Sept. 25, 2023 | The academic book review is on life support. If it dies, a vital plank of our intellectual ecosystem will vanish... more »
Sept. 22, 2023 | An essay about grief went viral in The Believer and was then adapted for This American Life. Does it matter that it was written by AI?... more »
Sept. 21, 2023 | Justice for Neanderthals! A quixotic campaign seeks to restore dignity to humanity’s long-dead cousins. But why?... more »
Sept. 20, 2023 | For Betty Friedan, a titan of second-wave feminism, her reputation should be secure. But in the academy it is approaching pariah status... more »
Sept. 19, 2023 | Shelby Foote was a failed novelist until he wrote about the Civil War. He was the Jewish Proust of the American South... more »
Sept. 18, 2023 | The South African novelist Thando Mgqolozana made being a feminist ally central to his work. Then allegations of abuse surfaced... more »
Sept. 15, 2023 | The musicians of Terezin. How the inmates of a Nazi concentration camp managed to create art ... more »
Sept. 14, 2023 | "Historians! Put down your tools! Your labors are at an end. The scientists have finally solved history." Or something like that... more »
Sept. 13, 2023 | The bulk of our cultural lives plays out online. Our artifacts are preserved in the cloud. Until they aren’t... more »
Sept. 12, 2023 | Ross Douthat, liberal America’s favorite conservative, makes reactionary views seem slightly ironic, and, thus, palatable... more »
Sept. 11, 2023 | F. Scott Fitzgerald and the toll of early ambition. "Failure was the shadow that stalked him because anything less than perfection was unthinkable”... more »
Sept. 8, 2023 | In South Dakota, Joseph Horowitz saw the future of classical music in America. His name is Delta David Gier... more »
Sept. 7, 2023 | The font industry has always been cutthroat and volatile. Now looms a new menace: a private-equity-owned aspiring monopoly... more »
Sept. 6, 2023 | Elif Batuman goes looking for a half-remembered Proust quote, via ChatGPT. The algorithm recommends she read all of In Search of Lost Time... more »
Sept. 5, 2023 | We imagine medieval inquisition to be all torture and confessions of Satanic activity. But a good deal of it was bland bureaucracy... more »
Sept. 4, 2023 | Milan Kundera has long been a cult sensation in the West. Will an array of critical charges — including misogyny — dull the passion?... more »
Sept. 1, 2023 | Why is it that a clock has 12 hours, an hour has 60 minutes, and a minute has 60 seconds?... more »
Aug. 31, 2023 | EP Thompson’s brother was executed for his dealings with Bulgarian anti-fascists. There was more to the story than a hero’s death... more »
Aug. 30, 2023 | Ever notice that your tongue tends to stick out when you’re focusing intently? Here’s why... more »
Aug. 29, 2023 | What’s behind the blurb arms race? And can anything arrest publishings deepening dependence on inane, over-the-top praise?... more »
Aug. 28, 2023 | Radical mycology. Mushrooms have real ecological promise. But they also offer themselves as a medium of mythic truth... more »
Aug. 25, 2023 | We think of atoms as mostly empty space. But protons' and neutrons’ interior is likely the most complex place in the universe... more »
Aug. 24, 2023 | A museum at Emory University wanted only the finest antiquities. Many of them, it turns out, may have been looted... more »
Aug. 23, 2023 | The works of Murakami, Ferrante, and Atwood are being used to train AI models without permission. Is that a problem?... more »
Aug. 22, 2023 | Toni Morrison knew the monumental worth of her work and was unembarrassed to be honored for it... more »