April 23, 2025 | Henry James, America’s first international writer, couldn’t leave home behind – and couldn’t abide it as a permanent home... more »
April 22, 2025 | NASA has spent decades looking for alien intelligence in the far reaches of the universe. But should we be looking much closer to home?... more »
April 21, 2025 | What does it mean to win an award for translation? The International Booker Prize for fiction in translation doesn’t seem to know... more »
April 18, 2025 | Behold, the new Frick. Post-renovation, the museum has nearly twice as much to see. What’s not to love?... more »
April 17, 2025 | Who has written the best American poetry of the 21st century? Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Ocean Vuong... more »
April 16, 2025 | Absorbed in close textual analysis, literary scholars overlook the simple joys of the plot twist and the big reveal... more »
April 15, 2025 | Edward Said gave the Palestinian position its gravitas. Now, at Columbia, his intellectual legacy is under attack... more »
April 14, 2025 | Claire Messud on Lolita: “In this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass”... more »
April 11, 2025 | The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz commemorated suffering. But he never abandoned a fragile sense of hope... more »
April 10, 2025 | A generation of students raised on an ethic of sexual egalitarianism struggles to confront a key theme in Othello: jealousy... more »
April 9, 2025 | Awash in freedom and material abundance, Americans are mired in boredom and intellectual dullness... more »
April 8, 2025 | "The college essay is absurd and unfair," writes Yascha Mounk. "It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny"... more »
April 7, 2025 | Learning for learning’s sake. College is being portrayed through the narrowest, most vocational lens. That’s a travesty... more »
April 4, 2025 | Perry Link: "People who ask me about my blacklisting usually don’t imagine that there are benefits to the status, but there are"... more »
April 3, 2025 | “I like genre fiction for the same reason I like … the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: Things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake”... more »
April 2, 2025 | $10 from The New Leader, $100 from Commentary. James Baldwin’s magazine writing career had humble origins... more »
April 1, 2025 | The most stable repository of civilization worth has long been books. That era is ending. What comes next?... more »
March 31, 2025 | Critics loved Evelyn Waugh’s dark comedy and wicked social satire. Then, to their dismay, Brideshead Revisited appeared... more »
March 28, 2025 | Christ and Campbell’s soup. Did Andy Warhol's faith have more influence over his art than his critics realize?... more »
March 27, 2025 | John Cage instructed his composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” be played “as slowly as possible.” The world’s longest organ recital will take 639 years. ... more »
March 26, 2025 | “My whole life,” wrote Bruce Chatwin, “has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific”... more »
March 25, 2025 | In a famous scene in Moby-Dick, Ishmael encounters “a long, limber, portentous, black” artwork. Could AI recreate it?... more »
March 24, 2025 | Judith Butler: “Is there a proposed criterion by which ‘extremist’ gender ideology can be distinguished from the non-extremist kind?”... more »
March 21, 2025 | We seek rest, yet are wary of its implicit boredom. This dilemma is resolved, perhaps, only by cats... more »
March 20, 2025 | The homogenous, aging American psychoanalytic community has begun emphasizing social injustice. The result: chaos... more »