June 2, 2023 | Microfiction, nanofiction, hint fiction, flash fiction, dribble, drabble, trabble: What's with writers' fascination with brevity?... more »
June 1, 2023 | “The era of bourgeois revolutions coincided with a general turn towards neoclassicism in architecture, visual arts, literature, music and theatre”... more »
May 31, 2023 | “Although they were the butt of endless Renaissance jokes, old women were also depicted as powerful, fearsome entities”... more »
May 30, 2023 | From admissions to assessment, academic integrity to scholarly research, how will artificial intelligence change higher education?... more »
May 29, 2023 | "This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble”... more »
May 26, 2023 | Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the idea of secrets — what they are, why we keep them, and what they reveal about us ... more »
May 25, 2023 | More than ever, we need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism. We need Max Weber... more »
May 24, 2023 | Sontag on women. Their oppression, she came to believe, presents a problem that is aesthetic and narrative problem as well as political and economic.... more »
May 23, 2023 | For Emmanuel Carrère, writing about other people is tantamount to torturing them. But representing a life other than your own is what makes human connection possible... more »
May 22, 2023 | Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley... more »
May 19, 2023 | You’ve had to deal with the sulkiness of others. Indeed, you might be a sulker yourself. But what is sulking, exactly?... more »
May 18, 2023 | Parents of young children are rarely alone, and yet they report feeling lonely. How to explain? Donald Winnicott has some theories... more »
May 17, 2023 | The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring... more »
May 16, 2023 | An extreme figure even in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris, Jean Lorrain was a dandy, Satanist, drinker of ether, and highly paid writer... more »
May 15, 2023 | “Whereas algorithms present personalized recommendations by rank, the blurb is a one-rank system of aesthetic value: utterly awesome” ... more »
May 12, 2023 | “Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »
May 11, 2023 | Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »
May 10, 2023 | Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »
May 9, 2023 | Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »
May 8, 2023 | Unusual writing can be eloquent writing. It can also be just plain unusual. Consider the essayist Brian Dillon... more »
May 5, 2023 | Style tip from Christopher Lasch: Jettison ostentatious erudition, abbreviations, and acronyms. Initials are for desiccated bureaucrats... more »
May 4, 2023 | The history of the swing. From Greece to Borneo, swinging has been a form of magic, a means of warding off evil, a form of celebration... more »
May 3, 2023 | Semafor, Air Mail, Punchbowl News, Puck, Substack: Making sense of the cacophonous, paywall-inhibited online reading environment... more »
May 2, 2023 | Roger Scruton wasn’t judicious about his associates. Now he’s being used by more-brutish conservatives as a shield of sophistication... more »
May 1, 2023 | Libertarian critics of democracy make several valid points. But there's no evidence their alternatives are better, and much to suggest they'd be worse ... more »