tired old whore. Some days I feel like a god. Most of the time I feel like an ambitious T-shirt salesman”... more »
Need a jolt? Read the songs of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th-century mystic who wrote rapturous, erotic descriptions of receiving the Eucharist... more »
Babitz and Didion. Making sense of the contentious bond between "fastidious, frigorific, bony Joan" and "heedless, hot, voluptuous Eve"... more »
Henri Bergson's present-day obscurity is inversely proportional to his contemporaneous fame. He transformed not just philosophy but also literature and art... more »
“Brevity has never been a quality of mine,” wrote Oliver Sacks. Indeed, excess was a hallmark of his life and his literary style... more »
What has 1,192 pages, weighs four pounds, and endorses the singular “they”? The latest version of The Chicago Manual of Style... more »
“If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing?”... more »
“If the stomach was long considered ‘the most enigmatic of organs’ by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals”... more »
Where the monsters come from. As a genre, horror emanates from the conflicting perils of community and solitude... more »
“Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »
Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »
The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »
We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »
Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »
When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »
AI and democracy. Had early technologists paid attention to John Dewey, we’d be in a much better place. Evgeny Morozov explains... more »
Literature professors gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to traditionalists and provocateurs... more »
“In search of solid ground, any number of artists have opted to return to first principles: technique, color, and, above all else, visual pleasure”... more »
Thirty years ago, Sven Birkerts derided digital reading. He was dismissed as a curmudgeonly Luddite, but he was right... more »
An array of contradictory modern movements claims the mantle of decolonization, seeking moral authority from the now-distant 20th century ... more »
“Appreciationgiving” doesn’t have the same ring to it but might be a more philosophically accurate approach to the holiday... more »
Whether cancel culture is a moral panic or a genuine scourge, are the words and deeds of American colleges students really so consequential?... more »
In place of the the monastic cell of the Middle Ages, Renaissance-era scholars had the studiolo — a place to converse with the dead... more »
The Duolingo delusion: It’s fun — but absurd — to think that five minutes of language-learning a day will make us fluent... more »
Barre, Pilates, the Alexander technique: Is our quest for straighter spines a moral panic or a legitimate concern over back pain?... more »
The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas, yes, but also a fairy-tale of illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy... more »
Art is about selection and omission. Melville goes on and on about whales; another writer would sum it up with “etcetera”... more »
“When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?”... more »
Democracy dies in darkness? Journalists’ aspiration to save democracy is counterproductive, argues Yascha Mounk... more »
Modern museums are designed to focus attention. But now our attention is fractured, and our art is changing... more »
The hard problem of dark comedy. “When I laugh with Céline, is my open mouth a gate to the Holocaust?” Michael Clune explains... more »
We live in the age of the internet novel, with its dispassionate, deadening style and lack of formal innovation... more »
To calm the identity wars, don’t underestimate the power of thinking in the third person. Kwame Anthony Appiah explains... more »
Margaret Fuller had “a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory”... more »
At the age of 10, Henri Bergson was left alone in Paris — amid violence, destruction, and the fall of the Second French Empire... more »
A family of fascists. The Mitfords were downwardly mobile aristocrats living in great ignorance and fear... more »
How did the world’s most famous swear word earn its status? Early evidence points to the role of a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele... more »
The Emily Oster riddle: Would you rather take pregnancy advice from a pediatric epidemiologist or an economist?... more »
In 1939, W.H. Auden left England. He rarely returned, but his self-conception as a poet remained bound up in his Englishness... more »
The real fertility question: Why has the ratio of childlessness to childfulness changed so little?... more »
Unlike data sets, the human mind isn’t trained. It experiences and learns and invents and thinks. No computer can do that... more »
In early modern England, numbers were tactile: Three barleycorns made an inch; four saltfish made a warp; tallies were made on wood... more »
“What afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity”... more »
Charles Taylor synthesizes moral reflection and intellectual history. His writing is difficult to follow, but worth trying... more »
Dickinson and Kafka could hardly seem more dissimilar. But the biographical overlaps are too numerous to dismiss... more »
Zero has been called the “eccentric uncle in the family of numbers.” It's also one of mankind's greatest achievements... more »
In 2017, 14 letters written by Sylvia Plath resurfaced. They claim abuse by Ted Hughes. What do they tell us about Plath?... more »
To write an essay is to erect an architecture of thinking, to build the place where a certain thought is possible... more »
Who was Evelyn Waugh? A clever sophist, a racist, a snob — yes, at times — but also a remorseful Catholic... more »
MAD magazine’s golden era. From the 1950s to ’80s, its goofball nonsense and cackling satire skewered cows both sacred and profane... more »
Out with cosmology and in with astrobiology and “complexity science,” which holds that life is based on physics, but beyond physics... more »
A paradox at the heart of education: Independence of mind can be achieved only by submission to authority. Matthew Crawford explains ... more »
Epigraphs have inspired many metaphors – “apéritifs,” “a spritz of fragrance in a large room” – but there's little consensus on their value... more »
Academic quit-lit is the bemoaning of a rarified class of students at elite colleges. In the hinterlands, grad school is a different proposition... more »
The blockbusterization of literature: At any given time, there is just one major book. Today, it’s Han Kang’s... more »
Wuthering Heights is an anti-romance shot through with sadomasochism. If it depicts love, there’s nothing pleasant about it... more »
“Nothing in excess,” “know thyself” — why do pithy philosophical sayings feel so antiquated and pat?... more »
What constitutes a writer’s space? A desk or office or cafe, sure, but also an inner region of the mind — a sacred aura... more »
The vexing Saad Eddin Ibrahim. The Egyptian sociologist spent his life advocating for democratization, but became an apologist for authoritarianism... more »
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