April 20, 2021 | Maria Stepanova: “Poetry is maybe the main thing happening now in Russian literature: powerful, daring, cutting-edge, diverse” ... more »
April 19, 2021 | Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look? ... more »
April 17, 2021 | A debate: What does it mean for the future of humanity if we soon share our living space with conscious machines?... more »
April 16, 2021 | If it weren’t for the fall of Rome, Walter Scheidel suggests, we’d all still be ploughing the fields, living in poverty, and dying young... more »
April 15, 2021 | Philip Johnson's Nazi past was long overlooked as he was showered with commissions. Twenty years after his death, the debate heats up ... more »
April 14, 2021 | John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change” ... more »
April 13, 2021 | “Trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration" ... more »
April 12, 2021 | George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward? ... more »
April 10, 2021 | Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists ... more »
April 9, 2021 | Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It's been decades since anyone has felt guilt about a guilty pleasure ... more »
April 8, 2021 | You can write poems about sex or excrement, but not business or money. Those are the only two obscene topics left. Dana Gioia explains... more »
April 7, 2021 | Zora Neale Hurston was the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest internal critic. But she found her voice in the swampy muck of Florida ... more »
April 6, 2021 | In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »
April 5, 2021 | Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »
April 3, 2021 | Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not ... more »
April 2, 2021 | American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign ... more »
April 1, 2021 | Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too ... more »
March 31, 2021 | Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough? ... more »
March 30, 2021 | David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »
March 29, 2021 | Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness ... more »
March 27, 2021 | “Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing? ... more »
March 26, 2021 | “Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away” ... more »
March 25, 2021 | There is something mildly shameful about literary pilgrimages. They are a kind of emotional and intellectual junk food. And yet... ... more »
March 24, 2021 | Evelyn Waugh on being interviewed by Jacques Barzun: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He... gave me a viva in history” ... more »
March 23, 2021 | Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive... more »