July 29, 2021 | In their haste to battle conservatives, the liberal punditsphere has simplified critical race theory to a set of innocuous talking points fit for school children ... more »
July 28, 2021 | We’ve undergone a decade of unprecedented interest in Black arts and letters. But where is the work of Black artists raised in poverty? ... more »
July 27, 2021 | A lesson in Socratic humility: Map the terrain of your ignorance, plot its mountains and rivers, and try to navigate it... more »
July 26, 2021 | Caitlin Flanagan has managed to evade the major vices: excessive eating, drinking, drugging, gambling. So what's got her at rock bottom? Twitter... more »
July 24, 2021 | A mystery novel by a pseudonymous author arrives with a warning: “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.” Was it just a ploy for virality, or something else? ... more »
July 23, 2021 | The kind of writing that Janet Malcolm practiced so beautifully had long been disappearing when she died. Today it is nearly gone ... more »
July 22, 2021 | The symbolic and social-media triumphs of Black celebrity intellectuals do not translate into meaningful change for the masses ... more »
July 21, 2021 | Our fact-challenged times have inspired a cottage industry testifying to the prescience of Hannah Arendt. But what was she actually saying? ... more »
July 20, 2021 | Classics has been charged with racism, colonialism, and fascism. Some rush to condemn the field, others to defend it — but there’s a middle way ... more »
July 19, 2021 | The future-oriented poetry of Osip Mandelstam’s contemporaries seems dated now. His words, however, have flourished with time ... more »
July 17, 2021 | Nuclear war, rising oceans, biotech gone mad — literature is awash with dystopian themes. We need a little more of the utopian impulse... more »
July 16, 2021 | Lauren Berlant’s “beautiful disservice”: making others believe “that the university was a place where love, care, and original thought could flourish” ... more »
July 15, 2021 | America’s aspirational class assumes that its social and cultural capital are valued and coveted by all. They’re not ... more »
July 14, 2021 | Almanacs strike a balance between practicality, poetry, and serendipity. The reward is a wonderfully freeing randomness ... more »
July 13, 2021 | “If you call for a bookstore not to stock your enemy’s book or rejoice when a problematic classic is taken out of print, your enemy will do the same” ... more »
July 12, 2021 | Ibram X. Kendi: The freakout over critical race theory isn’t a culture war with two sides — it’s CRT’s critics arguing among themselves ... more »
July 10, 2021 | Will future generations read The Dream Songs? John Berryman makes an easy target in today’s cultural climate ... more »
July 9, 2021 | A “Cat Person” quandary: How to feel when your relationship, rewritten and memorialized, becomes the world’s most viral short story... more »
July 8, 2021 | The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s political writings were a sort of fugitive polemic — an attack on everything from a vantage point of nowhere ... more »
July 7, 2021 | Alice Neel’s career as a struggling typist, stenographer, and painter raises a question: How do broke, self-supporting female artists do it? ... more »
July 6, 2021 | Knowledge, truth, justice — why do we spend so much time arguing over grand abstractions? The answer is rooted in pragmatism ... more »
July 5, 2021 | “The yeoman farmer as patriot and model citizen.” Did the influential books of early America contribute to cultural homogeneity?... more »
July 3, 2021 | A matter of taste. All responses to art are fundamentally personal, but not all are equally valid ... more »
July 2, 2021 | Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” has been assigned to millions of students. We're doing them a disservice ... more »
July 1, 2021 | For Kant and Nietzsche, complaining and whining were weak, lowly actions. But Simone Weil saw beauty and magic in them... more »