Jan. 16, 2025 | How did "diet" go from a way of life to a sum of calories and carbs? The shift began in the 17th century... more »
Jan. 15, 2025 | Are Amazon reviews art? The writer Kevin Killian posted more than 2,000 of them. Now they're collected in a book... more »
Jan. 14, 2025 | Bohemians and bohemia. How does a neighborhood become a cultural magnet? Consider Greenwich Village ... more »
Jan. 13, 2025 | Aristotle dismissed the sense of smell as the domain of women. In fact, humans have a better nose than most other mammals'... more »
Jan. 10, 2025 | To explain the workings of the imagination, brain science is necessary but insufficient. A great mystery remains... more »
Jan. 9, 2025 | Leibniz’s literary remains. An epistolary graphomaniac, he left behind 15,000 letters to some 1,300 people... more »
Jan. 8, 2025 | Before the Brothers Grimm, death, poverty, disfigurement, and hunger had never been so charming... more »
Jan. 7, 2025 | How two lovably eccentric dilettantes rescued Nietzsche's reputation and recast him as a prescient postmodern thinker... more »
Jan. 6, 2025 | The problem with Christian rock: The music’s stale conformity was the inverse of the ecstatic freedom its lyrics promised... more »
Jan. 3, 2025 | The extinction obsession. We’ve always indulged fantasies about the end of the world. What’s changed is the mechanism of our destruction... more »
Jan. 2, 2025 | What’s the point of psychoanalysis? According to Freud, it's to turn “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”... more »
Jan. 1, 2025 | “Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism”... more »
Dec. 31, 2024 | How was early Christianity unified? As Augustine put it, “Better a few Donatists burn in their own flames … than their vast majority perish in the flames of hell”... more »
Dec. 30, 2024 | Many scholars write histories of the working class without grasping the actual experience of work. David Montgomery was an exception... more »
Dec. 27, 2024 | A new account of the Vietnam War gets it all wrong: “In this search-for-villains approach to history, it is always the Americans who matter most”... more »
Dec. 26, 2024 | How Tariq Ali, a street-fighting, mustachioed Marxist, became a Trotskyist Zelig, never indulging a second thought... more »
Dec. 25, 2024 | For Thomas Hardy, the death of his first wife prompted him to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life... more »
Dec. 24, 2024 | Millennials' divorce books are less concerned with social tragedy or triumph. Tthe possibilities they explore instead are thrilling... more »
Dec. 23, 2024 | By the time Handel presented Messiah, he was being ridiculed as a fat, stale has-been. Only one of those things was true... more »
Dec. 20, 2024 | Saints for supper. In the Middle Ages, consuming holy icons was thought to cure a range of intestinal ailments... more »
Dec. 19, 2024 | "Every era reinvents the biography form to suit its purposes," writes Laura Kipnis. "Call it the post-truth biography"... more »
Dec. 18, 2024 | “Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”... more »
Dec. 17, 2024 | Piet Mondrian failed as a prophet. Today he's regarded as something more significant: an influencer... more »
Dec. 16, 2024 | Dicey, piece of cake, scrounge, and bonkers are all NOOB's — "not one-off Britishisms." Why have such words conquered America?... more »
Dec. 13, 2024 | The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »