Nov. 30, 2023 | In Central European spa towns rich in literary history, you can bathe in everything from beer to radon... more »
Nov. 29, 2023 | Moby-Dick had been out of print for decades when the author died. Since then, we’ve rediscovered the Melville we need... more »
Nov. 28, 2023 | Spare a thought for cliché-verre. Part printmaking, part photography, this 19th-century artistic medium never caught on... more »
Nov. 27, 2023 | Reassessing the work of Georg Lukács means expurgating Bolshevik themes and some long-outdated Marxist concepts. That’s asking a lot... more »
Nov. 24, 2023 | The jargon of 17th-century London, the slang of 1960s teens — if you can imagine it, it’s in Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection... more »
Nov. 23, 2023 | In the early 1900s, almost no Jewish person could be hired in publishing. By the 1960s, there was talk of a Jewish literary mafia. What happened?... more »
Nov. 22, 2023 | Undergoing cancer treatment, Paul Auster has thoughts on the American obsession with closure — “the stupidest idea” he’s ever heard of... more »
Nov. 21, 2023 | Three days of “Rothdom” — a Newark festival dedicated to Philip Roth — spur a thought: His creative, licentious force is best consumed alone... more »
Nov. 20, 2023 | In the 1960s, scientists believed in a connection between psychedelics and psychosis. Is there anything to that?... more »
Nov. 17, 2023 | Beginning in the 13th century, a new paradigm of measurement and mathematics built the modern world... more »
Nov. 16, 2023 | Stanley Fish on teaching at Florida’s newly controversial New College: “Virtue is not the business of the academy”... more »
Nov. 15, 2023 | Shakespeare’s first folio, in 1623, had an initial print run of 750. Today 233 copies survive, all of them unique... more »
Nov. 14, 2023 | “Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins”... more »
Nov. 13, 2023 | Generative AI has put us in a unique and unsettling headspace. Claude Shannon got there first... more »
Nov. 10, 2023 | For decades, Andrew Wylie was the world's most audacious broker of literary talent. Has the Wylie moment passed?... more »
Nov. 9, 2023 | Imagine tracking the winners and judges for top literary awards across 75 years. Now you can. Does it tell you anything? ... more »
Nov. 8, 2023 | The hard problem of consciousness is nowhere near an answer. Scientists and philosophers struggle on... more »
Nov. 7, 2023 | Why are movies getting longer? They’re not. But the ones that are longer are the ones people pay to see... more »
Nov. 6, 2023 | Whether you speak with a retroflex R, a bunched R, or a crispy R, it’s clear that R is the weirdest letter... more »
Nov. 3, 2023 | Memoir of a momentary extremist. For two years, Michael Kazin was a wannabe revolutionary. It was both thrilling and sobering... more »
Nov. 2, 2023 | The electricians of the 18th century dumbfounded their audiences. They were taken to be part miracle workers, part magicians... more »
Nov. 1, 2023 | Secular humanist definitions of morality face a dilemma: Choose a culture-centered ethics or return to a God-centered one... more »
Oct. 31, 2023 | Unherd prides itself on ideological eclecticism. But just how heterodox is the ascendant publication?... more »
Oct. 30, 2023 | The quality of a whisper, the stress of a syllable, the pitch of a voice: Alexander John Ellis’s life as a word nerd... more »
Oct. 27, 2023 | “Stinking fish,” “abominable wine,” “dirty taverns.” In 1783, the Continental Congress spent a rotten summer in New Jersey... more »