“Nothing in excess,” “know thyself” — pithy philosophical sayings feel antiquated and pat. Why?
... more »Oct. 8, 2024 | What constitutes a writer’s space? A desk or office or cafe, sure, but also an inner region of the mind — a sacred aura... more »
Oct. 7, 2024 | The vexing Saad Eddin Ibrahim. The Egyptian sociologist spent his life advocating for democratization, but became an apologist for authoritarianism... more »
Oct. 4, 2024 | Is intellectual humility a virtue? Yes, but only when married to intellectual courage... more »
Oct. 3, 2024 | “Theory was among other things the brief afterlife of a failed insurrection.” It was also, Terry Eagleton writes, “exhilarating”... more »
Oct. 2, 2024 | "If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning"... more »
Oct. 1, 2024 | Weird nonfiction has roots in the work of Welles and Borges. But its natural home is the internet, amid disinformation and pissant humor... more »
Sept. 30, 2024 | Bits, cheeky, clever, gutted: Ben Yagoda explains the British invasion of American English... more »
Sept. 27, 2024 | Why does Marilynne Robinson, master of nuanced, humane fiction, clang out vast, hostile, and unprovable assertions in her nonfiction?... more »
Sept. 26, 2024 | Marx made little of it, and Rousseau spoke about it incessantly. Where did the idea of equality come from?... more »
Sept. 25, 2024 | For Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th century saw material, intellectual and moral progress — and the 20th century saw it regress... more »
Sept. 24, 2024 | There’s a deep truth in Thomas Mann’s line: “To be reminded that one is not alone in the world — always unpleasant”... more »
Sept. 23, 2024 | Two decades of n+1. The “dishwater leftism and barbershop snark” of the early years gave way to something else. But is it better?... more »
Sept. 20, 2024 | You know Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Do you know its bizarre backstory?... more »
Sept. 19, 2024 | On knowing and not knowing. Benign self-ignorance and willful self-delusion. Mark Lilla on self-evasion and self-confrontation ... more »
Sept. 18, 2024 | Technicians of trivia. Historians cannot merely compile sterile facts — they must develop theoretical frameworks... more »
Sept. 17, 2024 | Ideas and definitions that Judith Butler resisted as a young scholar have caught up with the author – and us... more »
Sept. 16, 2024 | The collapse of epistemic authority, the rise of “highly incitable” people, and a propensity for online ranting shape our combustible reality... more »
Sept. 13, 2024 | Studying philosophy has been flattened into a single option: academic. What's left if that goes away?... more »
Sept. 12, 2024 | “We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism... more »
Sept. 11, 2024 | Every era recreates Mozart in its own image. In our time, he's a scatological imp who loves four-letter words... more »
Sept. 10, 2024 | Blasphemy seems like an anachronistic offense. But Salman Rushdie’s case is thoroughly modern... more »
Sept. 9, 2024 | Disappointments of literary Brooklyn. For one would-be writer, little magazine subculture was alienating and disgusting... more »
Sept. 6, 2024 | A real reader, insisted Nabokov, is a rereader. He was wrong, and so is the high-minded horde of rereading evangelists... more »
Sept. 5, 2024 | C.L.R. James planned a short trip to “dreadful” America and stayed for 15 years, even as his distaste for U.S. politics grew... more »