Aug. 9, 2024 | When a piece of writing exhibits moral excellence, we naturally assume it reflects the morality of the author. That’s often a mistake... more »
Aug. 8, 2024 | An effort is afoot to rescue the humanities’ relevance by pooh-poohing its founding commitments. That won’t work... more »
Aug. 7, 2024 | Great artists make poor propagandists, says Phil Klay. The activist’s job is activism, and the artist’s job is truth ... more »
Aug. 6, 2024 | Elias Canetti described his polemic against death as the book he was born to write. But he couldn’t finish it. He could barely start it... more »
Aug. 5, 2024 | Tristan Foison flourished as a musical fabulist by revealing exactly how classical music ennobles bullshit... more »
Aug. 2, 2024 | History is full of instances when science was subjugated to ideology, and science suffered. Is that happening now in America?... more »
Aug. 1, 2024 | Unlike computers, humans thrive on ambiguity and equivocation, on double entendre and sophistry, on blunders and embarrassments... more »
July 31, 2024 | Oh, Oblomov! “Follow my example, ye small-time yuppies and wage slaves… brothers and sisters led by the nose by dreary, servile little bosses”... more »
July 30, 2024 | Writers are susceptible to pressure from both market and peers. That’s not to say literary excellence isn’t the result of individual genius... more »
July 29, 2024 | What happens if you commit to memorizing a poem every week? Jacob Brogan on the overlooked pleasures of repetition... more »
July 26, 2024 | Note a conspicuous absence in contemporary literature: the unfiltered voice of raw manhood on the page
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July 25, 2024 | An old and fraught strain of historiography is resurgent: history as not simply a record but as sacred oracle... more »
July 24, 2024 | Does a free and competitive marketplace of ideas generate truth? Or does it simply respond to – and even exacerbate – people’s biases?... more »
July 23, 2024 | TikTok has a billion users clamoring to be part of the zeitgeist. Why can't they stop scrolling? Roxane Gay falls down a rabbit hole... more »
July 22, 2024 | Do we extract moral wisdom from reading? Or is reading itself a form of moral instruction?... more »
July 19, 2024 | Critics have traded the pleasure of reading for disenchanted explanations of what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us... more »
July 18, 2024 | Do the world's museums, many of which are filled with treasures from the colonial era, have a future? Of course they do!... more »
July 17, 2024 | Surrealism then and now. In the late '60s, the movement was outflanked by the left. Now it's been passed on the right... more »
July 16, 2024 | Solzhenitsyn's warning. After the gulag, he smelled intellectual rot wherever he went. Naive killjoy or vindicated prophet?... more »
July 15, 2024 | Is a public philosophy still possible? Don’t confuse intellectual titillation with the examined life... more »
July 12, 2024 | "The historian-as-self-appointed-indispensable-public-adviser-on-current-politics collapsed into a pile of pretty evident absurdity"... more »
July 11, 2024 | How is it that some writers can be so moral on the page and so cruel in their lives? Consider Alice Munro... more »
July 10, 2024 | “Marlowe endures as a parallel universe Bard, a kind of shadowy counter-Shakespeare, the great, queer, sacrilegious poet and playwright of damnation”... more »
July 9, 2024 | Whatever Foucault’s sins, his liberal critics have him wrong. He didn’t start the identitarian culture war... more »
July 8, 2024 | It's a gas! The strange story of the discovery that nitrous oxide creates delusions and blocks pain... more »