May 15, 2025 | The history of free speech is a history of accidents --— reforms undertaken that gave rise to unintended consequences... more »
May 14, 2025 | What made Mark Twain so irascible, profound, and unpredictable? A new 1,100 page biography has no clue... more »
May 13, 2025 | Is Trumpism fascism? The question has caused a deep rift among left-wing historians... more »
May 12, 2025 | “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” Einstein said in 1929. What exactly he meant has been debated ever since... more »
May 9, 2025 | At the center of the midcentury literati were the Paget Sisters, identical twins who were courted by Camus and Sartre... more »
May 8, 2025 | In 1691, the Athenian Mercury started soliciting questions from readers. Was this the birth of the modern advice columnist? ... more »
May 7, 2025 | What Gutenberg wrought. It seems unfair to pin the horrors and glories of modernity on one man, though it won’t stop us from trying... more »
May 6, 2025 | Helen Garner went from being a plagiarist of her own life to an acclaimed celebrator of the poetic quotidian... more »
May 5, 2025 | Cynthia Ozick and the art of the essay: Exactitude and sublimity coupled with melancholy and playfulness... more »
May 2, 2025 | Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and the secret notebook. What does a find in the Yale library reveal about the famous couple and their art?... more »
May 1, 2025 | Ever since the 16th century, reformers have tried to simplify the English language. They've rarely succeeded... more »
April 30, 2025 | The pressure to build a personal brand is one of the great pathologies of the past three decades... more »
April 29, 2025 | The rogue anthropologist David Graeber swung for the fences — and did not let strikeouts deter him... more »
April 28, 2025 | Didion on Zoloft: “It made me feel for about an hour that I’d lost my organizing principle, rather like having a planter's punch before lunch in the tropics”... more »
April 25, 2025 | An age of moral and material panic, of fury and anxiety, requires a shrewd chronicler. Enter David Rieff. ... more »
April 24, 2025 | It's been said that a good book should be interesting, memorable, and re-readable. Which 20th-century novels stack up?... more »
April 23, 2025 | Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »
April 22, 2025 | The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »
April 21, 2025 | In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »
April 18, 2025 | “It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »
April 17, 2025 | Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »
April 16, 2025 | Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »
April 15, 2025 | Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »
April 14, 2025 | The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »
April 11, 2025 | The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »