July 14, 2025 | As Annie Dillard put it, “the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany”... more »
July 11, 2025 | The Salt Path is the latest memoir with an author accused of fabrication or embellishment. Why does it keep happening?... more »
July 10, 2025 | “Novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind”... more »
July 9, 2025 | Born into a Mormon family in Utah, the pioneering lesbian poet May Swenson found her footing in Greenwich Village... more »
July 8, 2025 | A “trance evangelist,” an Indian guru, Andrew Jackson, Oprah — in America, charisma takes on many forms... more »
July 7, 2025 | Paradise Lost was not acclaimed by its first readers. Then came John Dryden, who popularized and distorted Milton's masterpiece... more »
July 4, 2025 | Bocaccio, a relentlessly autobiographical author, put his fickleness and neuroticism on display in his work... more »
July 3, 2025 | Have you heard about the classicist who wants to do away with classics? Meet Walter Scheidel... more »
July 2, 2025 | Plato has been pressed into service as the avatar of an intellectual tradition so often that it's easy to forget he was a person... more »
July 1, 2025 | William F. Buckley Jr. embodied conservatism in America. Yet he had trouble defining what it is or ought to be... more »
June 30, 2025 | At Random House, Toni Morrison was an exacting editor. She turned her authors’ talent, and her own, into cultural and literary power... more »
June 27, 2025 | Was Virginia Woolf a depressed recluse? Or a sociable type who enjoyed intimate dinner parties? A new collection of letters suggests the latter... more »
June 26, 2025 | Hubris and design thinking: The history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference... more »
June 25, 2025 | Steven Shapin: “The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people”... more »
June 24, 2025 | Those in Gen Z are having less sex, and when they do have it, they are doing so in arcane arrangements. Is that a problem?... more »
June 23, 2025 | Technology elevates efficiency over friction and seamlessness over inconvenience. Is that a bad thing?... more »
June 20, 2025 | In America, has the backlash against Marxism been more influential than the theory itself? ... more »
June 19, 2025 | Tom Crewe on the “ridiculous, sententious” writing of Ocean Vuong: “It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life”... more »
June 18, 2025 | Thomas Mallon has mastered the bitchy aperçu and brisk, summarizing detail. In short, he's an ideal diarist... more »
June 17, 2025 | Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker seek to parochialize the human, showing that our activities may just be a cosmic sideshow... more »
June 16, 2025 | An architect’s eccentric residential design, a manifesto house, is a rare instance of an artist putting polemic into practice... more »
June 13, 2025 | The Divine Comedy, repeatedly rescued from obscurity, has long perched awkwardly between canonical reverence and cultural neglect... more »
June 12, 2025 | Analytic philosophy offers the fantasy of free inquiry, but really just leans on “common sense” to justify the status quo — or so charge its critics... more »
June 11, 2025 | In 1959, Richard Ellmann published a biography of James Joyce. The genre would never be the same ... more »
June 10, 2025 | To the ancients, revolution was a perversion. To French philosophes, it marked human progress. How did that change in meaning come about? ... more »