June 2, 2023 | The wisdom of Epictetus includes deep Stoic insights, as well as his thoughts on the unmanliness of tweezing body hair... more »
June 1, 2023 | Being Hayek. His life played out along three great arcs: intellectual, geographical, and emotional. In all three, his views evolved along with his fortunes... more »
May 31, 2023 | Anthropologist of filth. Chuck Berry's sexual predilections were seen as un-chic, un-romantic, and too “real” for public taste... more »
May 30, 2023 | It is commonly believed that every written word by a major writer must be gathered and published. But what to make of Kafka’s diaries?... more »
May 29, 2023 | At her best, Susan Sontag refused to simplify her thinking for easy answers. At her worst, she was dodgy and noncommittal. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
May 26, 2023 | Derek Parfit spent most of his life cloistered within a cloistered institution. He sacrificed nearly everything to his intellectual calling... more »
May 25, 2023 | Birth of romanticism. When polymaths, poets, philosophers, and playwrights lived, argued, and loved in the German town of Jena ... more »
May 24, 2023 | For more than 20 years, J.C. presided over the back page of the TLS with wit, weirdness, and waspish provocation... more »
May 23, 2023 | Failure comes in many forms: physical, social, biological. Facing it humbles us, and so we lead better lives. So argues Costica Bradatan... more »
May 22, 2023 | “The problem of the world is this,” Orwell told a friend late in life. “Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”... more »
May 19, 2023 | Elias Canetti was a scholar, but not an academic. He wasn’t a novelist or poet, though he wrote that way. He was many writers at once... more »
May 18, 2023 | Bruno Schulz's stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. And his death — appalling and senseless — defies meaning... more »
May 17, 2023 | No nepo babies and no assholes — in the corny, cheerful world of Tom Hanks, moviemaking is earnest, joyous, well-compensated work... more »
May 16, 2023 | The American idea of continental philosophers as speculative, irrational mystics dates to the 1953 International Congress of Philosophy, in Brussels... more »
May 15, 2023 | Shakespeare's body of work is complex and confounding; so is the task of tracking down his biography. Who was he? Who cares?... more »
May 12, 2023 | Is multiculturalism an oxymoron? In an age of atomization a new book makes a case for cross-cultural transmission... more »
May 11, 2023 | Lauren Berlant’s writing flirts with meaning. Rhythmic and atmospheric, it’s somewhere between incoherence and poetry... more »
May 10, 2023 | “They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people?... more »
May 9, 2023 | Speaking, writing, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, radio, television, PR, A.I.: How we know what we know, and how that's changed... more »
May 8, 2023 | Too flinty and realistic to be an aesthete, Shirley Hazzard nevertheless pursued a life steeped in aesthetic pleasure... more »
May 5, 2023 | Rorty vs. MacIntyre: One was an ecumenical leftist, the other a powerful critic of liberalism. What matters about their lifelong argument?... more »
May 4, 2023 | Ask a philosopher of a certain age to reflect on the state of the discipline, and the response is generally dour. Philip Kitcher is no exception... more »
May 3, 2023 | Not long before descending into insanity, Nietzsche was moved to tears in Turin at a concert of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bizet... more »
May 2, 2023 | Some of Osip Mandelstam’s poems are frivolous, others gnomic. Most are memorable, and hypnotically musical... more »
May 1, 2023 | For decades, some bright minds have been consumed by a mundane problem: How to go viral on the internet... more »