Dec. 11, 2023 | Humans have always wanted to become like Gods. Francis Bacon understood this desire better than most... more »

Dec. 8, 2023 | Flaubert was once described as a “martyr of literary style.” His letters reveal just how apt that assessment was... more »

Dec. 7, 2023 | The art world is full of grifters, fakers, thieves, and critics on the make. Monet knew instinctively how to play the game... more »

Dec. 6, 2023 | Critics' lives are deskbound, confined to their thoughts and other people’s art. What drives them to it?... more »

Dec. 5, 2023 | “Ideology,” a word coined during the French Revolution, was declared dead by Daniel Bell in 1960. Now ideologies are roaring back to life... more »

Dec. 4, 2023 | Objective measures are our most effective weapon against racism and sexism, says Steven Pinker: blind auditions, traffic cameras, SAT... more »

Dec. 1, 2023 | Are there objectively correct answers to the big philosophical questions? A meta-ethicist makes the case that there are... more »

Nov. 30, 2023 | “You’re not allowed to be whiter than him ... And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.” Patricia Lockwood meets the pope... more »

Nov. 29, 2023 | Susan Sontag and George Steiner could be extraordinarily ill-mannered. But their critical ardor remains infectious... more »

Nov. 28, 2023 | A best-selling philosophical text on Amazon is the decade-old dissertation of a writer best known as Bronze Age Pervert... more »

Nov. 27, 2023 | Rescuing Pushkin from commemoration and co-optation: He “deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath”... more »

Nov. 24, 2023 | Censorship is a widespread problem among scientists. It’s most often driven by the scientists themselves... more »

Nov. 23, 2023 | Do animals need complex brains to experience consciousness? New work on scallops, jellyfish, and crabs suggests not... more »

Nov. 22, 2023 | When Gawker went girly and created a home for radical self-disclosure and all-abiding contempt. Moe Tkacik looks back... more »

Nov. 21, 2023 | My queue, myself. Ordering DVDs from Netflix served as a kind of biography of the various phases of my life... more »

Nov. 20, 2023 | Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more »

Nov. 17, 2023 | George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more »

Nov. 16, 2023 | The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more »

Nov. 15, 2023 | No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more »

Nov. 14, 2023 | Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more »

Nov. 13, 2023 | The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more »

Nov. 10, 2023 | Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more »

Nov. 9, 2023 | Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more »

Nov. 8, 2023 | Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more »

Nov. 7, 2023 | Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more »