Dec. 4, 2021 | “If self-care is a revealing cliché of the times, it may be about the amount of chatter that can be generated around questions of human need” ... more »
Dec. 3, 2021 | Late in a life of great loss, Robert Frost sought audiences to read poetry to late into the night - but never his most revealing work ... more »
Dec. 2, 2021 | In the Age of Amazon, literature-as-culture has converged with literature-as-commerce ... more »
Dec. 1, 2021 | On being depressed. Instead of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” you’re left with “I can’t go on” ... more »
Nov. 30, 2021 | When corporations, hippos, gorillas, and rivers can all, legally, be classified as people, has personhood lost its meaning?... more »
Nov. 29, 2021 | The irony of the harpsichord: It produces delightful subtleties that can be heard only by the person playing it ... more »
Nov. 27, 2021 | According to Adam Phillips, what we need to be cured of are our cures, and our hankering for them. “There is no cure” ... more »
Nov. 26, 2021 | Jasper Johns was an art-historical fixture at the age of 35. No wonder he entered his late style prematurely ... more »
Nov. 25, 2021 | Philosophy cannot anchor politics. So held Richard Rorty, dashing the hopes of a long line of political philosophers ... more »
Nov. 24, 2021 | Stoic philosophy is awash in ancient self-help: imagine the unimaginable, rehearse undergoing future evils, anticipate suffering ... more »
Nov. 23, 2021 | The individualism of Emerson and Thoreau was not a precursor of libertarianism. But their outlooks bear remarkable resemblances ... more »
Nov. 21, 2021 | In a Sylvère Lotringer classes, the syllabi were aspirational, constituting an entire curriculum, a mode of life... more »
Nov. 20, 2021 | The 1619 quandary: 1619 represents America’s “true” national founding — or a metaphor for it — or one origin story among many?... more »
Nov. 19, 2021 | How did a bowdlerized rendering of a marginal psychpathology — trauma theory — come to dominate our culture? ... more »
Nov. 18, 2021 | Talk to the hand. When a face is masked, the rest of the body tends to compensate ... more »
Nov. 17, 2021 | Race, as Stuart Hall put it, is a floating signifier: At any given point, there is no agreed-upon definition of the concept ... more »
Nov. 16, 2021 | The man who built “an ark to save learning from the deluge,” Sir Thomas Bodley reimagined what a library could be... more »
Nov. 15, 2021 | When Ta-Nehisi Coates wanted to escape the expectation that his work provide hope, he found a model in Tony Judt... more »
Nov. 13, 2021 | What differentiates humans from other animals? Our capacity and need for illusion ... more »
Nov. 12, 2021 | Ever since Hammurabi’s Code, most societies have restricted a woman’s freedom to enjoy alcohol. Nevertheless, they persisted ... more »
Nov. 11, 2021 | “I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me,” boasted Emerson, who was extremely dependent on his family ... more »
Nov. 10, 2021 | Is the purpose of studying U.S. history to create a consensus view, or to provoke argument?... more »
Nov. 9, 2021 | Something is rotten in the groves of academe. Political intolerance, exorbitant costs, weak leaders. Time to start over, says Niall Ferguson ... more »
Nov. 8, 2021 | The influences of slavery are pervasive. And that makes it difficult to precisely identify its discrete consequences ... more »
Nov. 6, 2021 | Hannah Arendt’s life was marked by three escapes: from a Gestapo cell in Berlin, from an internment camp in France, and from Heidegger... more »