July 22, 2017 | Leonardo and Michelangelo were driven and difficult, which is central to their modern appeal. The less mercurial Raphael is more admired than loved... more »
July 21, 2017 | A new history of the right is red meat for the left. Critics have tried to dismantle the book, footnote by footnote. Has anyone actually read it?... more »
July 20, 2017 | Gene editing threatens to homogenize society, says Atul Gawande. Aberrant yet valuable characteristics are under threat. Think of George Church's narcolepsy... more »
July 19, 2017 | Rather than “Which side are you on?,” Samuel Huntington wrote, the question in the post-Cold War world would be “Who are you?” What a prescient insight... more »
July 18, 2017 | Darwin and women. Publicly dismissive of the female intellect, in private he was completely dependent on it... more »
July 17, 2017 | Among most economists, globalization has been seen as both inevitable and salutary. Now the cracks in that consensus have split wide open... more »
July 15, 2017 | Questions of policy and of social science run on different tracks. Mixing them gets complicated. Consider Brown v. Board of Education... more »
July 14, 2017 | Information existed before Claude Shannon, but there was little sense of it as an idea, an object of hard science. His insight made our world possible... more »
July 13, 2017 | 20th-century American conservatism was a combination of inherited reflexes and political opportunism that never made any sense. Now it's come undone... more »
July 12, 2017 | Digital text alone is impoverished and, on occasion, emotionally arid. It lacks the nonverbal cues — body language — of spoken communication. That's why we need emoji... more »
July 11, 2017 | Philip Larkin's things include a Hitler figurine, empty spines of the diaries that he wished shredded after his death, and ample evidence of his own self-loathing... more »
July 10, 2017 | At 23, Charlotte Brontë became a governess. The experience would inform her later fiction: What better way to learn subordination, exploitation, and humiliation?... more »
July 8, 2017 | The history of the closet. It made itself useful in 15th-century Italy, where studioli housed secret poems and experimental philosophy... more »
July 7, 2017 | Félix Nadar's guestbook reveals what preoccupied the cultural elite of the Second Empire: morality, boredom, politics, inside jokes, and above all else, artistic ego... more »
July 6, 2017 | Isaiah Berlin called Toscanini “the most morally dignified and inspiring hero of our time.” Now he’s seen as the false messiah of middlebrow music appreciation. What gives?... more »
July 5, 2017 | The glory of the Hollywood memoir. Idiosyncratic, biased, boastful, unctuous, and vain, it nevertheless gives us a revealing glimpse into the past... more »
July 4, 2017 | Hemingway vs. Eastman. The literary “battle of the ages” involved evaluations of chest hair, a blow to the face (with a book, of course), slaps, and wrestling moves... more »
July 3, 2017 | E.M. Forster called him a “mixture of insolence and nervousness.” Hemingway said he had “the eyes of an unsuccessful rapist.” What made Wyndham Lewis so unlikable?... more »
July 1, 2017 | How was scientific publishing transformed from profit-shunning to for-profit oligopoly? It was all thanks to a man named Robert Maxwell... more »
June 30, 2017 | Feed the cats, water the plants, mail the lesbian literary magazine to subscribers named Starflower, Athena, Kali: What it was like to be Adrienne Rich’s assistant... more »
June 29, 2017 | The Brontë brother, Branwell, was known for vices — opiates, alcohol, married women, setting his bed on fire — but he had literary virtues as well... more »
June 28, 2017 | Golden age of the short story: the 1890s? 1980s? 2010s? We’ve been celebrating the “revival” of the form since Chekhov. Some perspective, please ... more »
June 27, 2017 | Is a tome three feet wide by two feet high a book? What about one with an embedded digital clock? Or a suitcase filled with lithographs?... more »
June 26, 2017 | Bernard-Henri Lévy can barely read Hebrew and hasn't devoted much time or energy to studying Judaism. That hasn't stopped him from writing a book of pronouncements on the topic... more »
June 24, 2017 | A passion for the mundane. A scuffed old bread knife, a glass vase, a coffee table — ordinary objects delighted, inspired, and confounded Matisse... more »