What will save the English department? Love, says Mark Edmundson. Professors need to remind themselves that their love for literature is what brought most of them into the profession ... more »
Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived ... more »
A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested? ... more »
“A deluge of things.” We inherit our passion for clutter from Victorians like Marion Sambourne, who owned 66 upright chairs ... more »
Nathalie Sarraute is remembered as a “boring formalist” within the insipid “new novel” movement. She was much more than that ... more »
Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be? ... more »
To read great books by flawed authors, we must recognize the sins of the past but also look for moments of shared human experience ... more »
When William James gave up on religion, he went in search of a new avenue to save his life. Can his approach help you save your own? ... more »
Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »
New Yorker writers cultivate reticence, self-deprecation, and wit. As Janet Malcolm learned, those are the last things a jury wants in a witness ... more »
For more than a century, Wagner's music has been a "drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans" ... more »
Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »
We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »
The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »
Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »
Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »
Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »
Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »
The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »
"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »
Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »
The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »
The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »
Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »
The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »
Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »
We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »
Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »
Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »
In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »
Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »
Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »
What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »
Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »
For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »
Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »
To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »
A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »
More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »
Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »
Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others ... more »
Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »
“After one finishes a story, one should cross out the beginning and the end," said Chekhov. "It is there that we writers lie most of all” ... more »
When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history ... more »
John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »
After 50, Gore Vidal said, litigation replaces sex. He would be proud of his posthumous legal legacy... more »
How did we go from the techno-utopianism of the ’90s to the digital cesspool we’re left with today? A new book explains ... more »
Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »
The tyranny of chairs. For most of history, humans would squat or lie down for stationary activities. Now we’re captive to poorly designed seats... more »
The least read masterpiece of 20th-century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23... more »
Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »
Satirized, pranked, mocked — even pelted with garbage — the Victorian poet William McGonagall was famous for his terrible art... more »
Boredom has been around since modernity, and now boredom studies is a thriving field. Can its scholars tell us anything new? ... more »
Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology ... more »
The apotheosis of Brutalism, that megalomaniacal overreach beloved of architects and dictators, was in 1920s Moscow. Is it having a retro moment?... more »
The literature of white liberalism. In books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, white people try to read their way out of trouble. Does that work?... more »
Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »
We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
What will save the English department? Love, says Mark Edmundson. Professors need to remind themselves that their love for literature is what brought most of them into the profession ... more »
“A deluge of things.” We inherit our passion for clutter from Victorians like Marion Sambourne, who owned 66 upright chairs ... more »
To read great books by flawed authors, we must recognize the sins of the past but also look for moments of shared human experience ... more »
New Yorker writers cultivate reticence, self-deprecation, and wit. As Janet Malcolm learned, those are the last things a jury wants in a witness ... more »
We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »
Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »
The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »
The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »
The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »
Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »
Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »
Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »
To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »
Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »
“After one finishes a story, one should cross out the beginning and the end," said Chekhov. "It is there that we writers lie most of all” ... more »
After 50, Gore Vidal said, litigation replaces sex. He would be proud of his posthumous legal legacy... more »
The tyranny of chairs. For most of history, humans would squat or lie down for stationary activities. Now we’re captive to poorly designed seats... more »
Satirized, pranked, mocked — even pelted with garbage — the Victorian poet William McGonagall was famous for his terrible art... more »
The apotheosis of Brutalism, that megalomaniacal overreach beloved of architects and dictators, was in 1920s Moscow. Is it having a retro moment?... more »
We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
Isaac Stern’s genial personality was well-suited for television. But the violinist was no mere crowd-pleaser... more »
The life of an amanuensis: endless transcribing, discretion regarding personal life, writing lessons on the side... more »
The medieval university duopoly. From 1334 to 1827, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge swore an oath not to teach elsewhere... more »
Before Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck was the name most likely to start an argument among jazz fans... more »
George Scialabba's book began as a suicide note. “I was, fortunately, too exhausted and disorganized to plan a suicide, much less compose an elegant rebuke to an uncaring world”... more »
"I’d been made a pariah," says Leon Wieseltier, "and I’ve read about pariahs all my life, so I guess I’m the wiser for it”... more »
For Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, social theory was a way to make sense of distant cultures — and a lever against your own predicaments... more »
A eulogy for the secondhand bookshop. This most eccentric and likeable of institutions shows every sign of being annihilated... more »
How Longfellow mourned his wife. He had his own grave dug at the age of 30, he traveled, and he courted an 18-year-old... more »
Bernard Bailyn, the scholar who overturned our understanding of the American Revolution, is dead at 97... more »
There’s a lot you don’t know when you see a painting online. Can that sense of mystery become part of the truth of the experience?... more »
Britain boasts a history of theater criticism that goes back to Hazlitt and Shaw. That 200-year tradition is at risk of coming to an end... more »
The socially distant art gallery: "A space of relaxation, leisure and education has become one of intense moral precarity"... more »
It’s time to end “the tyranny of words,” say some scientists, calling for brain-to-brain-interface technology. Not so fast... more »
Gayl Jones was a prodigy, hailed by Baldwin and Updike. Now she’s the best American novelist whose name you may not know... more »
Asked how she ended up with men as different as Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk, Françoise Gilot replied: “Lions mate with lions”... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
R.A. Fisher's eminence as a scientist is beyond doubt. So is the fact that he was a racist. How should the University of Cambridge remember him?... more »
Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived ... more »
Nathalie Sarraute is remembered as a “boring formalist” within the insipid “new novel” movement. She was much more than that ... more »
When William James gave up on religion, he went in search of a new avenue to save his life. Can his approach help you save your own? ... more »
For more than a century, Wagner's music has been a "drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans" ... more »
The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »
Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »
"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »
The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »
Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »
Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »
Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »
For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »
A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »
Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others ... more »
When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history ... more »
How did we go from the techno-utopianism of the ’90s to the digital cesspool we’re left with today? A new book explains ... more »
The least read masterpiece of 20th-century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23... more »
Boredom has been around since modernity, and now boredom studies is a thriving field. Can its scholars tell us anything new? ... more »
The literature of white liberalism. In books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, white people try to read their way out of trouble. Does that work?... more »
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality... more »
There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. It was his literary strength — and his moral failing... more »
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. So held Paul Valéry, endless tinkerer, perfectionist, and pain to his publisher... more »
In the face of tyranny, most join the oppressors or remain silent. A few resist. This is the story of Berlin's intellectuals... more »
In the aftermath of World War I, four philosophers set about studying the same fundamental question: “What does language do to us?” They had four different answers... more »
How did a Harvard divinity scholar fall for a clumsy archaeological fraud? She had every reason to believe... more »
How to follow a perfect novel? After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison found events conspiring against his second act... more »
“There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.”... more »
We remember the Italian Renaissance for its artistic brilliance, but it came with a dark side: slavery, rape, and slaughter... more »
Described as a “monk and ragamuffin,” Francis Poulenc was a composer who melded the incompatible... more »
In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did so many such instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »
What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »
The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »
Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »
Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »
To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »
Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »
Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »
A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested? ... more »
Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be? ... more »
Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »
Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »
Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »
Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »
Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »
Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »
We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »
In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »
What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »
Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »
More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »
Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »
John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »
Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »
Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »
Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology ... more »
Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »
Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »
Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... more »
How should historians approach the here and now? As a rule, they are wary of “presentism.” But that’s changing... more »
Susan Sontag famously wrote about Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism. What does an antifascist aesthetic look like?... more »
Arguments about Ezra Pound’s odious politics seem like ways to skirt the question of his literary merit. Is he any good?... more »
An allegation of systemic racism against a university is serious, says Randall Kennedy. Why is the evidence in some cases so flimsy?... more »
The mystery of the Vikings. We know of their heroism and cruelty, their riches and inequality. But their psychology remains unknowable... more »
Shame has been under scrutiny in America for more than 200 years. No emotion is at once so ubiquitous and so disputed... more »
In his work, William Faulkner could not escape the Civil War’s aftermath or its meaning. Neither can we... more »
In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-prone Joseph Banks helped earn it that reputation... more »
There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »
Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »
Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »
Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »
Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »
Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »
Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »
John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »
Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult to trace... more »
What exactly distinguishes charismatic democratic rulers from charismatic authoritarians? As a new book reveals, the line is vanishingly thin... more »
We are witnessing a shift in how we think about free speech. Stanley Fish is an intellectual godfather of this moment... more »
E.M. Forster’s funeral was an odd affair. Religion was banned, Beethoven piped in, the procession of cars was halted when a Rolls-Royce got stuck... more »
Intellectual life is beset by a climate of censoriousness and self-censorship; Twitter gets the final say. Thomas Chatterton Williams explains the Harper’s letter... more »
“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »
Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »
Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »
What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »
The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »
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