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 »
Nov. 6, 2023 | In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more »
Nov. 3, 2023 | “A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »
Nov. 2, 2023 | Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more »
Nov. 1, 2023 | Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more »
Oct. 31, 2023 | Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said, “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more »
Oct. 30, 2023 | Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more »
Oct. 27, 2023 | “How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more »
Oct. 26, 2023 | A student stood up and said: ‘This author is a misogynist.” Gale Walden on dating, loving, and teaching David Foster Wallace... more »
Oct. 25, 2023 | A good novel is a good novel, and a bad novel is a bad novel, regardless of who – or what generative AI – wrote it... more »
Oct. 24, 2023 | Unfairly besmirched as screechy, hectoring, and juvenile, the exclamation point is in dire need of a reputation reclamation... more »
Oct. 23, 2023 | We celebrate the humanities and we bash the humanities, but rarely do we pause to ask: What the hell are the humanities?... more »
Oct. 20, 2023 | George Eliot offers us “neither a gospel, nor imitable heroines, but a kind of negative wisdom about our relations”... more »
Oct. 19, 2023 | As memoirists know, it is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. But memory is wet sand... more »
Oct. 18, 2023 | Teaching “problematic” writers is a minefield. Affronted students can generate a social-media scandal — and bad course evaluations... more »
Oct. 17, 2023 | “Restructuring your inward being … is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business”... more »
Oct. 16, 2023 | Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Evolution is not over... more »
Oct. 13, 2023 | Ben Lerner writes beautifully about meritocracy’s discontents. He has also “perfected the humblebrag as auto-fictional style”... more »
Oct. 12, 2023 | The René Girard resurgence puts envy, rivalry, and scapegoating center stage in diagnosing the modern human condition... more »