Jan. 12, 2024 | The most surprising thing about a writing group at the CIA? No one is working on a spy novel... more »
Jan. 11, 2024 | The classical-music establishment’s challenge: How to foster the passionate devotion that allows an art form to survive... more »
Jan. 10, 2024 | Our punctuation, ourselves. What are we really talking about when we talk about exclamation points? ... more »
Jan. 9, 2024 | The first influencer, Beau Brummell, exuded “calculated nonchalance.” He was a harbinger of our celebrity culture... more »
Jan. 8, 2024 | Academic dishonesty, improper attribution, citational errors — why are professors so wary of invoking “plagiarism” in the case of Claudine Gay?... more »
Jan. 5, 2024 | Does the afterlife exist? Yes, thought Kurt Gödel. Where else could humans fulfill their potential?... more »
Jan. 4, 2024 | The medical-mystery genre has a familiar arc, usually punctuated by a revelatory “aha” moment. Not for Tom Scocca... more »
Jan. 3, 2024 | The first book of photography? British Algae, a binding of hundreds of cyanotypes compiled by an amateur botanist... more »
Jan. 2, 2024 | Confessions of a bookseller. The essential problem with how we talk about the job – and it is a job – is preciosity... more »
Jan. 1, 2024 | The next frontier in live musical performance? Zero gravity. What would it sound like to break the music-making conventions of earth?... more »
Dec. 29, 2023 | David Brooks on the golden age of nonfiction and his selections for this year’s Sidney Awards... more »
Dec. 28, 2023 | Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of cultural phenomena. Exhibit A: The “new” “last” Beatles’ single... more »
Dec. 27, 2023 | A writer is a creature of solitude, we’re told. Hogwash! Writing is the most gregarious of the arts... more »
Dec. 26, 2023 | Ideas of the afterlife. In the Western tradition, eternal fate is connected to one's earthly actions. Not so for the ancient Egyptians... more »
Dec. 25, 2023 | “Why, in the last 10 years, have elite colleges in particular become sites of such relentless ideological confrontation?”... more »
Dec. 22, 2023 | Was Milton Friedman the “last conservative,” or a founding radical of the contemporary age?... more »
Dec. 21, 2023 | It’s easy to moralize about capitalism, and especially about the thrill of consumerism. For that, read Zola... more »
Dec. 20, 2023 | How did Harvard Medical School become ensnared in the underground market in human body parts?... more »
Dec. 19, 2023 | What distinguishes war from genocide? It’s an especially fraught question these days, one that Omer Bartov takes head-on... more »
Dec. 18, 2023 | A scholar who publishes a paper every five days? The rise of the extremely productive researcher... more »
Dec. 15, 2023 | The New York Times has long been accused of having a liberal bias. The real problem, says James Bennet, is its illiberalism... more »
Dec. 14, 2023 | Melrose Place was a typically anodyne mid-'90s primetime soap opera. How did it get mixed up with a radical artists collective?... more »
Dec. 13, 2023 | Want to see genre bending book-cover design? Don’t look in a bookstore. Look at designs that got killed... more »
Dec. 12, 2023 | In the Victorian era, friendship was crucial. And no one was more essential to Charles Dickens than Wilkie Collins... more »
Dec. 11, 2023 | All culture was microculture, until it was eclipsed by monoculture. Now microculture is on the rise again... more »