July 23, 2018 | What is it like to be a man? We talk plenty about masculinity, but the topic resists straightforward discussion — even as men suck the air from every other conversation... more »
July 21, 2018 | How is it that the gray mush inside our skulls can produce "hopes, fears, and dreams"? It's the sort of question that animates a lot of useless agonizing... more »
July 20, 2018 | "Disrespecting your ideological predecessors is something of a sport in modern American feminism, and it reaches varsity level when it comes to criticizing the second wave"... more »
July 19, 2018 | They cost 99 cents and depict glistening shirtless men. Romance e-books might seem frivolous, but the controversy over Her Cocky Doctors is anything but... more »
July 18, 2018 | Writers and even academic institutes are celebrating the mystical power of psychedelics. The enthusiasm is based more on hope than on scientific evidence... more »
July 17, 2018 | Shakespeare and science. He was a poet of Copernican astronomy before the telescope, and a poet of microbiology before the modern microscope... more »
July 16, 2018 | What does it mean to acquire a taste for something, whether classical music, coffee, or conservatism? It means shedding who we are and becoming who we aspire to be... more »
July 14, 2018 | Science is too white, too male, too straight. So efforts to increase diversity make sense. But do they undermine scientific progress?... more »
July 13, 2018 | A mystical approach to translating Clarice Lispector. Hallucinations and prayers abounded; magic crystals were employed; when the dictionary failed, a psychic was consulted... more »
July 12, 2018 | Privilege: We hear that word a lot these days, usually as an indictment lobbed by the privileged themselves. Why? Matthew Crawford has a theory... more »
July 11, 2018 | Our culture scoffs at Freud and Jung and puts its faith in science and statistics. One hole in this pervasive rationality: the magic of coincidences... more »
July 10, 2018 | The Western canon emerged from a textual culture. Now we're in a digital age, when information is infinite. What authority do the Great Books still possess? ... more »
July 9, 2018 | Have we fundamentally misunderstood our relationship with the earth? Bruno Latour, suspecting so, goes to meet the 98-year-old behind the “Gaia” hypothesis... more »
July 7, 2018 | The lone male artist has often been taken as a genius; the lone female artist as a muse or “art monster.” But art does not have to be masculine or feminine... more »
July 6, 2018 | Donald Hall’s poetry could be dismissed as patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist. But it also teaches persistence, practicality, and farsightedness... more »
July 5, 2018 | The good life, according to Aztec philosophy: The goal was not the pursuit of perfection but rather rootedness, moderation, prudence, and courage... more »
July 4, 2018 | The conflict between the sciences and the humanities isn't resolvable as long as we disagree about what it means to be an educated person... more »
July 3, 2018 | In 1838, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand went on vacation in Majorca. Thus began the most notoriously unsuccessful holiday in the history of classical music... more »
July 2, 2018 | A boomlet of “death of liberalism” writing is underway. But look back: It first died in the 1870s and has been dying almost continuously since 1920... more »
June 30, 2018 | Frida Kahlo’s ashtray, her eyebrow pencil, her prosthetic leg — they convey only emptiness, alienation, and loss. They are displayed in museums, but they are not art... more »
June 29, 2018 | Nothing is more American than to proudly declare yourself outside the mainstream. And so we've become a herd of people busily declaring ourselves not part of the herd... more »
June 28, 2018 | Neuroscientists chase incorrect theories; brain-imaging studies suffer from statistical mistakes; economics embraces faulty premises. Does bad science spread?... more »
June 27, 2018 | Writing from Arles, France, van Gogh told his brother, “I’m in Japan here.” As French neoclassicism ran out of gas, his turn was to the East... more »
June 26, 2018 | Fondling in the library, seduction in the bookstore — why do sex and literature go together? Edmund White on reading, writing, and romance... more »
June 25, 2018 | Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young black painter who became the darling of rich, mostly white, collectors. We've had a hard time making the two go together easily. So did he... more »