Dec. 3, 2022 | After years in archives of pornography, Kathleen Lubey has emerged with a philosophy of smut and its contradictions ... more »
Dec. 2, 2022 | The culture war comes for libraries. Say goodbye to the reference desk, and hello to circulation-desk sermonizing ... more »
Dec. 1, 2022 | In the darkest days of World War II, Leo Strauss grew concerned about a new threat: liberal education... more »
Nov. 30, 2022 | When did "cleverness" become a dirty word? When we all started drowning in contrived knowingness and irony ... more »
Nov. 29, 2022 | In the footsteps of Woolf and Forster came “Young Bloomsbury” — an ambitious literary set that produced only minor works ... more »
Nov. 28, 2022 | Staughton Lynd, a Quaker/Marxist historian blackballed from the university system, has died. He was 92... more »
Nov. 26, 2022 | Legal originalists pretend that their method of interpretation is value-free. It isn't... more »
Nov. 25, 2022 | Octavia Butler woke up everyday at 2 am to write before working menial day jobs. Poverty was a constant, “unfortunately valid” excuse for inaction ... more »
Nov. 24, 2022 | Mike Davis, “an increasingly lonely pillar of a larger and more open Marxism,” died last month. He was 76 ... more »
Nov. 23, 2022 | Is there a genetic component to intelligence? The NIH is preventing scholars from even asking the question ... more »
Nov. 22, 2022 | No merger after all between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. For now, the Big Five of publishing will remain the Big Five... more »
Nov. 21, 2022 | Whether or not you believe that nothing is true, taking it seriously solves long-standing philosophical problems ... more »
Nov. 19, 2022 | Pig-Pen, who first appeared in Peanuts in 1954, represents nothing less than the enigma of human personality. Elif Batuman explains ... more »
Nov. 18, 2022 | William Godwin believed himself immune to the tumults and desires experienced by others. Then he met Mary Wollstonecraft... more »
Nov. 17, 2022 | Effective altruism's most distinctive characteristic? "The balletic deftness with which it tiptoes past targets likely to offend billionaires"... more »
Nov. 16, 2022 | Colette has never been more popular with Americans. Is it the sensuality of her writing? The scandalousness of her own story? ... more »
Nov. 15, 2022 | J. Edgar Hoover is not the villainous caricature you think you know, but a man of profound contradictions with an empathetic side... more »
Nov. 14, 2022 | Sound of Sendak. “The work can’t happen without music,” he said. “Everything I’ve done is a collaboration with a composer” ... more »
Nov. 12, 2022 | At the University of Michigan, an Intro to Comics course takes an ugly turn: Students conspire to have their professor fired ... more »
Nov. 11, 2022 | American academics are tightening their grip on Frantz Fanon. That robs the rest of us of the rich ambiguities of his writings... more »
Nov. 10, 2022 | Life off the tenure track is tough for humanists, as universities “churn folks up and then excrete them into a void” ... more »
Nov. 9, 2022 | A year after resigning her professorship amid threats, Kathleen Stock recalls the silence of her former colleagues... more »
Nov. 8, 2022 | The complicated history of Christendom. Was the Roman Empire’s adoption of the faith a blessing or a curse? ... more »
Nov. 7, 2022 | There is nothing sexy about hope; it is a bit mawkish and foolish. Yet it is a quiet kind of bravery ... more »
Nov. 5, 2022 | The rise of Sufism in 10th-century Baghdad is a tale of poets, miracles, and revelations. At its center was Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj ... more »