March 19, 2025 | “The nonagenarian writer should speak only of gratitude — and then shut up.” But not yet, if you’re Cynthia Ozick... more »
March 18, 2025 | “Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.” So held Alan Turing in 1950... more »
March 17, 2025 | Daniel Kahneman was determined to create a happy ending to his 90 years of life, to avoid the indignities and miseries of age. He chose suicide... more »
March 14, 2025 | “Nature and nurture aren’t separate forces — they’re a Möbius strip, endlessly looping back on each other”... more »
March 13, 2025 | How to spot a fake masterpiece. In the exposure of artistic forgeries, it's the little things that give them away... more »
March 12, 2025 | Toni Morrison’s audacious Dreaming Emmett. She planned to take the play to Paris, but it lasted only four weeks in Albany... more »
March 11, 2025 | The horrors of early pet food. In Victorian London, “cat’s meat men” pushed their carts of cheap offal and horsemeat up to 40 miles a day... more »
March 10, 2025 | Disease that spreads through the air? In the words of one journalist in France in the 1860s, that was “just too fantastic to imagine”... more »
March 7, 2025 | “I once believed my students and I were in this together, engaged in a shared intellectual pursuit.” Then came ChatGPT... more »
March 6, 2025 | “I have to prepare myself for a certain degree of loneliness.” In her 80s, Helen Garner focuses on her garden, her chickens, and her diary... more »
March 5, 2025 | As a utilitarian, Tyler Cowen believes that people do things for reasons. What’s his reason for wanting to know everything?... more »
March 4, 2025 | What Tom Wolfe wrought. Many journalists mimc his style. Few do the reporting that makes that style sing... more »
March 3, 2025 | Saudi Arabia’s pre-Islamic history, which it once condemned as idolatrous, is central to a new program encouraging tourism... more »
Feb. 28, 2025 | Most virtues come with no fine print, but the goodness of loyalty depends on its object. Vladimir Jankélévitch elaborated... more »
Feb. 27, 2025 | Robert Caro has one sentence pinned to an index card above his Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriter: “The only thing that matters is on this page” ... more »
Feb. 26, 2025 | Over time more species are seen as “intelligent” — dolphins, bees, and now, to some, even plants. Why?... more »
Feb. 25, 2025 | Decades before the internet, Harold Innis put his finger on a central paradox: Improvements in communication can make understanding more difficult... more »
Feb. 24, 2025 | Among the hobbyists. They are often viewed as eccentric weirdos. They’re actually in the business of selling dreams... more »
Feb. 21, 2025 | Modern refrigeration is a miracle but has its downsides: flavorless tomatoes; spinach devoid of vitamin C; slimy old lettuce... more »
Feb. 20, 2025 | Simone de Beauvoir didn't meander or saunter. She hiked zealously, at a grueling pace. She walked not to think... more »
Feb. 19, 2025 | Literature in translation is a tough sell in the United States. Tilted Axis, a small press founded in London, is trying to change that... more »
Feb. 18, 2025 | For Jhumpa Lahiri, Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been a rock, "something to hold on to when the waves are swelling." Now her task is to alter it... more »
Feb. 17, 2025 | World War I ended Henri Bergson’s influence: As Georges Politzer put it, “Mr. Bergson is as yet still dying, but Bergsonism is in fact dead”... more »
Feb. 14, 2025 | How Janet Malcolm created "Janet Malcolm." But she wrestled with her reputation as decisive, pitiless, a "journalistic serial killer"... more »
Feb. 13, 2025 | What does mescaline do to the brain? The works of Henri Michaux, the French Jackson Pollock, supply an answer... more »