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 »
March 19, 2025 | Hunter-gatherer societies were much more violent than our own, but much of that is due to a relatively small number of prehistoric psychopaths... more »
March 18, 2025 | One early human tool gave rise to our leap in intelligence: not the sharpened stone, but the handbag, for carrying food and babies... more »
March 17, 2025 | For a powerful account of the human condition, writes Marilynne Robinson, turn not to “anemic anthropology,” but to Calvinism... more »
March 14, 2025 | Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »
March 13, 2025 | Today we treat novels as salubrious stress relievers — kale smoothies for the soul. That overlooks their dark, diabolical potency... more »
March 12, 2025 | The necessity of Martha Nussbaum. Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex, and sometimes painful stuff of real life... more »
March 11, 2025 | Alice Gribbin: “Those who deem the nude in art a ‘sex object’ betray themselves as prudish and crass”... more »
March 10, 2025 | What can the memoir of madness accomplish? It can force us to reckon with ugly things, not because they are titillating, but because they are true... more »
March 7, 2025 | “The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination … may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism”... more »
March 6, 2025 | Technology has long been a boon to creativity, especially in film. But AI and its machine-managed flawlessness are different... more »