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Tuesday December 10, 2019
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Dec. 10, 2019

Articles of Note

Michelangelo was unmarried and lived with a motley bunch of "housemates." Scholars have been left to puzzle over the precise nature of these relationships... more »


New Books

Imagine what life was like 245 million years ago. Hard, isn’t it? Forget fossils — the world of dinosaurs is inherently unfathomable to us... more »


Essays & Opinions

What differentiates people from pigs? Perhaps just the existence of autobiographical memories, from which we construct a self... more »


Dec. 9, 2019

Articles of Note

Walter Benton was once one of America’s most popular poets. His secret? Sensuous, risqué writing that caused teenagers to mob bookstores... more »


New Books

As any pet owner can attest, animals do communicate. But do they have languages? Do mating dances, alarm calls, and meows have a grammar?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Lucian Freud sought to "move the senses by giving an intensification of reality.” He wanted to “shock and amaze.” At that he succeeded spectacularly... more »


Dec. 7, 2019

Articles of Note

The death of Camus. Did the KGB rig his car to make it crash at high speed?... more »


New Books

The genius of Philip Larkin’s poetry was his gift for somehow sublimating our appreciation of life by amplifying its ordinariness... more »


Essays & Opinions

Just as the invisible man’s retreat is a hibernation preparatory to action, Ralph Ellison’s letters are a map of his planned advance... more »


Dec. 6, 2019

Articles of Note

In the '90s, Stanley Fish infamously bemoaned the prevalence of Volvos on college campuses. Now he's dismayed by the ubiquity of Subarus — and what that means... more »


New Books

Who was Edison? To his employees, an Ubermensch; to his investors, a fantasist; to his rivals, a publicity whore; to his family, a stranger... more »


Essays & Opinions

A new science of humanity. In the first half of the 20th century, anthropologists were at the forefront of “the greatest moral battle of our time”... more »


Dec. 5, 2019

Articles of Note

John Berger’s 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing, was a grenade lobbed at art history. But, as he learned, it’s not easy to follow an act of demolition... more »


New Books

Not her sister’s keeper. Mary-Kay Wilmers is exacting and suspicious of didacticism, especially where feminism is involved... more »


Essays & Opinions

Every era has its fashionable argot. Ours is rife with buzzwords that have gone mainstream: "privilege," "problematic," "cisgender"... more »


Dec. 4, 2019

Articles of Note

For Derrida, friendship was both an ecstatic and a political act — one that required constant thinking about how we’d eulogize our friends... more »


New Books

What you think of religion largely depends on what you think is religion. Stephen Asma has been changing his mind... more »


Essays & Opinions

A more scientifically literate public, it’s presumed, could better distinguish truth. But our problem is not too little science in public culture, but too much... more »


Dec. 3, 2019

Articles of Note

Nabokov’s dislikes: Thomas Mann is a bad writer on a big scale. Freud merits unrelenting mockery. And never trust a translator... more »


New Books

“Historians of ideas were the least useful kind of historians,” held Isaiah Berlin. But there was one exception: Lewis Namier... more »


Essays & Opinions

The flummery of neuroscience: Defeated by the “hard problem” of consciousness, the field postulates one improbable theory after another... more »


Dec. 2, 2019

Articles of Note

John Simon and the art of the brutal pan. "When he saw something he hated, he eviscerated it and ate its liver, and those meals were not infrequent"... more »


New Books

As America’s identity wars go on, the combatants forget a simple truth: Holier-than-thou-ism is as old as the country itself... more »


Essays & Opinions

Amid the grief, grievances, and betrayal in the marriage of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, what remained was a need to write to each other... more »


Nov. 30, 2019

Articles of Note

To accuse someone of “virtue signaling” is to commit that offense yourself, just to a different audience. A philosopher unpacks the moral morass... more »


New Books

For 176 years, The Economist has been the ur-magazine of Anglophone liberalism. Can it survive an illiberal era?... more »


Essays & Opinions

What do the digital, medical, and legal humanities have in common? They subjugate the humanities to applied fields... more »


Nov. 29, 2019

Articles of Note

Clive James is dead. The critic, poet, and incomparable wit, who seemed incapable of writing a limp sentence, was 80... more »


New Books

The unbearable loneliness of the concert pianist. Applause, green room, hotel room, taxi, airport lounge. Reprise, repeat... more »


Essays & Opinions

Wherever one looks in history, rationality is haunted and teased by its other, irrationality. Now the boundary is being abandoned altogether... more »


Nov. 28, 2019

Articles of Note

Napoleon Chagnon, who died recently at the age of 81, was a rebuke to those scholars who don't regard seeking truth as their primary duty... more »


New Books

Horrified by campus debauchery, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to aim higher. But it quickly became a training ground for “young despots”... more »


Essays & Opinions

Liberal, literary attacks on “woke” culture have something in common: They are expressed in irritable gestures rather than ideas... more »


Nov. 27, 2019

Articles of Note

In 1899 a coal miner died in an accident with a copy of Thucydides in his pocket. The classics used to be integral to working-class British life... more »


New Books

Few architects have been studied more thoroughly than Frank Lloyd Wright. The problem isn't a lack of material. It's a lack of answers... more »


Essays & Opinions

Has Silicon Valley killed creativity? Artists, astrologers, and addicts, pushed out by high rent, find themselves in an impossible situation... more »


Nov. 26, 2019

Articles of Note

George Frideric Handel was, of course, a virtuoso performer and composer. He was good at managing his money, too... more »


New Books

The Epicurean life has a serious side. Hedonists cultivate a practical, prudent way of taking their pleasures... more »


Essays & Opinions

Social media has devolved into a contagion of moral grandstanding and outrage-mongering. And yet it can be fixed... more »


Nov. 25, 2019

Articles of Note

A charismatic leader, a creation myth that begins with an epiphany, and legions of rapturous followers: Is positive psychology science or religion?... more »


New Books

Jared Diamond's new book is a sustained but misleading metaphor. His giant category error: that nation-states behave like individual humans... more »


Essays & Opinions

Modern science rejected Aristotle, turning him into a caricature and a bogeyman. Time to unlearn something important. Aristotle was not “pre-scientific”... more »


Nov. 23, 2019

Articles of Note

Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 17 times more likely than other scientists to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry... more »


New Books

Ibram Kendi is here to teach you how to be antiracist. His book has the tone of a fundamentalist sermon. Andrew Sullivan is having none of it... more »


Essays & Opinions

"Forcing opinions into the mouths of dead writers is a dangerous style of necrophilia, especially when the writer is Adorno"... more »


Nov. 22, 2019

Articles of Note

Ode to a useless language. Literary Latin is an aesthetic delight masking a dark history... more »


New Books

What is real? How should one live? What government is best? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Philosophy is ever-changing and never-ending... more »


Essays & Opinions

Elaine Showalter was a target of Harold Bloom's attacks. Yet she still found his combination of the melodramatic and ridiculous an engaging shtick... more »


Nov. 21, 2019

Articles of Note

Instead of big, sprawling novels like White Teeth, we now have Knausgaard and Ferrante, who promise so little... more »


New Books

For their coiled, angry masculinity, D.H. Lawrence's essays are indefensible. For their sweep and immaculate style, they are unforgettable... more »


Essays & Opinions

Is plagiarism wrong? Worry less about people stealing from you. Worry more about saying something worth stealing... more »


Nov. 20, 2019

Articles of Note

“She’s turning 80 and she’s just put out the biggest book in the world.” The making of Margaret Atwood... more »


New Books

“Puritan” was at first a spiteful nickname for those who were not purer than others but were seen as thinking of themselves that way... more »


Essays & Opinions

“September 1, 1939,” perhaps Auden's most-quoted poem, is the one he liked least. Why did it survive all of his attempts to mute or suppress it?... more »


Nov. 19, 2019

Articles of Note

Clifton Fadiman, monarch of the middlebrows, was the target of endless snobby, self-regarding attacks. He deserved better... more »


New Books

James Wood’s transformation: Once fizzing with aphoristic insights, he now writes more carefully, often of aging, exile, and emotion... more »


Essays & Opinions

“I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me,” held Samuel Johnson... more »


Nov. 18, 2019

Articles of Note

"Creepy" is a popular pejorative. But what exactly do we mean when we describe people, usually men, as creepy?... more »


New Books

When Elaine Stritch was called “iconic," she'd get exasperated. “Let’s all level and tell each other what ‘iconic’ means,” she'd say. “It’s a mouthwash!”... more »


Essays & Opinions

Victor Serge was a permanent oppositionist — a committed revolutionary who was a thorn in the side of every movement he supported... more »


Nov. 16, 2019

Articles of Note

John M. Ford was a celebrated science-fiction writer and a dazzling storyteller. When he died, his works disappeared. How did this happen?... more »


New Books

Chaucer’s family was proud of him. But did he really have to wear a tunic so short that it exposed his loins, in red-and-black hosiery?... more »


Essays & Opinions

"The question of what you are is qualitative, not quantitative. What sort? What life? What team? In late 1995, I chose to switch teams.” Deirdre McCloskey on changing gender... more »




Articles of Note

Michelangelo was unmarried and lived with a motley bunch of "housemates." Scholars have been left to puzzle over the precise nature of these relationships... more »


Walter Benton was once one of America’s most popular poets. His secret? Sensuous, risqué writing that caused teenagers to mob bookstores... more »


The death of Camus. Did the KGB rig his car to make it crash at high speed?... more »


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

In the '90s, Stanley Fish infamously bemoaned the prevalence of Volvos on college campuses. Now he's dismayed by the ubiquity of Subarus — and what that means... more »


John Berger’s 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing, was a grenade lobbed at art history. But, as he learned, it’s not easy to follow an act of demolition... more »


For Derrida, friendship was both an ecstatic and a political act — one that required constant thinking about how we’d eulogize our friends... more »


Nabokov’s dislikes: Thomas Mann is a bad writer on a big scale. Freud merits unrelenting mockery. And never trust a translator... more »


John Simon and the art of the brutal pan. "When he saw something he hated, he eviscerated it and ate its liver, and those meals were not infrequent"... more »


To accuse someone of “virtue signaling” is to commit that offense yourself, just to a different audience. A philosopher unpacks the moral morass... more »


Clive James is dead. The critic, poet, and incomparable wit, who seemed incapable of writing a limp sentence, was 80... more »


Napoleon Chagnon, who died recently at the age of 81, was a rebuke to those scholars who don't regard seeking truth as their primary duty... more »


In 1899 a coal miner died in an accident with a copy of Thucydides in his pocket. The classics used to be integral to working-class British life... more »


George Frideric Handel was, of course, a virtuoso performer and composer. He was good at managing his money, too... more »


A charismatic leader, a creation myth that begins with an epiphany, and legions of rapturous followers: Is positive psychology science or religion?... more »


Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 17 times more likely than other scientists to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry... more »


Ode to a useless language. Literary Latin is an aesthetic delight masking a dark history... more »


Instead of big, sprawling novels like White Teeth, we now have Knausgaard and Ferrante, who promise so little... more »


“She’s turning 80 and she’s just put out the biggest book in the world.” The making of Margaret Atwood... more »


Clifton Fadiman, monarch of the middlebrows, was the target of endless snobby, self-regarding attacks. He deserved better... more »


"Creepy" is a popular pejorative. But what exactly do we mean when we describe people, usually men, as creepy?... more »


John M. Ford was a celebrated science-fiction writer and a dazzling storyteller. When he died, his works disappeared. How did this happen?... more »


“Do we have to read every fucking word the guy writes?” Philip Roth asked about John Updike. The two had spats but saw beyond the rivalry... more »


Kate Manne’s moral quandary: to respond to all suffering, at the expense of herself? Or to prioritize her philosophical work and live with the guilt?... more »


What makes a "bad movie" good? "These sorts of movies fascinate me in the way a too-honest idiot does, after he’s had three or four drinks"... more »


Guilty pleasures make us feel guilty because we know the shoddiness of what we’re getting but desire it all the same. What's going on? Ask Adorno... more »


On May 30, 1975, Nabokov appeared on Apostrophes, a French talk show. He drank whiskey from a teapot and glanced at notecards. The interview was marvelous... more »


“She walks like a bird, but that bird is a duck.” Short, plump, and ungainly, Loie Fuller was the unlikely star of the French Folies... more »


A sexy, transgressive ’70s cult classic urged rolling the dice on life’s big decisions. A search for its elusive, alluring author ... more »


In what way is Frank Sinatra the Jacques Derrida of pop music? Because no one was better at multilayered interpretations of lyrics. Ted Gioia explains... more »


The LRB at 40. Seriousness, spats, and personal ads: “Bald, short, fat and ugly male, 53, seeks shortsighted woman with tremendous sexual appetite”... more »


The most divisive question in fiction: Who gave you the right to tell that story? The answer, as 10 authors explain, is complicated... more »


Writers must not only write but also perform. J.D. Salinger simply refused. What was he keeping from us? That he was just as human as we are... more »


A poetic smackdown: 100 years ago, T.S. Eliot celebrated “tradition” and bashed the avant-garde. His venue? The leading avant-garde forum of the day... more »


Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Nude portraits were part of their courtship: “I’ll make you fall in love with yourself,” he told her... more »


A new generation of figurative painters does much right, but there’s something irksome about their work: an overdependence on academic methods... more »


Social scientists have championed theories of human infallibility in many matters. But mistakes are central to who we are... more »


After years of downsizing and intrigue, Condé Nast’s glossy-magazine empire is becoming the one thing it never was: normal... more »


Since the Enlightenment, we have tended to define human identity and worth in terms of the values of science. This is an odd and blinkered notion... more »


The London Review of Books has reached its 40th anniversary. But its influential editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, isn't celebrating... more »


What's become of commanding critics in the past 20 years? Most have died — and it's no longer obvious how much literary matters matter... more »


New Books

Imagine what life was like 245 million years ago. Hard, isn’t it? Forget fossils — the world of dinosaurs is inherently unfathomable to us... more »


As any pet owner can attest, animals do communicate. But do they have languages? Do mating dances, alarm calls, and meows have a grammar?... more »


The genius of Philip Larkin’s poetry was his gift for somehow sublimating our appreciation of life by amplifying its ordinariness... more »


Who was Edison? To his employees, an Ubermensch; to his investors, a fantasist; to his rivals, a publicity whore; to his family, a stranger... more »


Not her sister’s keeper. Mary-Kay Wilmers is exacting and suspicious of didacticism, especially where feminism is involved... more »


What you think of religion largely depends on what you think is religion. Stephen Asma has been changing his mind... more »


“Historians of ideas were the least useful kind of historians,” held Isaiah Berlin. But there was one exception: Lewis Namier... more »


As America’s identity wars go on, the combatants forget a simple truth: Holier-than-thou-ism is as old as the country itself... more »


For 176 years, The Economist has been the ur-magazine of Anglophone liberalism. Can it survive an illiberal era?... more »


The unbearable loneliness of the concert pianist. Applause, green room, hotel room, taxi, airport lounge. Reprise, repeat... more »


Horrified by campus debauchery, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to aim higher. But it quickly became a training ground for “young despots”... more »


Few architects have been studied more thoroughly than Frank Lloyd Wright. The problem isn't a lack of material. It's a lack of answers... more »


The Epicurean life has a serious side. Hedonists cultivate a practical, prudent way of taking their pleasures... more »


Jared Diamond's new book is a sustained but misleading metaphor. His giant category error: that nation-states behave like individual humans... more »


Ibram Kendi is here to teach you how to be antiracist. His book has the tone of a fundamentalist sermon. Andrew Sullivan is having none of it... more »


What is real? How should one live? What government is best? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Philosophy is ever-changing and never-ending... more »


For their coiled, angry masculinity, D.H. Lawrence's essays are indefensible. For their sweep and immaculate style, they are unforgettable... more »


“Puritan” was at first a spiteful nickname for those who were not purer than others but were seen as thinking of themselves that way... more »


James Wood’s transformation: Once fizzing with aphoristic insights, he now writes more carefully, often of aging, exile, and emotion... more »


When Elaine Stritch was called “iconic," she'd get exasperated. “Let’s all level and tell each other what ‘iconic’ means,” she'd say. “It’s a mouthwash!”... more »


Chaucer’s family was proud of him. But did he really have to wear a tunic so short that it exposed his loins, in red-and-black hosiery?... more »


“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child,” wrote Nabokov. So are his interviews at all worthwhile?... more »


When Wittgenstein went to war, the gossip machine quickly determined that he was a burnt-out wreck and a disgrace to the field... more »


Is most modern liberalism just the Christian heresy of Pelagianism by another name? A revisionist critique of John Rawls says yes... more »


Elizabeth Bishop’s dogged pertinacity: She would spend years, even decades, on a poem. Every word, every nuance, had to be perfect... more »


The National Review, American Greatness, and The Claremont Review of Books share a vision of American nationalism. That vision is a lie... more »


Lucian Freud thought Celia Paul was just another pretty muse. But she was a painter herself. Zadie Smith unpacks “museography”... more »


Science is trustworthy because it works, right? Well, most scientific theories throughout history have turned out to be false. Is our time different?... more »


Rivalries, alleged plagiarism, rapturous fandom — the giants of Russia’s golden age of literature had complicated relationships with one another... more »


Lydia Davis is a modern Vermeer, patiently observing everyday life, but from odd and askew angles... more »


In terms of its influence, The Economist has long been a publication like no other. It can plausibly be said to have made the modern world... more »


For García Márquez, the relationship between journalism and fiction was symbiotic: Journalism was an apprenticeship for fiction... more »


Jefferson's lofty vision for the University of Virginia was not shared by its early students. Riots in 1825 brought him to tears... more »


In John Hersey's day, all news was slow news. Hiroshima appeared more than a year after the bombing. The delay contributed to its style, substance, and accuracy... more »


By the end of his life, John Rawls had a stature so great that he shaped the very idea of what philosophy is. Has this become a problem?... more »


Jill Lepore's problem. She is among the most eloquent preachers of the liberal gospel. Yet she's preaching in increasingly radical times... more »


Is the modern world receptive to ancient ideas? A new series of compact and handsome pocket-sized translations seeks to find out... more »


On a February night in 1965, William F. Buckley squared off against James Baldwin. For Buckley, it was his most satisfying debate. For Baldwin, not so much... more »


Howard Zinn told America's story as a simplistic melodrama. But the latest attempt to create an appealing alternative is no less flawed... more »


Essays & Opinions

What differentiates people from pigs? Perhaps just the existence of autobiographical memories, from which we construct a self... more »


Lucian Freud sought to "move the senses by giving an intensification of reality.” He wanted to “shock and amaze.” At that he succeeded spectacularly... more »


Just as the invisible man’s retreat is a hibernation preparatory to action, Ralph Ellison’s letters are a map of his planned advance... more »


A new science of humanity. In the first half of the 20th century, anthropologists were at the forefront of “the greatest moral battle of our time”... more »


Every era has its fashionable argot. Ours is rife with buzzwords that have gone mainstream: "privilege," "problematic," "cisgender"... more »


A more scientifically literate public, it’s presumed, could better distinguish truth. But our problem is not too little science in public culture, but too much... more »


The flummery of neuroscience: Defeated by the “hard problem” of consciousness, the field postulates one improbable theory after another... more »


Amid the grief, grievances, and betrayal in the marriage of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, what remained was a need to write to each other... more »


What do the digital, medical, and legal humanities have in common? They subjugate the humanities to applied fields... more »


Wherever one looks in history, rationality is haunted and teased by its other, irrationality. Now the boundary is being abandoned altogether... more »


Liberal, literary attacks on “woke” culture have something in common: They are expressed in irritable gestures rather than ideas... more »


Has Silicon Valley killed creativity? Artists, astrologers, and addicts, pushed out by high rent, find themselves in an impossible situation... more »


Social media has devolved into a contagion of moral grandstanding and outrage-mongering. And yet it can be fixed... more »


Modern science rejected Aristotle, turning him into a caricature and a bogeyman. Time to unlearn something important. Aristotle was not “pre-scientific”... more »


"Forcing opinions into the mouths of dead writers is a dangerous style of necrophilia, especially when the writer is Adorno"... more »


Elaine Showalter was a target of Harold Bloom's attacks. Yet she still found his combination of the melodramatic and ridiculous an engaging shtick... more »


Is plagiarism wrong? Worry less about people stealing from you. Worry more about saying something worth stealing... more »


“September 1, 1939,” perhaps Auden's most-quoted poem, is the one he liked least. Why did it survive all of his attempts to mute or suppress it?... more »


“I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me,” held Samuel Johnson... more »


Victor Serge was a permanent oppositionist — a committed revolutionary who was a thorn in the side of every movement he supported... more »


"The question of what you are is qualitative, not quantitative. What sort? What life? What team? In late 1995, I chose to switch teams.” Deirdre McCloskey on changing gender... more »


Unable to predict a crash or facilitate prosperity, economics is now a field of dubious value. And yet it retains an unearned intellectual authority... more »


Ibsen was reviled by some as immoral, hailed by others as prophetic. James Joyce thought him the most influential intellect of his time. Ibsen retains his potency today... more »


Which words should be banished? “Adorkable,” “YOLO,” and “influencer” are popular suggestions. But policing language is a fraught exercise... more »


The origin stories of big ideas highlight the eureka moments. But it's the mundane work that is key. Inspiration favors the prepared mind... more »


"Liberalism" is a slippery word for Americans, who have no experience of anything else. Now critics are falling over themselves... more »


When the Aztecs met Cortés, they did not think he was a deity. Rather, they scouted his forces and set up a war room. So why does another tale persist?... more »


The sad-lady literary sirens are legion: Plath, Woolf, Jean Rhys. What would it mean, wonders Leslie Jamison, to move beyond them?... more »


“Where man strives for knowledge, the Devil will never be far away.” Knausgaard contemplates the power and temptations of literature... more »


Cave art has been found on nearly every continent. What does it mean? That our Paleolithic ancestors knew something we still strain to imagine... more »


Google has a “chief happiness officer,” a “treat yourself” ethic reigns, and happiness bloggers score viral hits. Yet peak happiness is a noxious goal... more »


Reading Kierkegaard can be dispiriting. He seems so dour, so tortured by inner turmoil. But he was, in some odd way, a happy writer... more »


Education of an architect. Aspiring to greatness is now conflated with aspiring to novelty, bolstering the field's affinity for what’s ugly... more »


Young Lucian Freud delighted in shocking visitors. He maintained a grisly cast of mounted animals in his home, and stored two dead monkeys in his kitchen oven... more »


To accommodate drinking, the Literary Review established the Academy Club. Poets were banned for never paying their tabs and for bad conversation... more »


Lusty retirees and power-lifting septuagenarians churn out books chronicling the joys of aging. It’s all quite misleading, of course... more »


"One doesn’t want to share in that old-man vibe and die of a heart attack after a student protester shows us her breasts." Justin E.H. Smith on avoiding Adorno's fate... more »


John Ashbery was famous for his impenetrability. "My poetry is disjunct," he said, "but then so is life." Fair enough. But is it fair to the reader?... more »


Why are some intellectuals pardoned for past sins, but others condemned? Case study: the reaction to a new collection by the “fascist icon” Charles Maurras... more »


Bartleby, autistic? Melville, on the spectrum? Literary critics used to make such armchair diagnoses, but now they’ve gotten more sophisticated... more »


Peter Handke has been widely denounced for his politics, but what of his prose? Turns out it’s associative, digressive, oneiric, and, above all, idiosyncratic... more »


J.S. Bach, bad boy. We remember him as a saint, but he downed beer by the gallon, got mixed up in knife fights, and consorted with women in the organ loft... more »


Parents whitewash parenting. For the truth, turn to Knausgaard: The car seat will humiliate you; you will panic in silence... more »


Everyone, academics included, hates academic writing. But maybe the disgust is misplaced. Could it be that most academic writing is actually pretty good?... more »


Reading is not a team sport. Thus, when we talk of the historical or cultural power of the novel, we may miss its real strength: establishing intimacy... more »


Since Shakespeare's day, theaters have been uniquely flammable. Thus early Broadway theaters’ obsession with fire escapes. Forty wasn’t too many... more »


Memoirs From Beyond the Grave. Chateaubriand wanted his 2,000-page book published only after his death. Then financial hardship struck... more »


Wittgenstein's house on a lake was built as a retreat from the world. But it turns out he was an oddly ostentatious recluse... more »


Lenin invented totalitarianism and the ideas of a one-party state and a terrorist state. He also invented a style of thinking that endures... more »


Minae Mizumura, both imaginatively cosmopolitan and linguistically rooted, exemplifies the change in what it means to be an immigrant writer... more »


Nota Bene

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  • Language and love affair
  • Chinese science-fiction
  • Overlooked romance
  • Memoir v. history
  • Clive James got it right
  • Russian jokes
  • Audiobook narrators


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