The first ordinary woman in English literature, the Wife of Bath gossips, drinks, and tells her husband’s secrets... more »
"There are two ways to write didactic fiction: with a straight face or playing it for laughs. Rushdie has always gone for the laughs"... more »
The real controversy behind the film The Woman King? The poor state of our knowledge of African history... more »
How a canvas bag with reinforced handles and a flat bottom became a literary trophy and status symbol... more »
The “Outrider” tradition of peripatetic experimental artists extends from Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to the poet Anne Waldman... more »
How does the Philippines — a nation with at least 150 languages — read José Rizal, the national poet and novelist? In English... more »
Women’s magazines like Mirabella, Elle, and Allure were not second-class citizens in the Grand Republic of Letters... more »
Was John Keats a thinker similar to Karl Marx, but working in a radically different mode? Jacobin makes the case... more »
Some clever-seeming, rich young men have renounced reading books. Their moral vision is severely lacking... more »
Across 60 books, 3,000 judicial decisions, and myriad essays and articles, Richard Posner held no dogma sacred, and no norm beyond question... more »
What constitutes an act of mourning? For Jonathan Lear, it is an attempt to turn loss into gain by imaginative alchemy... more »
ChatGPT has prompted hand-wringing that "the college essay is dead." The obit is late: The college essay died years ago... more »
The Transylvanian Marxist Gáspár Miklós Tamás watched as leftists became liberals; he didn’t make that transition himself... more »
Hemingway had four wives, Bellow five, Mailer six. Not all literary marriages are alike; each is unhappy in its own way ... more »
Full of architectural fantasies, the plans for Neom, a new city in Saudi Arabia, reveal a dystopia in the desert... more »
The work of Edward Hopper presents an enigma: Why is a great city like New York both a cause and a cure of loneliness?... more »
Epicurus was no debauched hedonist. The greatest pleasure, he thought, wasn't fame or fortune, but freedom from anxiety... more »
Vsevolod Garshin, Russia’s most underrated writer, was both an incorrigible idealist and a skeptic paralyzed by doubt ... more »
Glenn Loury on God, incarceration, higher ed, political correctness, race, and retirement after 46 years of teaching... more »
The modern man is struggling. Do his below-par outcomes deserve attention and policy solutions?... more »
The archive mole toils in obscure used-book stores, poring over sad-looking, dog-eared paperbacks... more »
Victor Navasky — writer, editor, publisher, wry iconocast — is dead at 90... more »
Chekhov's stories have small titles — “A Trifle,” “A Misfortune,” “A Trivial Incident" — but carry big stakes... more »
“Matisse beguiles and bewilders. He renders tree trunks in incandescent primary colors or turns the view out a window into a black void” ... more »
Janet Malcolm's personal papers reflect the care and concern of someone deeply wary of becoming another writer's subject ... more »
Taking African agency seriously. Exaggerating the influence of colonialism, Olúfemi Táíwò argues, can disrespect Africans... more »
Most kids’ books uplift and delight, or at least instruct. Then there’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day... more »
Jean Valtin’s 1941 autobiography was a sensation. But just how truthful was his account of life in the German underground? ... more »
Demon of distraction. For early monks, inattentiveness was an original sin of the mind. The war to concentrate was a primordial struggle ... more »
Step aside, Sartre. It is not an exaggeration to say that Karl Jaspers is the forgotten father of existentialism ... more »
When Truman Capote went to jail. In 1970, playing fast and loose with the facts finally caught up with him... more »
For transhumanists, the replacement of humanity by a better, more intelligent species would be a worthy upgrade... more »
Thomas Kuhn highlighted the differences among scientific communities — and then emphasized the similarities within those differences... more »
Charles Simic: “The truth is, everything I wrote in books — it was the money. I was tempted by the money” ... more »
Surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, theosophy, Jewish mysticism: Kafka managed to transcend any philosophical movement... more »
Do not fear ChatGPT. It won’t replace human intelligence, but it might provide new starting points for our thinking... more »
Club Freud. At a party for a new literary magazine dedicated to psychoanalysis, analysts and analysands mingle on the dance floor ... more »
Why did European music thrive in the 19th century? Because it wasn’t yet overinstitutionalized or overcredentialed... more »
The workaholics of Jewish Currents magazine ponder a difficult question: What is the Sabbath for?... more »
Struggling with bipolar disorder and the drama of the book world, a romance writer faked her own death. Now she’s back ... more »
Kathy Acker’s writing is allergic to any stable narratives about how women, artists, or outsiders might “find their identity”... more »
“To hell with culture,” argued Herbert Read. In a “natural society” there would be no artists, only workers ... more »
Sandro Botticelli was the great painter of hair. Enter the Church, for which hair was a theological superfluity... more »
Heinrich Päs’s “monism” combines quantum physics, general relativity, hallucinogens, and the Book of Genesis ... more »
Literary criticism has professionalized. Its reward? The pettiness, narcissism, and insecurity of its practitioners... more »
With an obsessive interest in food, Katherine Mansfield constructed her best stories as snacks for modern appetites... more »
Cormac McCarthy’s latest work ditches his liturgical, ecstatic style for a more demanding and heartless mode of inquiry... more »
Public spitting, defecation, urination, masturbation — shamelessness was part of Diogenes the Cynic’s philosophical strategy ... more »
Graduates from even elite Ph.D. programs in the humanities have virtually no chance of a tenure-track job. What’s to be done? ... more »
Mozart and Beethoven were freelance musicians. Two centuries later, they would have disappeared into a university and never heard from again ... more »
Anyone who cares about the origins of ideas must take an interest in mathematics. Yet on this front, the willful ignorance of intellectuals passes for cultivation ... more »
For Duchamp, "Nude Descending” and the uproar it caused were transformative. He dropped painting and chose to be a provocateur... more »
Janet Malcolm, masterly interviewer and cagey interviewee, was uniquely aware of the dangers of a tape recorder... more »
Enter the conductrice. Male conductors claim physical, forceful authority over a symphony. Does having women in the role change that?... more »
The Islamic painting at the heart of the controversy that led to an adjunct professor losing her job: Is it truly Islamophobic?... more »
“I’m not here to demonize the petroleum industry.” So begins a fundamentally misguided work of environmental history ... more »
English prose used to be ornate and elegant. Now it is simple and minimal, denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality... more »
A stampede to Substack? The platform provides the best answers to some of journalism’s perennial problems ... more »
Kafka the diarist reveals a tormented man with a robust appetite for living... more »
How to win a poetry prize: Get a B.A. from Harvard, an M.F.A. from Iowa, and befriend Carl Phillips and Robert Pinsky... more »
What it’s like to win a Nobel Prize. The typical entreaties for photos and autographs arrive, along with much stranger requests as well... more »
A new biography skewers Norman Mailer as unreadable and hilariously terrible, but it ignores his best work... more »
"Our language is entangled with our living," says Joseph M. Keegin. "Learning how to read — in the fullest sense of what literacy entails — means learning how to live"... more »
The first ordinary woman in English literature, the Wife of Bath gossips, drinks, and tells her husband’s secrets... more »
How a canvas bag with reinforced handles and a flat bottom became a literary trophy and status symbol... more »
Women’s magazines like Mirabella, Elle, and Allure were not second-class citizens in the Grand Republic of Letters... more »
Across 60 books, 3,000 judicial decisions, and myriad essays and articles, Richard Posner held no dogma sacred, and no norm beyond question... more »
The Transylvanian Marxist Gáspár Miklós Tamás watched as leftists became liberals; he didn’t make that transition himself... more »
The work of Edward Hopper presents an enigma: Why is a great city like New York both a cause and a cure of loneliness?... more »
Glenn Loury on God, incarceration, higher ed, political correctness, race, and retirement after 46 years of teaching... more »
Victor Navasky — writer, editor, publisher, wry iconocast — is dead at 90... more »
Janet Malcolm's personal papers reflect the care and concern of someone deeply wary of becoming another writer's subject ... more »
Jean Valtin’s 1941 autobiography was a sensation. But just how truthful was his account of life in the German underground? ... more »
When Truman Capote went to jail. In 1970, playing fast and loose with the facts finally caught up with him... more »
Charles Simic: “The truth is, everything I wrote in books — it was the money. I was tempted by the money” ... more »
Club Freud. At a party for a new literary magazine dedicated to psychoanalysis, analysts and analysands mingle on the dance floor ... more »
Struggling with bipolar disorder and the drama of the book world, a romance writer faked her own death. Now she’s back ... more »
Sandro Botticelli was the great painter of hair. Enter the Church, for which hair was a theological superfluity... more »
With an obsessive interest in food, Katherine Mansfield constructed her best stories as snacks for modern appetites... more »
Graduates from even elite Ph.D. programs in the humanities have virtually no chance of a tenure-track job. What’s to be done? ... more »
For Duchamp, "Nude Descending” and the uproar it caused were transformative. He dropped painting and chose to be a provocateur... more »
The Islamic painting at the heart of the controversy that led to an adjunct professor losing her job: Is it truly Islamophobic?... more »
A stampede to Substack? The platform provides the best answers to some of journalism’s perennial problems ... more »
What it’s like to win a Nobel Prize. The typical entreaties for photos and autographs arrive, along with much stranger requests as well... more »
Environmental activists are targeting works of art in protests. Are they justified? Peter Singer makes the case... more »
Is the pace of scientific discovery slowing down? Data suggests that we live in an age of incrementalism... more »
Richard Bernstein considered Arendt, Rorty, and Habermas not just philosophical interlocutors. They were also his friends... more »
Last dance of the “academostars.” The annual meeting of the English Institute reveals a hollowed out, more egalitarian, literary studies ... more »
Are we so saturated in stories that we've become their credulous, undiscerning consumers?... more »
Yes, "fail better," as Beckett said. But perfectionism can doom such a pursuit to, well, failure... more »
We know that the Americas were the last continents that humans entered, but we still don’t know exactly how this happened... more »
In Tudor England, the Christmas feast was large, but those on New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day, and Twelfth Night were more extravagant still... more »
Bob Gottlieb, 91, the last of the publishing giants, has a lament: “Publishing has grown more and more corporate.”... more »
In 16th-century Virginia, English painters confronted a novel visual challenge: the tattoos of Native Americans... more »
Louisa May Alcott's name is synonymous with girls, though she didn't know or like many of them... more »
Love and loss, abandonment and suffering, death and resurrection: Why The Velveteen Rabbit has survived a century... more »
The Santa Fe Institute, renowned as a bastion of brilliant and heterodox views, is the intellectual home of Cormac McCarthy ... more »
As an art student, Edward Hopper moved to New York at a time of dynamic new approaches. He wanted nothing to do with them... more »
Turgenev’s legacy: The best contemporary writing derives from the storytelling voice he pioneered... more »
Science magazine has chosen its “Breakthrough of the Year” — the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope ... more »
“Where Beethoven composed for eternity, Bach was a hired gun, concerned day-to-day with writing a banger for church on Sunday” ... more »
Books furnish a room, but they also crowd a house: dust, dirt, mold, cracked spines, torn dust jackets, warped pages, coffee stains... more »
"There is death and grief, and it's implicit in what dance is itself, here and gone — like a life." Jennifer Homans explains... more »
"There are two ways to write didactic fiction: with a straight face or playing it for laughs. Rushdie has always gone for the laughs"... more »
The “Outrider” tradition of peripatetic experimental artists extends from Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to the poet Anne Waldman... more »
Was John Keats a thinker similar to Karl Marx, but working in a radically different mode? Jacobin makes the case... more »
What constitutes an act of mourning? For Jonathan Lear, it is an attempt to turn loss into gain by imaginative alchemy... more »
Hemingway had four wives, Bellow five, Mailer six. Not all literary marriages are alike; each is unhappy in its own way ... more »
Epicurus was no debauched hedonist. The greatest pleasure, he thought, wasn't fame or fortune, but freedom from anxiety... more »
The modern man is struggling. Do his below-par outcomes deserve attention and policy solutions?... more »
Chekhov's stories have small titles — “A Trifle,” “A Misfortune,” “A Trivial Incident" — but carry big stakes... more »
Taking African agency seriously. Exaggerating the influence of colonialism, Olúfemi Táíwò argues, can disrespect Africans... more »
Demon of distraction. For early monks, inattentiveness was an original sin of the mind. The war to concentrate was a primordial struggle ... more »
For transhumanists, the replacement of humanity by a better, more intelligent species would be a worthy upgrade... more »
Surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, theosophy, Jewish mysticism: Kafka managed to transcend any philosophical movement... more »
Why did European music thrive in the 19th century? Because it wasn’t yet overinstitutionalized or overcredentialed... more »
Kathy Acker’s writing is allergic to any stable narratives about how women, artists, or outsiders might “find their identity”... more »
Heinrich Päs’s “monism” combines quantum physics, general relativity, hallucinogens, and the Book of Genesis ... more »
Cormac McCarthy’s latest work ditches his liturgical, ecstatic style for a more demanding and heartless mode of inquiry... more »
Mozart and Beethoven were freelance musicians. Two centuries later, they would have disappeared into a university and never heard from again ... more »
Janet Malcolm, masterly interviewer and cagey interviewee, was uniquely aware of the dangers of a tape recorder... more »
“I’m not here to demonize the petroleum industry.” So begins a fundamentally misguided work of environmental history ... more »
Kafka the diarist reveals a tormented man with a robust appetite for living... more »
A new biography skewers Norman Mailer as unreadable and hilariously terrible, but it ignores his best work... more »
Goethe, Schiller, and the practical realities and frequent absurdities of philosophizing amid the inescapable messiness of life... more »
Every Janet Malcolm story is, in a sense, the story of the construction of the story. Such is the case in her posthumous memoir... more »
Historians rightfully challenge misconceptions of America. But the nation’s myths can play a positive role, too... more »
The exclamation mark has been around for centuries. But we have not always known how to use it... more »
Lost languages. Linear Elamite was finally decrypted last summer. But being able to read a script is not the same as understanding the language itself... more »
How did Agatha Christie take the detective story to a new level? By injecting it with playfulness and intrigue ... more »
Joseph Roth, a writer in perpetual motion, was most at home in a Viennese cafe. And most at ease when drunk ... more »
The artist's studio, that "noisome cockpit of lust, crime, and virtuosity," has rarely been a place of serene creativity... more »
The search for paradise, where the domestic and the divine appear to meet, has a long history here on earth ... more »
“Acknowledging that we are designed to fail might lead us to live more joyfully and meaningfully, whatever our … ultimate fate”... more »
As a critic of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War and beyond, George Kennan had few if any peers... more »
Roman London. From the years 43 to 60 AD, it went from a backwater to a prosperous city to a burnt ruin... more »
The culture of the dandy and the flâneur also gave us the feuilleton. Joseph Roth was a master of the form... more »
For your ideas to succeed, said Friedrich Hayek, you have to outlive those who hate them. He died at the height of his fame... more »
What makes a book a book? Durability. Prophecies the book's demise have always given rise to new kind of books ... more »
Dickens and the rock star Prince shared a striking fashion sense, verbal lyricism, an addiction to audiences, and a lifelong engagement with Christianity. Does it matter?... more »
What are the best scholarly books of 2022? Anthony Grafton, Martha S. Jones, Matthew Desmond, and others make their picks... more »
Conceived as a vanity project, the library of Alexandria acquired a personality of its own ... more »
The real controversy behind the film The Woman King? The poor state of our knowledge of African history... more »
How does the Philippines — a nation with at least 150 languages — read José Rizal, the national poet and novelist? In English... more »
Some clever-seeming, rich young men have renounced reading books. Their moral vision is severely lacking... more »
ChatGPT has prompted hand-wringing that "the college essay is dead." The obit is late: The college essay died years ago... more »
Full of architectural fantasies, the plans for Neom, a new city in Saudi Arabia, reveal a dystopia in the desert... more »
Vsevolod Garshin, Russia’s most underrated writer, was both an incorrigible idealist and a skeptic paralyzed by doubt ... more »
The archive mole toils in obscure used-book stores, poring over sad-looking, dog-eared paperbacks... more »
“Matisse beguiles and bewilders. He renders tree trunks in incandescent primary colors or turns the view out a window into a black void” ... more »
Most kids’ books uplift and delight, or at least instruct. Then there’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day... more »
Step aside, Sartre. It is not an exaggeration to say that Karl Jaspers is the forgotten father of existentialism ... more »
Thomas Kuhn highlighted the differences among scientific communities — and then emphasized the similarities within those differences... more »
Do not fear ChatGPT. It won’t replace human intelligence, but it might provide new starting points for our thinking... more »
The workaholics of Jewish Currents magazine ponder a difficult question: What is the Sabbath for?... more »
“To hell with culture,” argued Herbert Read. In a “natural society” there would be no artists, only workers ... more »
Literary criticism has professionalized. Its reward? The pettiness, narcissism, and insecurity of its practitioners... more »
Public spitting, defecation, urination, masturbation — shamelessness was part of Diogenes the Cynic’s philosophical strategy ... more »
Anyone who cares about the origins of ideas must take an interest in mathematics. Yet on this front, the willful ignorance of intellectuals passes for cultivation ... more »
Enter the conductrice. Male conductors claim physical, forceful authority over a symphony. Does having women in the role change that?... more »
English prose used to be ornate and elegant. Now it is simple and minimal, denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality... more »
How to win a poetry prize: Get a B.A. from Harvard, an M.F.A. from Iowa, and befriend Carl Phillips and Robert Pinsky... more »
"Our language is entangled with our living," says Joseph M. Keegin. "Learning how to read — in the fullest sense of what literacy entails — means learning how to live"... more »
"We write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us," said Italo Calvino, who spent a large part of his life in the written world... more »
Reading great literature sent a shiver between Nabokov’s shoulder blades. You won’t get that thrill out of reading from a sense of obligation... more »
Universities are now governed by “learning outcomes” and box-ticking bureaucracies. What education is for can’t be so neatly defined... more »
Achilles tore at his hair; Edvard Munch painted blank faces. The aesthetics of pain have varied enormously ... more »
Upon graduation from the École Normale Supérieure, Simone Weil was poised to join the intellectual elite. Then she took a job as a factory worker ... more »
For Christopher Lasch, progressive optimism was merely a form of wishful thinking. But he wasn't without hope... more »
Annie Ernaux's work suggests that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction matters less than how literature interprets memory ... more »
Lionel Trilling's prose could be maddeningly vague, underscoring the difficulty of discerning his politics ... more »
Mathematical models are ubiquitous and widely persuasive. Do we lean on them too heavily?... more »
When Caroline Schlegel fell in love with the much younger Friedrich Schelling, her husband didn’t mind: “Her next lover is still wearing a little sailor suit!”... more »
Is Emily in Paris one of the most insipid pieces of television ever devised — or a self-aware and withering work of media criticism? ... more »
Ode to booze: Singing in groups has long had something to do with good drinking. Or drinking to the good... more »
The indiscriminate embrace of figurative painting is not without undesirable consequences, notably artists who cannot in fact paint... more »
Terry Eagleton rereads the Biblical story of Christmas, savoring the anomalies, oddities, and joys ... more »
Heidegger warned of how technology imposes a particular order on reality. What would he make of AI-produced culture?... more »
"We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities." Russell Jacoby explains... more »
Paul Tough: “Education is always a political act, but its politics can be complex and tangled, and they are often hidden from view” ... more »
What’s up with Cormac McCarthy’s literary emphasis on food? It’s a reminder we’re all linked to “the meat wheel of life”... more »
The overlap between masturbation and fascism has a definite genealogy. Matthew Crawford traces it ... more »
Philip Rieff, doom-mongering prophet, was also attuned to inner life's pleasurable intensities... more »
Justin E.H. Smith, well into midlife, has had his last swallow of alcohol. That particular search for transcendence is over... more »
Readers of literary biographies, beware: Authors can be so much smaller, so much less interesting than their fiction... more »
Isolation, loneliness, and a “friendship recession.” Robert Putnam was right to worry about the decline of social community ... more »
“The morality and lifestyle of the Cynics are one big show of the middle finger to social convention. They are the punks of the ancient world”... more »
A myth of modernism: The books are great because they're difficult, and difficult because they're great ... more »
Elite universities are bastions of wokeness. Or: Elite universities are finishing schools for the upper crust ... more »
Old age is full of physical and emotional burdens. But for some artists, it's a period of creative liberation ... more »
The Lady Chatterley myth. The sexual revolution, which drove D.H. Lawrence’s story to prominence, is under attack... more »
Ikea particleboard, gray sweatpants, ergonomic gaming chairs — “we live in undeniably ugly times,” argues n+1. But why is that?... more »
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