Oct. 2, 2023 | Intellectuals and the cult of seriousness. Sontag and Steiner made a performance of omniscience and moral solemnity that no one could honestly sustain... more »
Sept. 29, 2023 | To escape from boredom, we seek distraction and endless stimulation. A better path forward is leisured contemplation... more »
Sept. 28, 2023 | Progressive political thinking has fallen into the identity trap, where race, gender, and sexual orientation trump all else... more »
Sept. 27, 2023 | Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris transformed 18th-century natural science. When will the sisters get their due?... more »
Sept. 26, 2023 | Mom rage seems to be all about power — who has it, and who is denied it. But it is also about shame... more »
Sept. 25, 2023 | As a young man, Amos Oz discovered his literary identity on a kibbutz. “The more provincial you are, the more universal you get”... more »
Sept. 22, 2023 | “Loneliness,” Walter Benjamin wrote, is “a process of self-poisoning, whose anti-toxins lie in the creative attitude”... more »
Sept. 21, 2023 | AP courses are mechanistic, superficial, and they fail to live up to the liberal, humanist ideals on which they were founded... more »
Sept. 20, 2023 | Ulysses, Don Juan, The Power Broker. What’s the book that you’ve been meaning to read for the longest time?... more »
Sept. 19, 2023 | What is “woke”? Bashing vague, undefined concepts is easy. It’s harder to unpack them in philosophically serious ways... more »
Sept. 18, 2023 | Angsty novels by cool girl novelists reflect the student condition, not the human condition. It’s time to leave the quad behind... more »
Sept. 15, 2023 | How to lie with statistics: “In politics it doesn’t really matter what the numbers are, so much as whose they are”... more »
Sept. 14, 2023 | Martin Peretz, who helped define the liberal establishment even as he tweaked it, is at 84 persona non grata. “It’s a sodden coda”... more »
Sept. 13, 2023 | For the Bloomsbury set, clothing conventions – like other customs– were meant to be broken... more »
Sept. 12, 2023 | For W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay’s fiction was "filth" and made him feel like taking a bath. Now a McKay renaissance is afoot... more »
Sept. 11, 2023 | “Aside from the fact that they’re all dead, the women of Surrealism have had a banner couple of years”... more »
Sept. 8, 2023 | Whatever you have heard about trauma — from clinical definitions to literary uses to gauzy oversimplifications — probably stems from the work of Judith Herman... more »
Sept. 7, 2023 | What happened to Naomi Wolf is what happened to wellness culture: Its principles gave way to paranoid individualism... more »
Sept. 6, 2023 | J.L. Austin, military man. How the Oxford philosopher became one of the most consequential British intelligence officers of World War II... more »
Sept. 5, 2023 | The trouble with genealogy: Fragments of evidence do not cohere into ironclad facts... more »
Sept. 4, 2023 | The quest for pocket parity. Long ago, everyone carried a purse. Then came a new feature of male dress... more »
Sept. 1, 2023 | Don DeLillo, long anointed as a prophet, is surely “anticipating the involuntary mutations that await the posthumous"... more »
Aug. 31, 2023 | Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, 20th-century Oxford: Why do certain places and times produce a clustering of philosophical genius?... more »
Aug. 30, 2023 | Kafka’s notebooks contain homoerotic passages, dreams of sausages, and his repeated self-flagellation: “Wrote nothing”... more »
Aug. 29, 2023 | Is authoritative criticism a problem? No, criticism is not a passive medium of arbitration. It is an act of creation... more »