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 »
Oct. 4, 2023 | In 18th-century Europe, Latin was still a key part of formal education. Mastery of the language, however, was in steep decline... more »
Oct. 3, 2023 | Is Integrated Information Theory — one of the most widely discussed ways of considering consciousness — pseudoscience?... more »
Oct. 2, 2023 | Tyler Austin Harper: “White American elites … are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda”... more »
Sept. 29, 2023 | Ed Ruscha’s books were so unpopular, “so doomed to oblivion,” that documenting them is an obligation... more »
Sept. 28, 2023 | The pandemic, the Trump years, the mental-health crisis: What is driving the current return to Freud?... more »
Sept. 27, 2023 | In the early days of American English, “timber” became “lumber,” “autumn” became “fall,” and “shop” became “store”... more »
Sept. 26, 2023 | In search of fresh material to mine, AI companies are hiring poets, novelists, playwrights, writers, and Ph.D.s... more »
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 »