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Wednesday January 27, 2021
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Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »
Jan. 27, 2021

Articles of Note

Takedown artist Lauren Oyler is unapologetic: “I’m not afraid of being disliked by people that I already dislike.” How will critics receive her novel?   ... more »


New Books

The postcapitalist theorist Mark Fisher worked at the periphery of journalism and academia, penning few books. And yet his influence is enormous   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Joan Didion was 70 before she finished a nonfiction book not drawn from magazine assignments. Her talent is spinning craftwork into art   ... more »


Jan. 26, 2021

Articles of Note

Since the Second World War, scientists have understood the human brain as a predictive machine. Is that still a useful metaphor?   ... more »


New Books

Pirate publishers saturated the market and filled warehouses with unsellable stock. Result: the publishing crash of 1783... more »


Essays & Opinions

Critics hold that “the question of correctness is generally irrelevant” in poetry. But they’re mistaken about poets’ mistakes... more »


Jan. 25, 2021

Articles of Note

It's thought that Newton's Principia was such a monster of technical detail that few read it. That's a myth, it turns out ... more »


New Books

Robert Gottlieb on Harold Bloom: "It is a tremendous pity that the final statement from a critic of such significance...should be this disjointed effort"   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

19th-century science supposedly elevated the disinterested mind over human vitality. But Alexander von Humboldt’s story challenges that narrative ... more »


Jan. 23, 2021

Articles of Note

Oligarchs stepped in to bolster the arts in post-Soviet Russia. But is the work they have bankrolled any good?  ... more »


New Books

What are dreams? A kind of theater of the unconscious? Random neural firings? A Darwinian adaptation?  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Derrida and Foucault are often categorized by their critics as like-minded thinkers. In fact, they spent most of their lives disagreeing  ... more »


Jan. 22, 2021

Articles of Note

Should artificial intelligence model the brain or the mind? The debate has led to a fractious split in the field... more »


New Books

Young people rush to join the creative class of artists and academics. But beware the sacrifices that come with doing what you love   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. The problem isn’t with the theories, but with our susceptibility to them... more »


Jan. 21, 2021

Articles of Note

Darwin in space. If there is life on other planets, it will have evolved along the same lines as life on earth  ... more »


New Books

Lucian Freud was violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous. If he was not the devil, he was certainly the devil's advocate  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

The American elite is now the first national ruling class - a good thing in some ways, bad in others. Michael Lind explains  ... more »


Jan. 20, 2021

Articles of Note

Russian avant-garde art has been a font of fakery for decades. Some artists, celebrated in the West, may never have existed  ... more »


New Books

Wikipedia, comprising more than 55 million articles, is enormously popular. Is it "the last bastion of shared reality"?  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Plagued by anxiety attacks, Beckett turned to poetry, cardiology, psychoanalysis, and finally, obscure 17th-century Christian mysticism... more »


Jan. 19, 2021

Articles of Note

Mass unhappiness and social breakdown have spawned something new: the caring industry, with its revolutionary ideology  ... more »


New Books

According to Schopenhauer, existence vacillates between suffering and boredom. In such a world, earthly happiness is impossible  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Adam Smith was at most a deist, and David Hume was an avowed skeptic. But religion influences the economic ideas they produced  ... more »


Jan. 18, 2021

Articles of Note

In the late '90s, a professor began talking with Bruno Lohse, art agent to Hermann Göring. Then things got complicated... more »


New Books

“Pampered lunatics often reach a great age,” it's been said. And so it was with Lucian Freud... more »


Essays & Opinions

There’s an app for that! The notion that technology offers the best solution to any problem is appealing. And dangerous... more »


Jan. 16, 2021

Articles of Note

How many wives did King Henry VIII have? Where does the f-word come from? Wikipedia has the answers. But where did Wikipedia come from?   ... more »


New Books

Dostoevsky in love. What's romance to a man who believed that suffering gives value to existence?... more »


Essays & Opinions

How should we read? For Will Self, “we would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text” ... more »


Jan. 15, 2021

Articles of Note

1984 is again atop the best-seller list. Cue the rampant misuse of the term “Orwellian” ... more »


New Books

Stop reading like a critic. It’s time we treat Beckett and de Beauvoir the same way we do Beyoncé and the Boss — with devotion  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

The paradox of political science: Only by remaining aloof from the messiness of politics can it achieve the scientific authority it craves  ... more »


Jan. 14, 2021

Articles of Note

It was a “moral compass,” “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.” And then it was not. The inside story of American Dirt’s implosion  ... more »


New Books

More than the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of two flesh-and-blood daughters  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

“I have never written a plot-driven novel,” held Ursula Le Guin. “I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t”  ... more »


Jan. 13, 2021

Articles of Note

Cavemen have been widely studied. Cavewomen, less so. Now science is learning more about the Sheanderthal... more »


New Books

For George Saunders, fiction is fundamentally moral. Despite all that it can teach us, however, it is not our salvation ... more »


Essays & Opinions

The isolation artist. Edward Hopper's paintings make an emotional resurgence amid our sustained solitude  ... more »


Jan. 12, 2021

Articles of Note

Being a beginner is hard at any age, but it gets harder as you get older. Kids, knowing less, can learn more ... more »


New Books

Anne Applebaum is deft at critiquing anyone to her left or right. She is far less willing to interrogate her own assumptions  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

When Catherine Camus was informed of the death of her son Albert, all she could say was, “Too young”  ... more »


Jan. 11, 2021

Articles of Note

Hockney at 83. Pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, crayon, watercolor, photography, iPhone: No medium is uncongenial to his talent ... more »


New Books

“All things are made of elementary particles," says Frank Wilczek. Understanding them is a triumph of modern physics  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Americans say they want 2.5 children, but they're having only 1.7, on average. Why? Ross Douthat's case for larger families... more »


Jan. 9, 2021

Articles of Note

What to do with Nazi art? Hundreds of works, collecting dust in an Army fort in Virginia, may stay there forever ... more »


New Books

When did "fitness" become not just a physical but a moral good, the obligatory aim of every citizen? ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Ferociously dull and laden with puffery, the academic book review is a tedious genre that's outlived its purpose ... more »


Jan. 8, 2021

Articles of Note

Sylvia Plath is more than the way she died and the man she married. Her art transcends tragedy  ... more »


New Books

The age of wood. Lewis Mumford called it “the most various, the most shapeable, the most serviceable” of materials. It's also the most underappreciated ... more »


Essays & Opinions

The genius of Schubert’s syphilitic years was to draw the listener into his melancholy world, all the while pointing to an unattainable beauty ... more »


Jan. 7, 2021

Articles of Note

What do writers and editors do? Karl Ove Knausgaard investigates an often fraught relationship  ... more »


New Books

Amid these apocalyptic-seeming times, one philosopher’s vision stands out. This is a moment for Machiavelli... more »


Essays & Opinions

René Girard was not a particularly great theorist. It's easy to spot his weaknesses and lacunae. But he is the theorist our era deserves... more »


Jan. 6, 2021

Articles of Note

Sixty years ago, George Steiner declared tragedy dead. Terry Eagleton has come to bury that idea... more »


New Books

Leïla Slimani wins literary accolades for busting taboos around sex and violence. But does her work actually reinforce those conventions?... more »


Essays & Opinions

The goal of all art is inexhaustible precision — something simple, like Melville’s whale, that gains endlessly in complexity... more »


Jan. 5, 2021

Articles of Note

Do dashed expectations among elites lead to social unrest? If so, beware the downwardly mobile Ph.D.... more »


New Books

Harry Houdini could escape from seemingly impossible situations. But he couldn't escape his roots   ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Henri Breuil, “the Pope of Prehistory,” did more than anyone else to prove that our early ancestors were capable of symbolic thought... more »


Jan. 4, 2021

Articles of Note

In the rush to turn Frida Kahlo into a symbol, we've lost her significance as an artist, not merely a martyr  ... more »


New Books

Cary Grant's greatest role was Cary Grant, a persona of elegance, charisma, and charm  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

"To find humor in death isn’t to degrade or deny the sanctity of human life, but rather to grapple with its finite nature"  ... more »




Articles of Note

Takedown artist Lauren Oyler is unapologetic: “I’m not afraid of being disliked by people that I already dislike.” How will critics receive her novel?   ... more »


Since the Second World War, scientists have understood the human brain as a predictive machine. Is that still a useful metaphor?   ... more »


It's thought that Newton's Principia was such a monster of technical detail that few read it. That's a myth, it turns out ... more »


Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

Oligarchs stepped in to bolster the arts in post-Soviet Russia. But is the work they have bankrolled any good?  ... more »


Should artificial intelligence model the brain or the mind? The debate has led to a fractious split in the field... more »


Darwin in space. If there is life on other planets, it will have evolved along the same lines as life on earth  ... more »


Russian avant-garde art has been a font of fakery for decades. Some artists, celebrated in the West, may never have existed  ... more »


Mass unhappiness and social breakdown have spawned something new: the caring industry, with its revolutionary ideology  ... more »


In the late '90s, a professor began talking with Bruno Lohse, art agent to Hermann Göring. Then things got complicated... more »


How many wives did King Henry VIII have? Where does the f-word come from? Wikipedia has the answers. But where did Wikipedia come from?   ... more »


1984 is again atop the best-seller list. Cue the rampant misuse of the term “Orwellian” ... more »


It was a “moral compass,” “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.” And then it was not. The inside story of American Dirt’s implosion  ... more »


Cavemen have been widely studied. Cavewomen, less so. Now science is learning more about the Sheanderthal... more »


Being a beginner is hard at any age, but it gets harder as you get older. Kids, knowing less, can learn more ... more »


Hockney at 83. Pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, crayon, watercolor, photography, iPhone: No medium is uncongenial to his talent ... more »


What to do with Nazi art? Hundreds of works, collecting dust in an Army fort in Virginia, may stay there forever ... more »


Sylvia Plath is more than the way she died and the man she married. Her art transcends tragedy  ... more »


What do writers and editors do? Karl Ove Knausgaard investigates an often fraught relationship  ... more »


Sixty years ago, George Steiner declared tragedy dead. Terry Eagleton has come to bury that idea... more »


Do dashed expectations among elites lead to social unrest? If so, beware the downwardly mobile Ph.D.... more »


In the rush to turn Frida Kahlo into a symbol, we've lost her significance as an artist, not merely a martyr  ... more »


Charm, patience, and a big budget for cognac and cigars: how John le Carré got sources to tell him everything  ... more »


Marxism and religion. The Frankfurt School theorists understood that democracy requires a dialogue between theology and reason... more »


“They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense”   ... more »


Trotsky’s sidekick. Jean van Heijenoort was his secretary and bodyguard for seven years, and then built another life ... more »


Is our sedentary lifestyle slowly killing us? Is sitting the new smoking? "Let’s relax. The chair is not the enemy"  ... more »


Being Roger Penrose. At the heart of the Nobel-winning physicist's work are his artistry and his ideas about beauty... more »


Prisons are everywhere in the work of Charles Dickens, who knew the costs of confinement and the ubiquity of sequestered lives   ... more »


Fifty years ago, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. Is it still possible to reason together about the common good? ... more »


Does instant communication mean the death of the literary letter? It depends on how you define a letter  ... more »


To understand why science is so widely distrusted, we must see how that attitude has arisen  ... more »


For Leonora Carrington, humanity was a seductive costume donned by dummies. Abandoning the costume courted madness but also brought liberation... more »


Liberalism, a never-ending quest to find the best way for diverse people to live together, is in decline. We need a better liberalism... more »


How to start an independent publishing house in 2020? Recruit billionaire backers, make podcast and film-rights agreements, figure out distribution... more »


In the aggregate, high expectations for the future have made the world a better place. Individually, however, it's made us miserable... more »


Beethoven and freedom. "We may judge what is merely beautiful, but sublime art judges us, or better said, it challenges us to judge ourselves”  ... more »


To say that John le Carré invented the modern spy novel doesn’t do justice to his achievement. His fictional world blurred into reality... more »


Book thieves come in two varieties: the rogue custodians, who exploit their access to literary treasures, and the academics  ... more »


Why were doctors and nurses uniquely attracted to Nazi philosophy, enlisting in much higher proportions than any other profession? ... more »


Just 11 percent of books published by large presses in 2018 were written by people of color. Why is publishing so white?... more »


New Books

The postcapitalist theorist Mark Fisher worked at the periphery of journalism and academia, penning few books. And yet his influence is enormous   ... more »


Pirate publishers saturated the market and filled warehouses with unsellable stock. Result: the publishing crash of 1783... more »


Robert Gottlieb on Harold Bloom: "It is a tremendous pity that the final statement from a critic of such significance...should be this disjointed effort"   ... more »


What are dreams? A kind of theater of the unconscious? Random neural firings? A Darwinian adaptation?  ... more »


Young people rush to join the creative class of artists and academics. But beware the sacrifices that come with doing what you love   ... more »


Lucian Freud was violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous. If he was not the devil, he was certainly the devil's advocate  ... more »


Wikipedia, comprising more than 55 million articles, is enormously popular. Is it "the last bastion of shared reality"?  ... more »


According to Schopenhauer, existence vacillates between suffering and boredom. In such a world, earthly happiness is impossible  ... more »


“Pampered lunatics often reach a great age,” it's been said. And so it was with Lucian Freud... more »


Dostoevsky in love. What's romance to a man who believed that suffering gives value to existence?... more »


Stop reading like a critic. It’s time we treat Beckett and de Beauvoir the same way we do Beyoncé and the Boss — with devotion  ... more »


More than the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of two flesh-and-blood daughters  ... more »


For George Saunders, fiction is fundamentally moral. Despite all that it can teach us, however, it is not our salvation ... more »


Anne Applebaum is deft at critiquing anyone to her left or right. She is far less willing to interrogate her own assumptions  ... more »


“All things are made of elementary particles," says Frank Wilczek. Understanding them is a triumph of modern physics  ... more »


When did "fitness" become not just a physical but a moral good, the obligatory aim of every citizen? ... more »


The age of wood. Lewis Mumford called it “the most various, the most shapeable, the most serviceable” of materials. It's also the most underappreciated ... more »


Amid these apocalyptic-seeming times, one philosopher’s vision stands out. This is a moment for Machiavelli... more »


Leïla Slimani wins literary accolades for busting taboos around sex and violence. But does her work actually reinforce those conventions?... more »


Harry Houdini could escape from seemingly impossible situations. But he couldn't escape his roots   ... more »


Cary Grant's greatest role was Cary Grant, a persona of elegance, charisma, and charm  ... more »


Was Louis Kahn a true sage, or just a bushwa artist talented at conning the eggheads at Yale and Penn?  ... more »


The creative class flourished for decades in the middle of the 20th century, then was crushed. Can it be rebuilt?... more »


Knausgaard returns, with a collection of earnest, tedious, minor essays. Is excessive literary production a social offense?   ... more »


Molded in the mythos of meritocracy, millennials have now become the burnout generation... more »


"I am a Christian," insisted Thomas Jefferson. But he had no patience for metaphysical claims. So he went about reinventing Jesus... more »


The survival of a moderate conservatism may have become inextricable from the survival of liberal democracy itself  ... more »


"Demons are more than crazed hypotheses or ungrounded thought experiments; they are quietly central to our very understanding of the world"   ... more »


A.J. Ayer quipped that the problem with logical positivism was that “nearly all of it was false.” But it was "true in spirit" ... more »


Harold Bloom viewed literature as a contest, measuring writers against a yardstick of purportedly timeless values  ... more »


Merpeople: For Linnaeus, they were next to seals and manatees, for Darwin, they explained a missing link. Now they’re being connected to queer identity  ... more »


Fredrik deBoer and Michael Sandel say meritocracy is a bad idea, but really their beef is with the imperfect implementation of the system... more »


Heinrich Heine was an idealistic devotee of German culture. That didn't blind him to what made it so dangerous  ... more »


The best of 20th-century philosophy urges us to be fearless, critical, and creative, and to avoid orthodoxies, ideologies, and obscurantist nonsense... more »


Isabel Wilkerson’s study of caste illuminates much about India. But in an American context, it merely obfuscates ... more »


Of the many misrepresentations about Adorno, the most persistent is that he had little aptitude for practical politics. Nonsense ... more »


For Twain and Woolf, little was as tedious as discussing the weather. And yet such conversation continues — implacably, abysmally... more »


A spate of books peddles philosophers, from Socrates to William James, as gurus of the good life. Try Spinoza... more »


Is strongman a useful category for political analysis? A new book stretches the definition beyond its limits... more »


Essays & Opinions

Joan Didion was 70 before she finished a nonfiction book not drawn from magazine assignments. Her talent is spinning craftwork into art   ... more »


Critics hold that “the question of correctness is generally irrelevant” in poetry. But they’re mistaken about poets’ mistakes... more »


19th-century science supposedly elevated the disinterested mind over human vitality. But Alexander von Humboldt’s story challenges that narrative ... more »


Derrida and Foucault are often categorized by their critics as like-minded thinkers. In fact, they spent most of their lives disagreeing  ... more »


Conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. The problem isn’t with the theories, but with our susceptibility to them... more »


The American elite is now the first national ruling class - a good thing in some ways, bad in others. Michael Lind explains  ... more »


Plagued by anxiety attacks, Beckett turned to poetry, cardiology, psychoanalysis, and finally, obscure 17th-century Christian mysticism... more »


Adam Smith was at most a deist, and David Hume was an avowed skeptic. But religion influences the economic ideas they produced  ... more »


There’s an app for that! The notion that technology offers the best solution to any problem is appealing. And dangerous... more »


How should we read? For Will Self, “we would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text” ... more »


The paradox of political science: Only by remaining aloof from the messiness of politics can it achieve the scientific authority it craves  ... more »


“I have never written a plot-driven novel,” held Ursula Le Guin. “I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t”  ... more »


The isolation artist. Edward Hopper's paintings make an emotional resurgence amid our sustained solitude  ... more »


When Catherine Camus was informed of the death of her son Albert, all she could say was, “Too young”  ... more »


Americans say they want 2.5 children, but they're having only 1.7, on average. Why? Ross Douthat's case for larger families... more »


Ferociously dull and laden with puffery, the academic book review is a tedious genre that's outlived its purpose ... more »


The genius of Schubert’s syphilitic years was to draw the listener into his melancholy world, all the while pointing to an unattainable beauty ... more »


René Girard was not a particularly great theorist. It's easy to spot his weaknesses and lacunae. But he is the theorist our era deserves... more »


The goal of all art is inexhaustible precision — something simple, like Melville’s whale, that gains endlessly in complexity... more »


Henri Breuil, “the Pope of Prehistory,” did more than anyone else to prove that our early ancestors were capable of symbolic thought... more »


"To find humor in death isn’t to degrade or deny the sanctity of human life, but rather to grapple with its finite nature"  ... more »


"If one were interested in the sexual life of the professoriate at the turn of the last century, it would be strange to omit Veblen" ... more »


The artist who most acutely registers the deranged quality of contemporary American public life? Peter Saul... more »


Over the past 70 years, popular culture has gone from realism to fantasy and science fiction. Blame, in part, Ray Bradbury... more »


"Historians will record that in the early decades of the 21st century we became an unforgiving society, a society of furies, a society in search of guilt and shame"... more »


More than a few writers have been drunks. Is their drinking part of a negotiation with their own impossibly high standards? ... more »


Graham Greene, steeped as he was in bleak moral choices, was delighted that French attempts to pronounce his name sounded like “Grim Grin” ... more »


Every year, David Brooks compiles a list of the best long-form essays of the year. Here are his 2020 Sidney Awards... more »


What was so different about Beethoven? The novelty of his rhythms, which turned into plot, into argument, into speech ... more »


America, writes David Blight, is polarized in a cold civil war. The core questions of the original Civil War and Reconstruction era remain unanswered ... more »


“Rather than shoving all our debates into a single, hellish town square, let each town have its own” ... more »


A failed philosophical mission: Plato urged Dionysius I to abandon wine and orgies. In response, the tyrant sold Plato into slavery... more »


Scientists' mistakes are regrettable but usually not sinister. Science remains the gold standard of truth. And it needs defending ... more »


E.P. Thompson’s rise was a paradoxical intellectual event: “history from below” promised social uplift, yet ignored colonial realities... more »


The banality of empathy. Empathizing with fictional characters is too often seen as an ethical good. It’s not   ... more »


Why have restaurant reviews become smackdowns? Our appetite for blood sport distorts how critics write and think about food ... more »


William Gaddis was cynical about America, wishing it were more like Costa Rica. But he never lost hope entirely... more »


Eating with Italian futurists: oranges should be balanced on one’s head, meat eating should be synchronized with trumpet blasts, pasta should be avoided ... more »


J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sought to transform the world by reintroducing old stories. Nearly a century later, they’ve been remarkably successful ... more »


Before the Gilded Age, classical music was on par with juggling acts and vaudeville tunes. Beer — not wine — flowed. What changed?... more »


Consider pinnacles of literary culture: Elizabethan England, 19th-century Russia, Flaubert’s France. America, in 2020, is at the other end of that spectrum ... more »


For the academic left, science is a hegemonic force with sweeping authority over the modern world. But that misunderstands science   ... more »


Now bludgeoned by liberals, the idea of American exceptionalism was itself a creation of the left  ... more »


What does the pandemic portend for the arts in America? We can’t even agree that culture matters, much less how to protect it ... more »


People who grouse about cultural appropriation aren't just puritanical; they don't respect the anarchic energies of art... more »


Modern poetry is intimidating. But you don’t need expertise in ekphrasis to appreciate Ross Gay, Frank Bidart, and Ada Limón ... more »


Era of cant. Wherever people are punished for expressing an unorthodox opinion, humbug is bound to flourish  ... more »


The art of artificial intelligence. Are we at the dawn of a new medium? If so, it would portend a doleful future  ... more »


Gone are the days of voracious nerding out in the academy. Such work must now demonstrate a new moral piety  ... more »


“The difficulty of making out the plain sense of poetry.” Literary studies faces a foundational problem: Making distinctions comes with diminishing returns... more »


Nota Bene

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  • Keep Beethoven weird
  • Adieu, tie!
  • Novelists and playwrights
  • Joyce in China
  • Do dogs dream?
  • Mary Catherine Bateson, R.I.P.
  • Incest scandal in France
  • Regarding Arendt
  • Ethics of eating octopus


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