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 »
Feb. 12, 2025 | What if the solution to what ails the humanities is 10 days on an old farm in the Hudson Valley? Bill Deresiewicz explains... more »
Feb. 11, 2025 | Descartes, Kepler, Boyle, Newton — these titans of the Scientific Revolution are, in fact, not the intellectual forefathers of modern secularism... more »
Feb. 10, 2025 | Andrea Long Chu on Pamela Paul: “Her principal opinion is that everyone else’s opinions should be as weakly held as her own”... more »
Feb. 7, 2025 | "A children’s book is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build"... more »
Feb. 6, 2025 | Sir Thomas More’s birthplace was very likely not fashionable Milk Street, but lawless “Cripplegate Without,” home to thieves, sex workers, and trash dumps... more »
Feb. 5, 2025 | Soliciting book blurbs is time-consuming, dispiriting, and occasionally mortifying. So Simon & Schuster is getting rid of them... more »
Feb. 4, 2025 | With intensity, earnestness, and a bougie aesthetic, McNally Jackson is reshaping literary life in New York... more »
Feb. 3, 2025 | The Gobi bear, the northern white rhinoceros: We talk about preserving species of animals. But what about preserving sub-species?... more »
Jan. 31, 2025 | Before Gloria Steinem fought the patriarchy, she wrote The Beach Book to “make you feel better about wasting time on the beach”... more »