Nota Bene



The ALD Archives


Newspapers

Breaking

Magazines

Book Reviews

Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »
June 2, 2023

Articles of Note

During the Great Plague of 1665, the Common Council of the City of London decreed: “All dogs and cats should be immediately killed”... more »


New Books

The wisdom of Epictetus includes deep Stoic insights, as well as his thoughts on the unmanliness of tweezing body hair... more »


Essays & Opinions

Microfiction, nanofiction, hint fiction, flash fiction, dribble, drabble, trabble: What's with writers' fascination with brevity?... more »


June 1, 2023

Articles of Note

With funding from Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, the life-extension business is booming. Enter the biochemist Charles Brenner, the longevity skeptic... more »


New Books

Being Hayek. His life played out along three great arcs: intellectual, geographical, and emotional. In all three, his views evolved along with his fortunes... more »


Essays & Opinions

The era of bourgeois revolutions coincided with a general turn towards neoclassicism in architecture, visual arts, literature, music and theatre”... more »


May 31, 2023

Articles of Note

Beyond eating, drinking, speaking, and smiling: 42 ways of communicating by bringing your hands to your mouth... more »


New Books

Anthropologist of filth. Chuck Berry's sexual predilections were seen as un-chic, un-romantic, and too “real” for public taste... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Although they were the butt of endless Renaissance jokes, old women were also depicted as powerful, fearsome entities”... more »


May 30, 2023

Articles of Note

Guinness World Records have always been a repository of impressively absurd feats. Does it have a place in a world where weird is commonplace?... more »


New Books

It is commonly believed that every written word by a major writer must be gathered and published. But what to make of Kafka’s diaries?... more »


Essays & Opinions

From admissions to assessment, academic integrity to scholarly research, how will artificial intelligence change higher education?... more »


May 29, 2023

Articles of Note

How sad to try to sell your soul to a dictator and find that the dictator isn't buying. Consider the case of the composer Hans Pfitzner... more »


New Books

At her best, Susan Sontag refused to simplify her thinking for easy answers. At her worst, she was dodgy and noncommittal. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »


Essays & Opinions

"This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble”... more »


May 26, 2023

Articles of Note

Rules can be thick or thin, says Lorraine Daston. “Behind every thin rule is a thick rule, cleaning up after it”... more »


New Books

Derek Parfit spent most of his life cloistered within a cloistered institution. He sacrificed nearly everything to his intellectual calling... more »


Essays & Opinions

Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the idea of secrets — what they are, why we keep them, and what they reveal about us ... more »


May 25, 2023

Articles of Note

There is no such thing as color, only the people who perceive it. Sky isn’t blue, the sun isn’t yellow, snow isn’t white... more »


New Books

Birth of romanticism. When polymaths, poets, philosophers, and playwrights lived, argued, and loved in the German town of Jena ... more »


Essays & Opinions

More than ever, we need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism. We need Max Weber... more »


May 24, 2023

Articles of Note

For rationalists, nothing should interfere with apprehending the world as it is. So why are they turning to religion, ritual, and all things woo?... more »


New Books

For more than 20 years, J.C. presided over the back page of the TLS with wit, weirdness, and waspish provocation... more »


Essays & Opinions

Sontag on women. Their oppression, she came to believe, presents a problem that is aesthetic and narrative problem as well as political and economic.... more »


May 23, 2023

Articles of Note

Martin Amis — novelist, memoirist, journalist, critic, caustic wit, dazzling stylist — is dead. He was 73... Dwight Garner... James Wood... Salman Rushdie... Ian McEwan... Lisa Allardice... Boyd Tonkin... James Parker... A.O. Scott... Christian Lorentzen... Terry Eagleton... Jennifer Egan... Tom Meaney... more »


New Books

Failure comes in many forms: physical, social, biological. Facing it humbles us, and so we lead better lives. So argues Costica Bradatan... more »


Essays & Opinions

For Emmanuel Carrère, writing about other people is tantamount to torturing them. But representing a life other than your own is what makes human connection possible... more »


May 22, 2023

Articles of Note

As a young man, Adam Kirsch didn't turn to George Michael and Madonna to learn about sex and sin. He turned to opera... more »


New Books

“The problem of the world is this,” Orwell told a friend late in life. “Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”... more »


Essays & Opinions

Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley... more »


May 19, 2023

Articles of Note

In 1928, two German mathematicians proposed the “decision problem”. Then a 23-year old graduate student in England started working on it... more »


New Books

Elias Canetti was a scholar, but not an academic. He wasn’t a novelist or poet, though he wrote that way. He was many writers at once... more »


Essays & Opinions

You’ve had to deal with the sulkiness of others. Indeed, you might be a sulker yourself. But what is sulking, exactly?... more »


May 18, 2023

Articles of Note

Dear Thought Criminals." Where do canceled, almost-canceled, and aspiring-to-be-canceled academics and artists hang out? Pamela Paresky's parties... more »


New Books

Bruno Schulz's stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. And his death  appalling and senseless  defies meaning... more »


Essays & Opinions

Parents of young children are rarely alone, and yet they report feeling lonely. How to explain? Donald Winnicott has some theories... more »


May 17, 2023

Articles of Note

"If you go to the right, you lose your life, and if you go to the left, you lose your conscience.” The Gulag Archipelago at 50... more »


New Books

No nepo babies and no assholes — in the corny, cheerful world of Tom Hanks, moviemaking is earnest, joyous, well-compensated work... more »


Essays & Opinions

The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring... more »


May 16, 2023

Articles of Note

The daguerreotype craze began in 1839. A few silvery inches of a stranger's face gave new meaning to the idea of love at first sight... more »


New Books

The American idea of continental philosophers as speculative, irrational mystics dates to the 1953 International Congress of Philosophy, in Brussels... more »


Essays & Opinions

An extreme figure even in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris, Jean Lorrain was a dandy, Satanist, drinker of ether, and highly paid writer... more »


May 15, 2023

Articles of Note

For 30 years, Douglas Rushkoff was a believer in the digital revolution. No more. The Gen X techno-optimist is now a middle-aged Marxist... more »


New Books

Shakespeare's body of work is complex and confounding; so is the task of tracking down his biography. Who was he? Who cares?... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Whereas algorithms present personalized recommendations by rank, the blurb is a one-rank system of aesthetic value: utterly awesome”  ... more »


May 12, 2023

Articles of Note

At 72, with cancer and a shattered family, the poet Jorie Graham might just have written the best book of her career... more »


New Books

Is multiculturalism an oxymoron? In an age of atomization a new book makes a case for cross-cultural transmission... more »


Essays & Opinions

Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »


May 11, 2023

Articles of Note

"In mid-twentieth-century America, nuns were publishing widely in the finest literary publications. Something, it seems, was happening"... more »


New Books

Lauren Berlant’s writing flirts with meaning. Rhythmic and atmospheric, it’s somewhere between incoherence and poetry... more »


Essays & Opinions

Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »


May 10, 2023

Articles of Note

In search of lost time. In 1983 a thief stole 106 rare clocks from a Jerusalem museum. Investigators were stumped — until a deathbed confession showed up... more »


New Books

“They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »


May 9, 2023

Articles of Note

Death has been humanity’s central defining experience — our deepest existential theme. Birth, by contrast, is our least-explored subject... more »


New Books

Speaking, writing, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, radio, television, PR, A.I.: How we know what we know, and how that's changed... more »


Essays & Opinions

Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »


May 8, 2023

Articles of Note

Magical realism was invented not by Márquez or Llosa, but by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. Why isn’t he better known?... more »


New Books

Too flinty and realistic to be an aesthete, Shirley Hazzard nevertheless pursued a life steeped in aesthetic pleasure... more »


Essays & Opinions

Unusual writing can be eloquent writing. It can also be just plain unusual. Consider the essayist Brian Dillon... more »


May 5, 2023

Articles of Note

If you were devising an ecosystem for advancing scientific knowledge, would you emphasize merit?... more »


New Books

Rorty vs. MacIntyre: One was an ecumenical leftist, the other a powerful critic of liberalism. What matters about their lifelong argument?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Style tip from Christopher Lasch: Jettison ostentatious erudition, abbreviations, and acronyms. Initials are for desiccated bureaucrats... more »


May 4, 2023

Articles of Note

Dean Koontz, writer of terrifying tales of murder and mayhem, is scared of flying, fires, and gory movies. He’s the kind of guy who irons his underwear... more »


New Books

Ask a philosopher of a certain age to reflect on the state of the discipline, and the response is generally dour. Philip Kitcher is no exception... more »


Essays & Opinions

The history of the swing. From Greece to Borneo, swinging has been a form of magic, a means of warding off evil, a form of celebration... more »


May 3, 2023

Articles of Note

Sally Haslanger, Amia Srinivasan, and Anthony Appiah have resigned from the masthead of The Journal of Political Philosophy. What happened?... more »


New Books

Not long before descending into insanity, Nietzsche was moved to tears in Turin at a concert of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bizet... more »


Essays & Opinions

Semafor, Air Mail, Punchbowl News, Puck, Substack: Making sense of the cacophonous, paywall-inhibited online reading environment... more »


May 2, 2023

Articles of Note

For Murakami, art is not always about art, though it is about discipline. His daily goal: write 1,600 words... more »


New Books

Some of Osip Mandelstam’s poems are frivolous, others gnomic. Most are memorable, and hypnotically musical... more »


Essays & Opinions

Roger Scruton wasn’t judicious about his associates. Now he’s being used by more-brutish conservatives as a shield of sophistication... more »


May 1, 2023

Articles of Note

It started as a social club for fiddlers in Tennessee. How did it become what we know as the Ku Klux Klan?... more »


New Books

For decades, some bright minds have been consumed by a mundane problem: How to go viral on the internet... more »


Essays & Opinions

Libertarian critics of democracy make several valid points. But there's no evidence their alternatives are better, and much to suggest they'd be worse ... more »


April 28, 2023

Articles of Note

Gallery walls plastered with graphs, endless artist statements, pamphlets everywhere — behold the rise of research-based art... more »


New Books

Bach, Handel, Mozart, Schubert: All of them fell out of favor between their time and ours. But not Beethoven. Why?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Neutrality might be a fiction, but it is an essential one, says Anthony Appiah. "Performing fairness can make us fairer"... more »


April 27, 2023

Articles of Note

In the German capital, expats have built a new language centered on nightlife slang, expletives, and loan words: Berlinglish ... more »


New Books

The new anti-anti-colonialism. The brutalities of British imperialism spur contemporary denial, guilt, trauma, and silence... more »


Essays & Opinions

Literary criticism is flourishing, says Ryan Ruby, despite – and sometimes because of – dire economic circumstances... more »


April 26, 2023

Articles of Note

Freud’s Talmudic style. Both psychoanalysis and rabbinic tradition make themselves immune to disproof by rational argument... more »


New Books

Tyler Cowen: "Longtermism is a radical and oft-neglected philosophy, and few people are interested in living by its implications"... more »


Essays & Opinions

Nations and peoples fall into nostalgic moods just as individuals do. Its allure is as strong as its destructive potential. Mark Lilla explains... more »


April 25, 2023

Articles of Note

John le Carré was disillusioned "in that special way which only affects those who have had very strong illusions in the first place"... more »


New Books

Is ballet a relic of outdated patriarchy, a cult-like system that conditions women to be obedient? Or is it “a laboratory of femaleness”? Both... more »


Essays & Opinions

“I’ve taken enormous walks and lived on rice and codfish tongues and I feel like a new man.” John Dos Passos was at home on Cape Cod... more »


April 24, 2023

Articles of Note

The evolutionary long game. Ants, saltwater clams, and mammals waited at least tens of millions of years before exploding in number. Why?... more »


New Books

The Derek Parfit scandal. In 1981, Oxford’s All Souls College refused him a promotion unless he wrote a book. Twenty months later, Reasons and Persons was complete... more »


Essays & Opinions

We like clear-cut rules, but life is full of extenuating circumstances. Enter discretion, an uncomfortable yet necessary virtue... more »