June 2, 2023 | During the Great Plague of 1665, the Common Council of the City of London decreed: “All dogs and cats should be immediately killed”... more »
June 1, 2023 | With funding from Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel, the life-extension business is booming. Enter the biochemist Charles Brenner, the longevity skeptic... more »
May 31, 2023 | Beyond eating, drinking, speaking, and smiling: 42 ways of communicating by bringing your hands to your mouth... more »
May 30, 2023 | Guinness World Records have always been a repository of impressively absurd feats. Does it have a place in a world where weird is commonplace?... more »
May 29, 2023 | How sad to try to sell your soul to a dictator and find that the dictator isn't buying. Consider the case of the composer Hans Pfitzner... more »
May 26, 2023 | Rules can be thick or thin, says Lorraine Daston. “Behind every thin rule is a thick rule, cleaning up after it”... more »
May 25, 2023 | There is no such thing as color, only the people who perceive it. Sky isn’t blue, the sun isn’t yellow, snow isn’t white... more »
May 24, 2023 | For rationalists, nothing should interfere with apprehending the world as it is. So why are they turning to religion, ritual, and all things woo?... more »
May 23, 2023 | Martin Amis — novelist, memoirist, journalist, critic, caustic wit, dazzling stylist — is dead. He was 73... Dwight Garner... James Wood... Salman Rushdie... Ian McEwan... Lisa Allardice... Boyd Tonkin... James Parker... A.O. Scott... Christian Lorentzen... Terry Eagleton... Jennifer Egan... Tom Meaney... more »
May 22, 2023 | As a young man, Adam Kirsch didn't turn to George Michael and Madonna to learn about sex and sin. He turned to opera... more »
May 19, 2023 | In 1928, two German mathematicians proposed the “decision problem”. Then a 23-year old graduate student in England started working on it... more »
May 18, 2023 | “Dear Thought Criminals." Where do canceled, almost-canceled, and aspiring-to-be-canceled academics and artists hang out? Pamela Paresky's parties... more »
May 17, 2023 | "If you go to the right, you lose your life, and if you go to the left, you lose your conscience.” The Gulag Archipelago at 50... more »
May 16, 2023 | The daguerreotype craze began in 1839. A few silvery inches of a stranger's face gave new meaning to the idea of love at first sight... more »
May 15, 2023 | For 30 years, Douglas Rushkoff was a believer in the digital revolution. No more. The Gen X techno-optimist is now a middle-aged Marxist... more »
May 12, 2023 | At 72, with cancer and a shattered family, the poet Jorie Graham might just have written the best book of her career... more »
May 11, 2023 | "In mid-twentieth-century America, nuns were publishing widely in the finest literary publications. Something, it seems, was happening"... more »
May 10, 2023 | In search of lost time. In 1983 a thief stole 106 rare clocks from a Jerusalem museum. Investigators were stumped — until a deathbed confession showed up... more »
May 9, 2023 | Death has been humanity’s central defining experience — our deepest existential theme. Birth, by contrast, is our least-explored subject... more »
May 8, 2023 | Magical realism was invented not by Márquez or Llosa, but by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. Why isn’t he better known?... more »
May 5, 2023 | If you were devising an ecosystem for advancing scientific knowledge, would you emphasize merit?... more »
May 4, 2023 | Dean Koontz, writer of terrifying tales of murder and mayhem, is scared of flying, fires, and gory movies. He’s the kind of guy who irons his underwear... more »
May 3, 2023 | Sally Haslanger, Amia Srinivasan, and Anthony Appiah have resigned from the masthead of The Journal of Political Philosophy. What happened?... more »
May 2, 2023 | For Murakami, art is not always about art, though it is about discipline. His daily goal: write 1,600 words... more »
May 1, 2023 | It started as a social club for fiddlers in Tennessee. How did it become what we know as the Ku Klux Klan?... more »