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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »