Jan. 16, 2025 | Regency-era sex ed was comprised of such works as Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal, Every Woman’s Book, and the best-seller Aristotle’s Masterpiece... more »
Jan. 15, 2025 | Michael Ignatieff: “I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls”... more »
Jan. 14, 2025 | Victor Pelevin’s “descent from dazzling young writer to misogynist crank mirrors the decline of mainstream Russian culture”... more »
Jan. 13, 2025 | In 1723 a poetic work about bees — yes, bees — so scandalized English society that it was put on trial for fear it would “debauch the nation”... more »
Jan. 10, 2025 | Why did Alice Munro’s biographer keep quiet about the abuse endured by the short-story writer's daughter?... more »
Jan. 9, 2025 | The humanities refashioned themselves as society’s conscience. A new, conservative movement in literary studies recoils from that role... more »
Jan. 8, 2025 | In South America, capybaras run riot. In Italy, gray wolves interbreed with dogs. So in rushes the wildlife birth control industry... more »
Jan. 7, 2025 | Is there a radical feminist undercurrent to embroidery and crochet? Or is such crafting merely “she-power frippery”?... more »
Jan. 6, 2025 | American men have stopped reading fiction — or so suggests an array of think pieces. But is it true?... more »
Jan. 3, 2025 | Consider a new volume of Freud’s works, an ethnography of homeless Angelenos, and 10 of the other best scholarly books of 2024... more »
Jan. 2, 2025 | Obsession with historical authenticity prevails at sites like Colonial Williamsburg — but such re-creations take us only so far... more »
Jan. 1, 2025 | Apoptosis, necroptosis, entosis, NETosis: Cells die in at least 20 different ways, some silent and some showy ... more »
Dec. 31, 2024 | Intellectuals seeking God? “A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything ... are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more”... more »
Dec. 30, 2024 | English is the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Is the world being linguistically brainwashed? Not likely... more »
Dec. 27, 2024 | How does your “self-continuity” stack up? The concept measures the extent to which your past, present, and future selves align... more »
Dec. 26, 2024 | What explains the public’s pathetic knowledge of history? Start with bogus cliches and salacious, error-filled bestsellers... more »
Dec. 25, 2024 | Stanley Kubrick and the price of perfectionism. He preoccupied himself with every detail, big and small. It came at a cost... more »
Dec. 24, 2024 | Who killed literary fiction? It's the big publishing houses, which used to compete for talent but have become sedate, predictable... more »
Dec. 23, 2024 | Sailor, singer, atheist, philosopher, aficionado of ribald limericks: Daniel Dennett contained multitudes. But why was his work important?... more »
Dec. 20, 2024 | Does progress in the arts and sciences purify our moral or corrupt them? That question reduced Rousseau to tears... more »
Dec. 19, 2024 | "You can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity," says Judith Butler. "If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties" ... more »
Dec. 18, 2024 | The Zabihollah Mansouri riddle. Was one of the most popular literary figures of 20th-century Iran an utter charlatan?... more »
Dec. 17, 2024 | “Picture a desert with old servers rusting into the sand beneath the sun like the state of Ozymandias.” Ryan Ruby on language, poetry, and civilizational collapse... more »
Dec. 16, 2024 | Harold Bloom claimed to be able to read 1,000 pages an hour. At that pace, it would still take 280 years to get through GPT-4’s training data... more »
Dec. 13, 2024 | Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »