The NEA and the end of the literary arts grant: “We know it’s not a lot for some organizations, but it’s huge for us”
... more »May 16, 2025 | Washington D.C.’s Wilson Center for International Scholars has been dismantled. What will happen to its 30,000 books?... more »
May 15, 2025 | The Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, On the Road: What were your early literary gateway books?... more »
May 14, 2025 | Close reading emerged in the 1920s as a pejorative. Now it’s a rallying cry. If only we could define it ... more »
May 13, 2025 | We have long known that psychoanalysts love poetry, says Hannah Zeavin. The jury is out on whether they can be said to love poets... more »
May 12, 2025 | Used in hats, boas, and funerary art, dyed ostrich feathers were a 19th-century phenomenon... more »
May 9, 2025 | Stendhal syndrome: Every year, dozens of tourists are rushed to Florence’s hospitals, physically overcome by paintings, sculptures, and frescoes... more »
May 8, 2025 | Radiance? Tremulous? Nefarious? Linguists choose the most beautiful word in the English language... more »
May 7, 2025 | Renata Adler: “When I went to The New York Times to become the movie reviewer,” Hannah Arendt said, “When are you going to get serious?”... more »
May 6, 2025 | In his late years, JMW Turner, though rich, lived in “moral degradation” in squalid lodgings in a squalid part of London. Why?... more »
May 5, 2025 | "People hate writers, and writers hate themselves. There’s a sense that writers should be ashamed of themselves"... more »
May 2, 2025 | What machines write will be different from what we write. Those differences should be cause for intrigue, not anxiety... more »
May 1, 2025 | Why does Switzerland have more bunkers per capita than anywhere else in the world?... more »
April 30, 2025 | The cat that wouldn’t die. Schrödinger’s cat has joined Pavlov’s dog in science’s bestiary of the bizarre... more »
April 29, 2025 | In Chaucer’s time, average sentence length was 49 words. Now sentences are much shorter. Why?... more »
April 28, 2025 | Scholars generally believe Shakespeare had a disastrous marriage. New research challenges that consensus... more »
April 25, 2025 | Peter Singer is often sought out for advice on ethical dilemmas. But one man can do only so much. So he created a chatbot... more »
April 24, 2025 | Ross Douthat: “The role I play at the Times could not be played if I was constantly burning bridges”... more »
April 23, 2025 | The artist, writer, and gallerist John Kelsey is, at heart, a Romantic — but an injured and grudging one... more »
April 22, 2025 | Are there life-forms hiding inside Earth’s crust? And if there are, how do they survive?... more »
April 21, 2025 | The materialism of Richard Dawkins, Robert Sapolsky, and Lawrence Krauss is among the silliest ideas of our time... more »
April 18, 2025 | The novelist and the censor. A best-selling Chinese writer is contacted by the man who erases his social-media posts. Why?... more »
April 17, 2025 | Junot Díaz was cleared of the worst of the #MeToo charges against him. Yet his work still disappeared from the Norton Anthology... more »
April 16, 2025 | The harrowing story of The Buru Quartet. Indonesia’s pre-eminent novelist wrote his masterpiece while on a prison island... more »
April 15, 2025 | Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist known for gritty realism, is dead. He was 89... Dwight Garner... Alberto Manguel... Tunku Varadarajan... WSJ... El País... Ilan Stavans... more »