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 »
April 14, 2025 | Slurp, chomp, squish, chew. Why do some people find the sound of eating so unbearable?... more »
April 11, 2025 | In 1932 Leo Strauss asked Hannah Arendt on a date, only to be rejected for his conservative politics... more »
April 10, 2025 | Baby in a box. B. F. Skinner’s “air crib” promised to solve parenting woes with gadgeteering. The public reception was decidedly mixed... more »
April 9, 2025 | Delmore Schwartz contended with great expectations and frustrated ambitions, especially as mental illness closed in. But he kept writing... more »
April 8, 2025 | The defrocked Armenian monk Ambroise Calfa made his fortune by swindling social climbers with faux knighthoods ... more »
April 7, 2025 | Jill Lepore: “Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago”... more »
April 4, 2025 | Hilma af Klint is hailed as an iconic genius of abstract art. But should some of the credit assigned to her be shared?... more »
April 3, 2025 | Why do so many academics and nonacademics alike feel so hostile toward academic writing?... more »
April 2, 2025 | Egon Schiele and the secret baby. His sister's surprise pregnancy posed a question: Was he the uncle or the father?... more »
April 1, 2025 | Comma queen. If style is character, what does Renata Adler’s promiscuous use of commas say about her?... more »
March 31, 2025 | Good writers match language and form with observation and feeling. AI fiction, however, has no feeling... more »
March 28, 2025 | An exhibit of the letters of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne has the New York Public Library preparing for a flood of visitors... more »
March 27, 2025 | "The ordinary son of an extraordinary father.” Richard Blair was three weeks old when he was adopted by George Orwell... more »
March 26, 2025 | “Erotomania,” “a monstrous sexual perversion,” the ultimate symbol of a persecuted gay man. Oscar Wilde’s sexuality was complex... more »
March 25, 2025 | As poetry and criticism professionalized, difficulty was fetishized. But Robert Frost’s difficulties are of a different kind... more »
March 24, 2025 | Leisure as letters. Reading and writing should be fundamentally playful — but deliberate — acts... more »
March 21, 2025 | The rock biopic has a new job in the age of the financialization of music: produce, and reproduce, an audience... more »
March 20, 2025 | Could the oldest writing system in the world be deciphered? Cuneiform persistently stumped scholars — until the 1850s... more »