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 »
Oct. 26, 2023 | Academics tend to focus on enlarging the borders of their disciplines. Instead, they should think about how those disciplines come to an end... more »
Oct. 25, 2023 | Thirty-nine place settings, most of them displaying an aestheticized vulva. “The Dinner Party” almost broke Judy Chicago... more »
Oct. 24, 2023 | Musician’s dystonia. Some of the finest have suffered devastating hand spasms and shakes. Why?... more »
Oct. 23, 2023 | Although Louise Glück was often identified with post-confessional poetry, she was too interested in others to risk the solipsism of mere selfhood... more »
Oct. 20, 2023 | Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, in becoming the manual of magical practice, also advanced the idea that magic was a kind of philosophy... more »
Oct. 19, 2023 | The brass astrolabe, the water clock, and finally the mechanical timepiece: 14th-century Europe couldn’t get enough of clocks... more »
Oct. 18, 2023 | Mermaid books, rainbow bookmarks, and one big headache. The Scholastic Book Fair has run into culture-war controversy... more »
Oct. 17, 2023 | The American Museum of Natural History holds the remains of at least 12,000 people. Who were they?... more »
Oct. 16, 2023 | Louise Glück, whose "unmistakable poetic voice" made individual existence universal, has died. She was 80... more »
Oct. 13, 2023 | A 19-century “storm controversy.” Were North American hurricanes, blizzards, and thunderstorms rotational or centripetal in nature?... more »
Oct. 12, 2023 | Cubism, Dada, Pop, minimalism, and now “the contemporary.” Progress in art has ground to a stop... more »
Oct. 11, 2023 | Today’s AI models, flawed as they are, someday will be acknowledged as the first to have achieved artificial general intelligence... more »
Oct. 10, 2023 | “It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire.” And yet, Alexander Chee writes, Dracula remains a vital literary experience... more »
Oct. 9, 2023 | What happens when reading is governed largely by the logic of machines, rather than the inner dialogue of our own humanity? We're finding out... more »
Oct. 6, 2023 | Jon Fosse — “our age’s great writer of light and darkness” — has won the Nobel Prize in literature... WaPo... Guardian... Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov... Damion Searls... Merve Emre...... more »
Oct. 5, 2023 | Identity politics doesn’t come from postmodernism, as is commonly held. In fact, it dates back to the 18th century... more »