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 »
Oct. 11, 2023 | RIP, literary fiction. The genre, born in response to conglomeration in 1980, has become an anachronism... more »
Oct. 10, 2023 | The varieties of feminism can be seen in the magazines their advocates created: Ms., Bitch, Bust, Sassy, Feministing, Jezebel... more »
Oct. 9, 2023 | Christian Lorentzen on the new alienations, obsolete vanities, and petty, unfulfilled apolitical careerism of his generation... more »
Oct. 6, 2023 | Bookstores are full of tales of wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens. Who’s behind all this? Lester del Rey, inventor of fantasy... more »
Oct. 5, 2023 | Is there a greater dismissal of American literature’s achievement than the withholding of the Nobel from Don DeLillo?... more »
Oct. 4, 2023 | Alchemy, phrenology, astrology — it’s easy to know when an intellectual project fails. But how does one succeed?... more »
Oct. 3, 2023 | “Technophobia is explicit in the text and implicit in the format of Liberties; the medium and the message are perfectly aligned”... more »
Oct. 2, 2023 | “The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »
Sept. 29, 2023 | The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »
Sept. 28, 2023 | “The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »
Sept. 27, 2023 | “Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »
Sept. 26, 2023 | Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »
Sept. 25, 2023 | Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »
Sept. 22, 2023 | Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »
Sept. 21, 2023 | In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »
Sept. 20, 2023 | “You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »
Sept. 19, 2023 | “Impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” What do the clothing, decor, and stylistic choices of the Bloomsbury set mean?... more »