April 23, 2025 | Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »
April 22, 2025 | The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »
April 21, 2025 | In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »
April 18, 2025 | “It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »
April 17, 2025 | Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »
April 16, 2025 | Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »
April 15, 2025 | Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »
April 14, 2025 | The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »
April 11, 2025 | The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »
April 10, 2025 | The evolution of teeth. What began in the ocean half a billion years ago has led us to the dentist's chair... more »
April 9, 2025 | For Agnes Callard, the philosophical life demands relentless self-questioning. But she has little to say about the conditions that make such inquiry possible... more »
April 8, 2025 | James C. Scott called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’” Why were his ideas so compelling to libertarians?... more »
April 7, 2025 | Alexander Solzhenitsyn was both artist and prophet. He was far more persuasive as the former than as the latter... more »
April 4, 2025 | Melancholy need not be understood as fatalism or decadent withdrawal. For W.G. Sebald, it was a form of resistance... more »
April 3, 2025 | "People tell me I get overexcited," Philip Hoare tells us. "Well, bollocks to that." When it comes to William Blake, his enthusiasm knows no bounds... more »
April 2, 2025 | At the Great Siege of Malta, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights were suicidally brave in the defense of a barren island. Why?... more »
April 1, 2025 | The critic Andrea Long Chu gets away with baggy associative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance... more »
March 31, 2025 | Henry James in Palm Beach. “Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand”... more »
March 28, 2025 | The prevailing view of Hegel is that he regarded history as a simplistic march of progress. The prevailing view is wrong... more »
March 27, 2025 | Czeslaw Milosz agonized over whether to defect from Stalinist Poland: “What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile”... more »
March 26, 2025 | There were methods for slowing Big Tech’s overhaul of our social world — but they are too little, too late... more »
March 25, 2025 | What is it about brutally inhospitable mountains that can move us so totally and instinctively? Nan Shepherd called it “the tang of height”... more »
March 24, 2025 | The benefits of a bad memory. To remember the important things, we have to forget the inessential... more »
March 21, 2025 | Was Curzio Malaparte — nationalist and cosmopolite, pacifist and bellicist, elitist and populist — the quintessential European of his time?... more »
March 20, 2025 | “A book was like fresh air," said Adam Michnik. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad.” The CIA was deft at smuggling them behind the Iron Curtain... more »