Nov. 4, 2024 | “Why can’t you be funny again?” Dorothy Parker chafed at her own reputation as a reliable wit and quipster... more »
Nov. 1, 2024 | Life in a rock band. “Today I feel like a tired old whore. Some days I feel like a god. Most of the time I feel like an ambitious T-shirt salesman”... more »
Oct. 31, 2024 | Need a jolt? Read the songs of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th-century mystic who wrote rapturous, erotic descriptions of receiving the Eucharist... more »
Oct. 30, 2024 | Babitz and Didion. Making sense of the contentious bond between "fastidious, frigorific, bony Joan" and "heedless, hot, voluptuous Eve"... more »
Oct. 29, 2024 | Henri Bergson's present-day obscurity is inversely proportional to his contemporaneous fame. He transformed not just philosophy but also literature and art... more »
Oct. 28, 2024 | “Brevity has never been a quality of mine,” wrote Oliver Sacks. Indeed, excess was a hallmark of his life and his literary style... more »
Oct. 25, 2024 | What has 1,192 pages, weighs four pounds, and endorses the singular “they”? The latest version of The Chicago Manual of Style... more »
Oct. 24, 2024 | “If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing?”... more »
Oct. 23, 2024 | “If the stomach was long considered ‘the most enigmatic of organs’ by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals”... more »
Oct. 22, 2024 | Where the monsters come from. As a genre, horror emanates from the conflicting perils of community and solitude... more »
Oct. 21, 2024 | Two critics spar over a foundational question: Does the study of culture have a special role to play in public life? ... more »
Oct. 18, 2024 | Richard Dawkins’s less-than-inspiring exhortation: “You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-traveling cooperative of viruses”... more »
Oct. 17, 2024 | In the scramble to figure out how a bookstore can survive, we’ve lost sight of a different question: How should a bookstore be?... more »
Oct. 16, 2024 | Ta-Nehisi Coates has always insisted that he is an artist, not an activist. But now he's adopted a new role: political pamphleteer... more »
Oct. 15, 2024 | For Musa al-Gharbi, “woke” reforms in tech, journalism, and academia create only a hollow veneer of virtuousness... more »
Oct. 14, 2024 | Evolution can be whimsical and capricious, meaning that bad design can get awkwardly cemented. Consider the retina... more »
Oct. 11, 2024 | Writing that extracts universal laws from arresting anecdotes is good for business. But bad for writing. Ask Malcolm Gladwell... more »
Oct. 10, 2024 | James Salter wrote sumptuous descriptions of meals, houses, and ejaculations. But his greatest subject was failure... more »
Oct. 9, 2024 | To Ayn Rand, her own ideas were infallible, and ambiguity was evidence of moral treason. Is it any surprise she appeals to teenage boys?... more »
Oct. 8, 2024 | What makes looking at a great painting so magical? Not the historical intricacies or any controversies over the work. Just being there is the thing... more »
Oct. 7, 2024 | America is awash in myths: the Myth of the Founding, the Myth of the Civil War, etc. Is abandoning such folklore possible?... more »
Oct. 4, 2024 | The 17th-century Duke of Buckingham pursued a reckless and incompetent foreign policy, at the cost of human lives and national humiliation... more »
Oct. 3, 2024 | Ideology has been likened to halitosis. It’s “what the other person has.” Fun line, but does it explain ideology?... more »
Oct. 2, 2024 | The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, but that it so often denies us the lush joys of physicality... more »
Oct. 1, 2024 | The Village Voice – utopian in origin, dysfunctional in execution – left a remarkable imprint on American culture... more »