The artist, writer, and gallerist John Kelsey is, at heart, a Romantic, but an injured and grudging one... more »
Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »
Henry James, America’s first international writer, couldn’t leave home behind – and couldn’t abide it as a permanent home... more »
Are there life-forms hiding inside Earth’s crust? And if there are, how do they survive?... more »
The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »
NASA has spent decades looking for alien intelligence in the far reaches of the universe. But should we be looking much closer to home?... more »
The materialism of Richard Dawkins, Robert Sapolsky, and Lawrence Krauss is among the silliest ideas of our time... more »
In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »
What does it mean to win an award for translation? The International Booker Prize for fiction in translation doesn’t seem to know... more »
The novelist and the censor. A best-selling Chinese writer is contacted by the man who erases his social-media posts. Why?... more »
“It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »
Behold, the new Frick. Post-renovation, the museum has nearly twice as much to see. What’s not to love?... more »
Junot Díaz was cleared of the worst of the #MeToo charges against him. Yet his work still disappeared from the Norton Anthology... more »
Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »
Who has written the best American poetry of the 21st century? Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Ocean Vuong... more »
The harrowing story of The Buru Quartet. Indonesia’s pre-eminent novelist wrote his masterpiece while on a prison island... more »
Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »
Absorbed in close textual analysis, literary scholars overlook the simple joys of the plot twist and the big reveal... more »
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist known for gritty realism, is dead. He was 89... Dwight Garner... Alberto Manguel... Tunku Varadarajan... WSJ... El País... Ilan Stavans... more »
Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »
Edward Said gave the Palestinian position its gravitas. Now, at Columbia, his intellectual legacy is under attack... more »
Slurp, chomp, squish, chew. Why do some people find the sound of eating so unbearable?... more »
The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »
Claire Messud on Lolita: “In this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass”... more »
In 1932 Leo Strauss asked Hannah Arendt on a date, only to be rejected for his conservative politics... more »
The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »
The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz commemorated suffering. But he never abandoned a fragile sense of hope... more »
Baby in a box. B. F. Skinner’s “air crib” promised to solve parenting woes with gadgeteering. The public reception was decidedly mixed... more »
The evolution of teeth. What began in the ocean half a billion years ago has led us to the dentist's chair... more »
A generation of students raised on an ethic of sexual egalitarianism struggles to confront a key theme in Othello: jealousy... more »
Delmore Schwartz contended with great expectations and frustrated ambitions, especially as mental illness closed in. But he kept writing... more »
For Agnes Callard, the philosophical life demands relentless self-questioning. But she has little to say about the conditions that make such inquiry possible... more »
Awash in freedom and material abundance, Americans are mired in boredom and intellectual dullness... more »
The defrocked Armenian monk Ambroise Calfa made his fortune by swindling social climbers with faux knighthoods ... more »
James C. Scott called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’” Why were his ideas so compelling to libertarians?... more »
"The college essay is absurd and unfair," writes Yascha Mounk. "It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny"... more »
Jill Lepore: “Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago”... more »
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was both artist and prophet. He was far more persuasive as the former than as the latter... more »
Learning for learning’s sake. College is being portrayed through the narrowest, most vocational lens. That’s a travesty... more »
Hilma af Klint is hailed as an iconic genius of abstract art. But should some of the credit assigned to her be shared?... more »
Melancholy need not be understood as fatalism or decadent withdrawal. For W.G. Sebald, it was a form of resistance... more »
Perry Link: "People who ask me about my blacklisting usually don’t imagine that there are benefits to the status, but there are"... more »
Why do so many academics and nonacademics alike feel so hostile toward academic writing?... more »
"People tell me I get overexcited," Philip Hoare tells us. "Well, bollocks to that." When it comes to William Blake, his enthusiasm knows no bounds... more »
“I like genre fiction for the same reason I like … the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: Things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake”... more »
Egon Schiele and the secret baby. His sister's surprise pregnancy posed a question: Was he the uncle or the father?... more »
At the Great Siege of Malta, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights were suicidally brave in the defense of a barren island. Why?... more »
$10 from The New Leader, $100 from Commentary. James Baldwin’s magazine writing career had humble origins... more »
Comma queen. If style is character, what does Renata Adler’s promiscuous use of commas say about her?... more »
The critic Andrea Long Chu gets away with baggy associative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance... more »
The most stable repository of civilization worth has long been books. That era is ending. What comes next?... more »
Good writers match language and form with observation and feeling. AI fiction, however, has no feeling... more »
Henry James in Palm Beach. “Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand”... more »
Critics loved Evelyn Waugh’s dark comedy and wicked social satire. Then, to their dismay, Brideshead Revisited appeared... more »
An exhibit of the letters of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne has the New York Public Library preparing for a flood of visitors... more »
The prevailing view of Hegel is that he regarded history as a simplistic march of progress. The prevailing view is wrong... more »
Christ and Campbell’s soup. Did Andy Warhol's faith have more influence over his art than his critics realize?... more »
"The ordinary son of an extraordinary father.” Richard Blair was three weeks old when he was adopted by George Orwell... more »
Czeslaw Milosz agonized over whether to defect from Stalinist Poland: “What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile”... more »
John Cage instructed his composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” be played “as slowly as possible.” The world’s longest organ recital will take 639 years. ... more »
“Erotomania,” “a monstrous sexual perversion,” the ultimate symbol of a persecuted gay man. Oscar Wilde’s sexuality was complex... more »
There were methods for slowing Big Tech’s overhaul of our social world — but they are too little, too late... more »
“My whole life,” wrote Bruce Chatwin, “has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific”... more »
The artist, writer, and gallerist John Kelsey is, at heart, a Romantic, but an injured and grudging one... more »
Are there life-forms hiding inside Earth’s crust? And if there are, how do they survive?... more »
The materialism of Richard Dawkins, Robert Sapolsky, and Lawrence Krauss is among the silliest ideas of our time... more »
The novelist and the censor. A best-selling Chinese writer is contacted by the man who erases his social-media posts. Why?... more »
Junot Díaz was cleared of the worst of the #MeToo charges against him. Yet his work still disappeared from the Norton Anthology... more »
The harrowing story of The Buru Quartet. Indonesia’s pre-eminent novelist wrote his masterpiece while on a prison island... more »
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist known for gritty realism, is dead. He was 89... Dwight Garner... Alberto Manguel... Tunku Varadarajan... WSJ... El País... Ilan Stavans... more »
Slurp, chomp, squish, chew. Why do some people find the sound of eating so unbearable?... more »
In 1932 Leo Strauss asked Hannah Arendt on a date, only to be rejected for his conservative politics... more »
Baby in a box. B. F. Skinner’s “air crib” promised to solve parenting woes with gadgeteering. The public reception was decidedly mixed... more »
Delmore Schwartz contended with great expectations and frustrated ambitions, especially as mental illness closed in. But he kept writing... more »
The defrocked Armenian monk Ambroise Calfa made his fortune by swindling social climbers with faux knighthoods ... more »
Jill Lepore: “Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago”... more »
Hilma af Klint is hailed as an iconic genius of abstract art. But should some of the credit assigned to her be shared?... more »
Why do so many academics and nonacademics alike feel so hostile toward academic writing?... more »
Egon Schiele and the secret baby. His sister's surprise pregnancy posed a question: Was he the uncle or the father?... more »
Comma queen. If style is character, what does Renata Adler’s promiscuous use of commas say about her?... more »
Good writers match language and form with observation and feeling. AI fiction, however, has no feeling... more »
An exhibit of the letters of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne has the New York Public Library preparing for a flood of visitors... more »
"The ordinary son of an extraordinary father.” Richard Blair was three weeks old when he was adopted by George Orwell... more »
“Erotomania,” “a monstrous sexual perversion,” the ultimate symbol of a persecuted gay man. Oscar Wilde’s sexuality was complex... more »
As poetry and criticism professionalized, difficulty was fetishized. But Robert Frost’s difficulties are of a different kind... more »
Leisure as letters. Reading and writing should be fundamentally playful — but deliberate — acts... more »
The rock biopic has a new job in the age of the financialization of music: produce, and reproduce, an audience... more »
Could the oldest writing system in the world be deciphered? Cuneiform persistently stumped scholars — until the 1850s... more »
“The nonagenarian writer should speak only of gratitude — and then shut up.” But not yet, if you’re Cynthia Ozick... more »
“Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.” So held Alan Turing in 1950... more »
Daniel Kahneman was determined to create a happy ending to his 90 years of life, to avoid the indignities and miseries of age. He chose suicide... more »
“Nature and nurture aren’t separate forces — they’re a Möbius strip, endlessly looping back on each other”... more »
How to spot a fake masterpiece. In the exposure of artistic forgeries, it's the little things that give them away... more »
Toni Morrison’s audacious Dreaming Emmett. She planned to take the play to Paris, but it lasted only four weeks in Albany... more »
The horrors of early pet food. In Victorian London, “cat’s meat men” pushed their carts of cheap offal and horsemeat up to 40 miles a day... more »
Disease that spreads through the air? In the words of one journalist in France in the 1860s, that was “just too fantastic to imagine”... more »
“I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit.” Then came ChatGPT... more »
“I have to prepare myself for a certain degree of loneliness.” In her 80s, Helen Garner focuses on her garden, her chickens, and her diary... more »
As a utilitarian, Tyler Cowen believes that people do things for reasons. What’s his reason for wanting to know everything?... more »
What Tom Wolfe wrought. Many journalists mimc his style. Few do the reporting that makes that style sing... more »
Saudi Arabia’s pre-Islamic history, which it once condemned as idolatrous, is central to a new program encouraging tourism... more »
Most virtues come with no fine print, but the goodness of loyalty depends on its object. Vladimir Jankélévitch elaborated... more »
Robert Caro has one sentence pinned to an index card above his Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriter: “The only thing that matters is on this page” ... more »
Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »
The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »
In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »
“It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »
Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »
Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »
Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »
The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »
The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »
The evolution of teeth. What began in the ocean half a billion years ago has led us to the dentist's chair... more »
For Agnes Callard, the philosophical life demands relentless self-questioning. But she has little to say about the conditions that make such inquiry possible... more »
James C. Scott called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’” Why were his ideas so compelling to libertarians?... more »
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was both artist and prophet. He was far more persuasive as the former than as the latter... more »
Melancholy need not be understood as fatalism or decadent withdrawal. For W.G. Sebald, it was a form of resistance... more »
"People tell me I get overexcited," Philip Hoare tells us. "Well, bollocks to that." When it comes to William Blake, his enthusiasm knows no bounds... more »
At the Great Siege of Malta, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights were suicidally brave in the defense of a barren island. Why?... more »
The critic Andrea Long Chu gets away with baggy associative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance... more »
Henry James in Palm Beach. “Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand”... more »
The prevailing view of Hegel is that he regarded history as a simplistic march of progress. The prevailing view is wrong... more »
Czeslaw Milosz agonized over whether to defect from Stalinist Poland: “What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile”... more »
There were methods for slowing Big Tech’s overhaul of our social world — but they are too little, too late... more »
What is it about brutally inhospitable mountains that can move us so totally and instinctively? Nan Shepherd called it “the tang of height”... more »
The benefits of a bad memory. To remember the important things, we have to forget the inessential... more »
Was Curzio Malaparte — nationalist and cosmopolite, pacifist and bellicist, elitist and populist — the quintessential European of his time?... more »
“A book was like fresh air," said Adam Michnik. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad.” The CIA was deft at smuggling them behind the Iron Curtain... more »
A rarefied gig. Has there ever been a more lucrative place to be a writer than Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair?... more »
The history of AI is dashed hopes and blind alleys. You don't have to be an “accelerationist” or a “doomer" to see that this time is different... more »
House of Albert Barnes. What drove the curmudgeonly collector to acquire so many Renoirs, Cézannes and Modiglianis?... more »
Through binges, bankruptcies, and depressive spells, Edgar Allan Poe knew where the best of him lay: in making art... more »
In the 18th century, hypochondria was a rarefied disease tied to leisure and luxury. Then the laboring classes began to develop it... more »
Dante’s divine… autofiction? The Commedia is not a “memoir” in the conventional sense, yet it’s a deeply personal reflection... more »
Van Gogh, age 32, arrived in Paris a "provincial rube" and “painter of no particular skill." Did the city really transform him?... more »
“The only people who connect ancient and modern Greece are tour guides, Fulbright scholars, and fascists”... more »
When it comes to sexual matters, the Bible is neither clear nor consistent. Diarmaid MacCulloch teases out the contradictions... more »
Many academics tolerate the metaphysical commitments of mainstream religionists. But a belief in the paranormal?... more »
Free speech and its discontents. “We cannot have truth and wisdom without accommodating error and folly”... more »
Here come the pedagogy gurus, with their gaseous abstractions and bureaucratic proceduralism... more »
Experiencing an obscure, hyper-specific emotion? In some language, there’s probably a word for that... more »
What is "woke"? An abundance of zeal, a lack of proportion, and self-interest masquerading as general interest... more »
Henry James, America’s first international writer, couldn’t leave home behind – and couldn’t abide it as a permanent home... more »
NASA has spent decades looking for alien intelligence in the far reaches of the universe. But should we be looking much closer to home?... more »
What does it mean to win an award for translation? The International Booker Prize for fiction in translation doesn’t seem to know... more »
Behold, the new Frick. Post-renovation, the museum has nearly twice as much to see. What’s not to love?... more »
Who has written the best American poetry of the 21st century? Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Ocean Vuong... more »
Absorbed in close textual analysis, literary scholars overlook the simple joys of the plot twist and the big reveal... more »
Edward Said gave the Palestinian position its gravitas. Now, at Columbia, his intellectual legacy is under attack... more »
Claire Messud on Lolita: “In this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass”... more »
The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz commemorated suffering. But he never abandoned a fragile sense of hope... more »
A generation of students raised on an ethic of sexual egalitarianism struggles to confront a key theme in Othello: jealousy... more »
Awash in freedom and material abundance, Americans are mired in boredom and intellectual dullness... more »
"The college essay is absurd and unfair," writes Yascha Mounk. "It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny"... more »
Learning for learning’s sake. College is being portrayed through the narrowest, most vocational lens. That’s a travesty... more »
Perry Link: "People who ask me about my blacklisting usually don’t imagine that there are benefits to the status, but there are"... more »
“I like genre fiction for the same reason I like … the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: Things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake”... more »
$10 from The New Leader, $100 from Commentary. James Baldwin’s magazine writing career had humble origins... more »
The most stable repository of civilization worth has long been books. That era is ending. What comes next?... more »
Critics loved Evelyn Waugh’s dark comedy and wicked social satire. Then, to their dismay, Brideshead Revisited appeared... more »
Christ and Campbell’s soup. Did Andy Warhol's faith have more influence over his art than his critics realize?... more »
John Cage instructed his composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” be played “as slowly as possible.” The world’s longest organ recital will take 639 years. ... more »
“My whole life,” wrote Bruce Chatwin, “has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific”... more »
In a famous scene in Moby-Dick, Ishmael encounters “a long, limber, portentous, black” artwork. Could AI recreate it?... more »
Judith Butler: “Is there a proposed criterion by which ‘extremist’ gender ideology can be distinguished from the non-extremist kind?”... more »
We seek rest, yet are wary of its implicit boredom. This dilemma is resolved, perhaps, only by cats... more »
The homogenous, aging American psychoanalytic community has begun emphasizing social injustice. The result: chaos... more »
Hunter-gatherer societies were much more violent than our own, but much of that is due to a relatively small number of prehistoric psychopaths... more »
One early human tool gave rise to our leap in intelligence: not the sharpened stone, but the handbag, for carrying food and babies... more »
For a powerful account of the human condition, writes Marilynne Robinson, turn not to “anemic anthropology,” but to Calvinism... more »
Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »
Today we treat novels as salubrious stress relievers — kale smoothies for the soul. That overlooks their dark, diabolical potency... more »
The necessity of Martha Nussbaum. Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex, and sometimes painful stuff of real life... more »
Alice Gribbin: “Those who deem the nude in art a ‘sex object’ betray themselves as prudish and crass”... more »
What can the memoir of madness accomplish? It can force us to reckon with ugly things, not because they are titillating, but because they are true... more »
“The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination … may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism”... more »
Technology has long been a boon to creativity, especially in film. But AI and its machine-managed flawlessness are different... more »
What is intuition? The return of a lost memory? An unearned sense of certitude? A physician deals with losing his decisiveness... more »
A victim of his own accessibility. Montaigne’s writing is categorized as “motivational self-help.” Don’t be fooled... more »
Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a “big, huge mistake,” but one we should be grateful for... more »
Social science has a rigor problem, and the common solutions — replication, public critique — are inefficient. It’s time for a new approach... more »
When Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” came out over 35 years ago, it was roundly mocked. But he’s been proven right... more »
Perry Anderson asks: Why is neoliberalism more powerful and pervasive an ideology than the liberalism on which it rests?... more »
A plague of bad essays purports to explain how some distant historical event explains the present. Beware such relevance mongering... more »
The supremacy of finitude: Our lives, our species, and our universe will all someday come to an end. That should galvanize us... more »
If the universe offers us clues to its purpose, the reasonable thing to do is not just pay attention but believe. Ross Douthat’s case for religion... more »
When Shulamith Firestone finally published her second book, it wasn't a memoir of her descent into psychosis. It was something deeper ... more »
AI and the problem of other minds. How can we ever know if AI has subjective feelings? Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT... more »
AI and literature. "Writing it off, ignoring it, assuming it is a slop machine and little more...is a narrow, badly informed, and false view of what is going on"... more »
Dostoevsky's faith. Belief, doubt, and hypocrisy preoccupy both his fictional characters and his own agonized quest for understanding... more »
A new literary genre — call it the Hot Divorcées Club — has arrived with an unmistakable whiff of emancipation... more »
“Make your own job.” The slogan of the 19th-century New Thought movement has been embraced by contemporary self-help gurus... more »
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