Dec. 3, 2022 | Art can’t solve our problems, or make up for our losses. But it might help us transcend them. Griffin Oleynick explains    ... more »

Dec. 2, 2022 | Auden's influence pinballs throughout postwar literature. Is he the great 20th-century language poet?... more »

Dec. 1, 2022 | The chalky, silty smell of ink, the scratch of the pen across the page — writing longhand is a gift to us all... more »

Nov. 30, 2022 | The letters of John le Carré reveal his sense of shame and his moralizing streak — qualities many of his characters inherited ... more »

Nov. 29, 2022 | The search for forgotten female novelists has gone awry by using Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as standards... more »

Nov. 28, 2022 | Baby Einstein, magnetic logic games, music boxes that play Mozart: The didacticism of modern toys is novel — and also a mistake... more »

Nov. 26, 2022 | The most influential essay of the 20th century? Gordon Moore’s “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits”   ... more »

Nov. 25, 2022 |  From lead paint to an orange pigment used as rat poison, humanity’s obsession with color has often had toxic consequences    ... more »

Nov. 24, 2022 | “This vile thin paper is my abhorrence. It is characteristic of the age.” For 19th-century bibliophiles, literary culture was already in decline    ... more »

Nov. 23, 2022 | Los Angeles’s “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibit presents a terrible question: What if an art museum were more like the airport? ... more »

Nov. 22, 2022 | Apocalypticism, millenarianism, eschatology — the end times come in many versions. Ours might be the most pessimistic yet... more »

Nov. 21, 2022 | Proust-industrial complex. A century has passed since his death, but he is as unignorable as ever... more »

Nov. 19, 2022 | Haruki Murakami: “While the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel” ... more »

Nov. 18, 2022 | Read old books, says Michael Dirda. "The great books are great because they speak to us, generation after generation" ... more »

Nov. 17, 2022 | The “economic determination of politics” was a pipe dream, argued István Hont. We should have listened more closely... more »

Nov. 16, 2022 | “Longtermism is a technocratic dream that purports to give some of the wealthiest people in the world the ability to plan the far future of humanity”   ... more »

Nov. 15, 2022 | Does Joan Didion's dining-room table hold some residual energy from her? It's another kind of magical thinking... more »

Nov. 14, 2022 | Is geography destiny in world affairs? No, it’s the human-made landscape, not the natural one, that will shape the next century ... more »

Nov. 12, 2022 | How’s an author meant to react to the shrinking market for books? With jealousy and competitiveness, of course    ... more »

Nov. 11, 2022 | The Velveteen Rabbit is a beloved classic of children's literature. It is also a genuinely philosophical work... more »

Nov. 10, 2022 | To comprehend the difference between smell and flavor, plug your nose and taste a jelly bean ... more »

Nov. 9, 2022 | Many writers are respected for their style, but few for their humanity: Vonnegut was admired for both... more »

Nov. 8, 2022 | Puritanism did not prevail in America because it tends to backfire, says Jill Lepore. Twitter’s pious mercilessness is no exception ... more »

Nov. 7, 2022 | Bill Deresiewicz: "Wokeness flattens art, and it seeks to flatten our response to art. It wants us all to have the same response to any given work”   ... more »

Nov. 5, 2022 | The dreariness of book clubs. They are boring because we avoid uncomfortable questions.    ... more »