Houellebecq’s tips for writers: Develop in yourself a profound resentment; ruin your life, but not by much; alcohol will help... more »
Ideology has been likened to halitosis. It’s “what the other person has.” Fun line, but does it explain ideology?... more »
“Theory was among other things the brief afterlife of a failed insurrection.” It was also, Terry Eagleton writes, “exhilarating”... more »
Who pays for the arts? In some countries it’s the government. In the U.S. it’s been philanthropy — until recently... more »
The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, but that it so often denies us the lush joys of physicality... more »
"If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning"... more »
In the 1980s, David Bromwich was hopeful that academic politics would grow less narrow, less self-involved. Didn’t happen... more »
The Village Voice – utopian in origin, dysfunctional in execution – left a remarkable imprint on American culture... more »
Weird nonfiction has roots in the work of Welles and Borges. But its natural home is the internet, amid disinformation and pissant humor... more »
Typically, as the number of species in competition goes up, the rate of forming new species goes down. The hominin tribe is an exception... more »
A New Yorker staff writer takes a hard look at New York’s rave scene, and develops a cynicism — not of the scene — but of our literary culture... more »
Bits, cheeky, clever, gutted: Ben Yagoda explains the British invasion of American English... more »
Awkwardness is a social construction — it isn’t something an individual should, or even can, fix on their own... more »
Could it be that the story of money is the story of humanity itself, from 18,000 BC to the present? Not exactly... more »
Why does Marilynne Robinson, master of nuanced, humane fiction, clang out vast, hostile, and unprovable assertions in her nonfiction?... more »
In 1988, Steve Pyke produced a portrait of A.J. Ayer. Three decades later, he’s still photographing philosophers... more »
One hermeneutic to rule them all. With sparring medievalists, Marxists, and right-leaning fans, Tolkienists are a fractious bunch... more »
Marx made little of it, and Rousseau spoke about it incessantly. Where did the idea of equality come from?... more »
Frederic Jameson – philosopher, Marxist, academic celebrity, literary critic – is dead. He was 90... A.O. Scott... Terry Eagleton... Benjamin Kunkel... The Nation... WaPo...... more »
In the university, philosophy is narrow and familiar. Becca Rothfeld shows that it can be extravagant, imaginative, and ambitious... more »
For Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th century saw material, intellectual and moral progress — and the 20th century saw it regress... more »
In 2022 a clump of papyri was unearthed in Egypt's Faiyum Oasis. It was the most substantial discovery of Euripides in half a century... more »
Culture in the sense we have understood it is eroding. Time to mourn – and to celebrate... more »
There’s a deep truth in Thomas Mann’s line: “To be reminded that one is not alone in the world — always unpleasant”... more »
John Barth “was always penning segments of his own eulogy, smuggling themes and flourishes into his life’s account before death could settle it”... more »
To be young when Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop Art and Minimalism was to know the art world before the art market... more »
Two decades of n+1. The “dishwater leftism and barbershop snark” of the early years gave way to something else. But is it better?... more »
At 88, Robert Caro is still toiling away on his LBJ biography. He aims for 900 words a day... more »
“Violence as Fanon conceived it, then, was a cure for the almost incurable. It was a weapon in the hands of non-beings, a way out of nothingness”... more »
You know Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Do you know its bizarre backstory?... more »
Leonard Cohen was the quintessential anti-rock star, distrusting everything about the role. Especially his own charisma ... more »
Anchovies, a dish of frugality, has represented excess — both “food for the poor” and “the famous meat of drunkards,” circa 1600... more »
On knowing and not knowing. Benign self-ignorance and willful self-delusion. Mark Lilla on self-evasion and self-confrontation ... more »
Understanding capitalism means grasping its world-making and world-destroying capacities. Marx’s task was enormous... more »
James Lovelock upended our understanding of planetary science. Then his contrarianism turned in unreliable directions... more »
Technicians of trivia. Historians cannot merely compile sterile facts — they must develop theoretical frameworks... more »
The censoriousness and spinelessness of literary magazines are stifling writers’ careers before they begin... more »
Auden’s desire for isolation. The ideas that brought him to the pinnacle of his fame also led him to leave England... more »
Ideas and definitions that Judith Butler resisted as a young scholar have caught up with the author – and us... more »
Two dreaded words: “Historian here!” Public scholarship claims authority through credentials. Criticism, by contrast, does so through style... more »
Yuval Noah Harari’s take on AI: “a fuzzy batch of misguided animal fables and often-unpersuasive reflections on technology”... more »
The collapse of epistemic authority, the rise of “highly incitable” people, and a propensity for online ranting shape our combustible reality... more »
A quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction. The present has been abandoned for the past... more »
Shakespeare and Freud: What is the proper relationship between psychoanalysis and literature?... more »
Studying philosophy has been flattened into a single option: academic. What's left if that goes away?... more »
William the Conqueror doesn’t deserve his reputation for cruelty. In fact, he ushered in an era of chivalrous clemency... more »
Gauguin’s wild 1888 visit to Arles came to an end when Van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at him — then came at him with a razor... more »
“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism... more »
Conservatives are rare among professors. Does it matter? Eleven academics weigh in... more »
East-West trade once went by sea via India, shipping pepper, ivory, cotton, and rhubarb. Is the historical Silk Road a myth? ... more »
Every era recreates Mozart in its own image. In our time, he's a scatological imp who loves four-letter words... more »
In 1953, John Huston asked Ray Bradbury to write a screenplay of Moby-Dick, which Bradbury had never read. That didn’t stop him... more »
Self-help meets the ancien régime in The Habsburg Way, which counsels having lots of children, dying well, and having a memorable funeral... more »
Blasphemy seems like an anachronistic offense. But Salman Rushdie’s case is thoroughly modern... more »
Among a crisis in the humanities, scholars debate whether literary theory is avant-garde or lyric. But why choose?... more »
Sponges, corals, and cephalopods are very different from human beings. Do they nevertheless share aspects of our mental lives?... more »
Disappointments of literary Brooklyn. For one would-be writer, little magazine subculture was alienating and disgusting... more »
99 percent of ancient texts have been lost to history. What’ was lost for millennia may now be found... more »
Marilynne Robinson, pillar of moral seriousness, takes on the book of Genesis. Surprisingly, the result is dogmatism... more »
A real reader, insisted Nabokov, is a rereader. He was wrong, and so is the high-minded horde of rereading evangelists... more »
Remembering Mortimer J. Adler, an intellectually dazzling figure who managed to get all the important things wrong... more »
Some academics insist that children’s literature can be written only by children. "Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers"... more »
C.L.R. James planned a short trip to “dreadful” America and stayed for 15 years, even as his distaste for U.S. politics grew... more »
Houellebecq’s tips for writers: Develop in yourself a profound resentment; ruin your life, but not by much; alcohol will help... more »
Who pays for the arts? In some countries it’s the government. In the U.S. it’s been philanthropy — until recently... more »
In the 1980s, David Bromwich was hopeful that academic politics would grow less narrow, less self-involved. Didn’t happen... more »
Typically, as the number of species in competition goes up, the rate of forming new species goes down. The hominin tribe is an exception... more »
Awkwardness is a social construction — it isn’t something an individual should, or even can, fix on their own... more »
In 1988, Steve Pyke produced a portrait of A.J. Ayer. Three decades later, he’s still photographing philosophers... more »
Frederic Jameson – philosopher, Marxist, academic celebrity, literary critic – is dead. He was 90... A.O. Scott... Terry Eagleton... Benjamin Kunkel... The Nation... WaPo...... more »
In 2022 a clump of papyri was unearthed in Egypt's Faiyum Oasis. It was the most substantial discovery of Euripides in half a century... more »
John Barth “was always penning segments of his own eulogy, smuggling themes and flourishes into his life’s account before death could settle it”... more »
At 88, Robert Caro is still toiling away on his LBJ biography. He aims for 900 words a day... more »
Leonard Cohen was the quintessential anti-rock star, distrusting everything about the role. Especially his own charisma ... more »
Understanding capitalism means grasping its world-making and world-destroying capacities. Marx’s task was enormous... more »
The censoriousness and spinelessness of literary magazines are stifling writers’ careers before they begin... more »
Two dreaded words: “Historian here!” Public scholarship claims authority through credentials. Criticism, by contrast, does so through style... more »
A quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction. The present has been abandoned for the past... more »
William the Conqueror doesn’t deserve his reputation for cruelty. In fact, he ushered in an era of chivalrous clemency... more »
Conservatives are rare among professors. Does it matter? Eleven academics weigh in... more »
In 1953, John Huston asked Ray Bradbury to write a screenplay of Moby-Dick, which Bradbury had never read. That didn’t stop him... more »
Among a crisis in the humanities, scholars debate whether literary theory is avant-garde or lyric. But why choose?... more »
99 percent of ancient texts have been lost to history. What’ was lost for millennia may now be found... more »
Remembering Mortimer J. Adler, an intellectually dazzling figure who managed to get all the important things wrong... more »
The subtle genius of Katharine White. The longtime New Yorker editor was remarkable for being unremarkable... more »
Invention of a status symbol. How a few lines from a Bruce Chatwin book gave rise to an iconic product... more »
Christopher Isherwood was not keen to dine with Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne – “Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All”... more »
Does a paleontological site in North Dakota contain evidence of one of the most dramatic events in the history of the planet?... more »
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are unlikely titans of Russian literature. Not everyone is pleased... more »
People have always been anxious about their health. But their anxiety reflects the preoccupations and peculiarities of each era... more »
“Graffti inserts itself like the blade of a knife between creation and destruction, between publicity and furtiveness, between word and image”... more »
Battles over money. Allegations of racism. A chair ousted. When a college English department self-destructs... more »
Chomsky was in his teens when he read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. It solidified his political convictions... more »
Nazis burned books. But they also sold them, including at a bookstore in Los Angeles... more »
The case against having children. "Maybe you’re very sincere about your concerns about a human future. But you’re contradicting yourself"... more »
Inside the Orwell archive. What crucial discoveries lurk in a warehouse of rusty filing cabinets?... more »
Tom Wolfe was known for his style. But it was his worldview that made him. David Brooks explains... more »
Unlocking the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets. Does the medieval document have meaning? Or is it artful nonsense?... more »
Are snails sentient? We need a theory that bridges neurobiology and consciousness. Unfortunately, we have 22... more »
For Vermeer, color conveyed meaning. But are the colors we see today the colors he intended to convey?... more »
The rise and fall of a media empire. Why National Geographic is a cautionary tale for magazines... more »
Paul Bloom on strangling cats, raising kids, and why psychologists aren’t especially savvy about human behavior... more »
Liberalism is everywhere under attack. Is that because of its failures? Or its failures of nerve?... more »
Ideology has been likened to halitosis. It’s “what the other person has.” Fun line, but does it explain ideology?... more »
The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, but that it so often denies us the lush joys of physicality... more »
The Village Voice – utopian in origin, dysfunctional in execution – left a remarkable imprint on American culture... more »
A New Yorker staff writer takes a hard look at New York’s rave scene, and develops a cynicism — not of the scene — but of our literary culture... more »
Could it be that the story of money is the story of humanity itself, from 18,000 BC to the present? Not exactly... more »
One hermeneutic to rule them all. With sparring medievalists, Marxists, and right-leaning fans, Tolkienists are a fractious bunch... more »
In the university, philosophy is narrow and familiar. Becca Rothfeld shows that it can be extravagant, imaginative, and ambitious... more »
Culture in the sense we have understood it is eroding. Time to mourn – and to celebrate... more »
To be young when Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop Art and Minimalism was to know the art world before the art market... more »
“Violence as Fanon conceived it, then, was a cure for the almost incurable. It was a weapon in the hands of non-beings, a way out of nothingness”... more »
Anchovies, a dish of frugality, has represented excess — both “food for the poor” and “the famous meat of drunkards,” circa 1600... more »
James Lovelock upended our understanding of planetary science. Then his contrarianism turned in unreliable directions... more »
Auden’s desire for isolation. The ideas that brought him to the pinnacle of his fame also led him to leave England... more »
Yuval Noah Harari’s take on AI: “a fuzzy batch of misguided animal fables and often-unpersuasive reflections on technology”... more »
Shakespeare and Freud: What is the proper relationship between psychoanalysis and literature?... more »
Gauguin’s wild 1888 visit to Arles came to an end when Van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at him — then came at him with a razor... more »
East-West trade once went by sea via India, shipping pepper, ivory, cotton, and rhubarb. Is the historical Silk Road a myth? ... more »
Self-help meets the ancien régime in The Habsburg Way, which counsels having lots of children, dying well, and having a memorable funeral... more »
Sponges, corals, and cephalopods are very different from human beings. Do they nevertheless share aspects of our mental lives?... more »
Marilynne Robinson, pillar of moral seriousness, takes on the book of Genesis. Surprisingly, the result is dogmatism... more »
Some academics insist that children’s literature can be written only by children. "Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers"... more »
Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor does not sound like children’s literature — yet it was for W.H. Auden... more »
What is most indelible about Simone Weil is her mix of cosmic empathy and aggressive intolerance... more »
Monstrous motherhood. What can we learn from women who’ve abandoned their children?... more »
What it means to be a stone. Rocks can behave in ways that defy our imagination, and increase our access to awe... more »
We are all storytellers, certain assumptions embedded in our discursive maneuvers. Has that ability degraded?... more »
Some writers are at their best when denouncing idiocy rather than praising greatness. Consider Christopher Hitchens ... more »
Few poets have suffered more from the early overestimation of critics than Delmore Schwartz. He never quite recovered... more »
The "1812 Overture," Tchaikovsky’s best-known work, is a gaudy monstrosity. One more paradox in a life full of them.... more »
Guy Davenport knew that he was working at the end of a tradition. He was the last high modernist... more »
Equality is at the center of liberalism, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But the relationship has long been fraught... more »
Nietzsche was a vehement critic of every kind of egalitarianism. Odd that his reputation was rescued by leftist scholars... more »
Ideology, totality, utopia, form: Frederic Jameson, now 90, has never wavered in his obsessions... more »
The desire to unite art and life. The Russian and Soviet avant-garde wasn’t a school or a style. It was a mentality... more »
The Sylvia Plath stigma. Why are her female readers portrayed as unserious, depressive fangirls?... more »
Dickinson and Darwin. The poet's and the naturalist’s lives overlapped, as did their desire to synthesize the material world... more »
Fanny and Louis. She was wild and tiny and central to his literary achievements... more »
Cromwell: The name redounds as shorthand for villainy and political skill. The truth is far more interesting... more »
We’re all Faustians now. What’s at stake isn’t so much our souls as our privacy, along with much else... more »
“Theory was among other things the brief afterlife of a failed insurrection.” It was also, Terry Eagleton writes, “exhilarating”... more »
"If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning"... more »
Weird nonfiction has roots in the work of Welles and Borges. But its natural home is the internet, amid disinformation and pissant humor... more »
Bits, cheeky, clever, gutted: Ben Yagoda explains the British invasion of American English... more »
Why does Marilynne Robinson, master of nuanced, humane fiction, clang out vast, hostile, and unprovable assertions in her nonfiction?... more »
Marx made little of it, and Rousseau spoke about it incessantly. Where did the idea of equality come from?... more »
For Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th century saw material, intellectual and moral progress — and the 20th century saw it regress... more »
There’s a deep truth in Thomas Mann’s line: “To be reminded that one is not alone in the world — always unpleasant”... more »
Two decades of n+1. The “dishwater leftism and barbershop snark” of the early years gave way to something else. But is it better?... more »
You know Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Do you know its bizarre backstory?... more »
On knowing and not knowing. Benign self-ignorance and willful self-delusion. Mark Lilla on self-evasion and self-confrontation ... more »
Technicians of trivia. Historians cannot merely compile sterile facts — they must develop theoretical frameworks... more »
Ideas and definitions that Judith Butler resisted as a young scholar have caught up with the author – and us... more »
The collapse of epistemic authority, the rise of “highly incitable” people, and a propensity for online ranting shape our combustible reality... more »
Studying philosophy has been flattened into a single option: academic. What's left if that goes away?... more »
“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism... more »
Every era recreates Mozart in its own image. In our time, he's a scatological imp who loves four-letter words... more »
Blasphemy seems like an anachronistic offense. But Salman Rushdie’s case is thoroughly modern... more »
Disappointments of literary Brooklyn. For one would-be writer, little magazine subculture was alienating and disgusting... more »
A real reader, insisted Nabokov, is a rereader. He was wrong, and so is the high-minded horde of rereading evangelists... more »
C.L.R. James planned a short trip to “dreadful” America and stayed for 15 years, even as his distaste for U.S. politics grew... more »
Dickens was a scoundrel; Tolstoy an exploitative sex addict; Alice Walker an anti-Semite. Still, read them ... more »
In praise of reference books. The best way to satisfy a young and weird mind’s desire for useless knowledge... more »
Grades at American universities are so inflated they’ve become meaningless. Time to do away with them altogether... more »
Is AI-generated writing mimicking us, or are we imitating AI? Resisting the allure of maximal clarity and minimal idiosyncrasies... more »
Behold the strange and wondrous world of plankton, a vast ecosystem giving rise to the idea of the ocean... more »
A funny thing happened to Marxist political philosophers. When they stripped away the BS, there was nothing left but liberalism ... more »
Whitewashing Nietzsche. Generations of academics have tried to argue away his appeal to young men... more »
Our decisions are caused by neural mechanisms and biological processes. Even if uncoerced, are they still freely made?... more »
Literary fame is fickle and fleeting. So what makes a book endure? Lincoln Michel has a few theories... more »
The demand to “decolonize” places and things is ubiquitous. What does it mean?... more... more »
Matthew Arnold thought Chaucer “lacked high seriousness.” But Shakespeare couldn’t have done without him... more »
The venerable lab mouse. Its ubiquity in biomedical research is a bizarre accident of history... more »
Film and philosophy. Stanley Cavell yoked Kant with Capra, Hegel with Hepburn. To what end?... more »
When women turn life into literature and speak rather than remain silent, we call it gossip... more »
“I can feel the neurons in my brain struggling and striving. Yes, I can feel it. Now you think I’m crazy.” Anne Carson has Parkinson’s... more »
When the leading lights of physics gathered in Mussolini’s Rome, they clashed over cosmic rays... more »
“Facts don’t change minds because, most often, it’s the framework through which we analyze them that is at stake”... more »
For Montaigne, cruelty was the worst vice. But being mean, however fraught, has definite social value... more »
When a piece of writing exhibits moral excellence, we naturally assume it reflects the morality of the author. That’s often a mistake... more »
An effort is afoot to rescue the humanities’ relevance by pooh-poohing its founding commitments. That won’t work... more »
Great artists make poor propagandists, says Phil Klay. The activist’s job is activism, and the artist’s job is truth ... more »
Elias Canetti described his polemic against death as the book he was born to write. But he couldn’t finish it. He could barely start it... more »
Tristan Foison flourished as a musical fabulist by revealing exactly how classical music ennobles bullshit... more »
History is full of instances when science was subjugated to ideology, and science suffered. Is that happening now in America?... more »
Unlike computers, humans thrive on ambiguity and equivocation, on double entendre and sophistry, on blunders and embarrassments... more »
Oh, Oblomov! “Follow my example, ye small-time yuppies and wage slaves… brothers and sisters led by the nose by dreary, servile little bosses”... more »
Writers are susceptible to pressure from both market and peers. That’s not to say literary excellence isn’t the result of individual genius... more »
What happens if you commit to memorizing a poem every week? Jacob Brogan on the overlooked pleasures of repetition... more »
Note a conspicuous absence in contemporary literature: the unfiltered voice of raw manhood on the page
... more »
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