Shakespeare and Freud: What is the proper relation between psychoanalysis and literature?
... more »Sept. 12, 2024 | Gauguin’s wild 1888 visit to Arles came to an end when Van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at him — then came at him with a razor... more »
Sept. 11, 2024 | East-West trade once went by sea via India, shipping pepper, ivory, cotton, and rhubarb. Is the historical Silk Road a myth? ... more »
Sept. 10, 2024 | Self-help meets the ancien régime in The Habsburg Way, which counsels having lots of children, dying well, and having a memorable funeral... more »
Sept. 9, 2024 | Sponges, corals, and cephalopods are very different from human beings. Do they nevertheless share aspects of our mental lives?... more »
Sept. 6, 2024 | Marilynne Robinson, pillar of moral seriousness, takes on the book of Genesis. Surprisingly, the result is dogmatism... more »
Sept. 5, 2024 | Some academics insist that children’s literature can be written only by children. "Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers"... more »
Sept. 4, 2024 | Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor does not sound like children’s literature — yet it was for W.H. Auden... more »
Sept. 3, 2024 | What is most indelible about Simone Weil is her mix of cosmic empathy and aggressive intolerance... more »
Sept. 2, 2024 | Monstrous motherhood. What can we learn from women who’ve abandoned their children?... more »
Aug. 30, 2024 | What it means to be a stone. Rocks can behave in ways that defy our imagination, and increase our access to awe... more »
Aug. 29, 2024 | We are all storytellers, certain assumptions embedded in our discursive maneuvers. Has that ability degraded?... more »
Aug. 28, 2024 | Some writers are at their best when denouncing idiocy rather than praising greatness. Consider Christopher Hitchens ... more »
Aug. 27, 2024 | Few poets have suffered more from the early overestimation of critics than Delmore Schwartz. He never quite recovered... more »
Aug. 26, 2024 | The "1812 Overture," Tchaikovsky’s best-known work, is a gaudy monstrosity. One more paradox in a life full of them.... more »
Aug. 23, 2024 | Guy Davenport knew that he was working at the end of a tradition. He was the last high modernist... more »
Aug. 22, 2024 | Equality is at the center of liberalism, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But the relationship has long been fraught... more »
Aug. 21, 2024 | Nietzsche was a vehement critic of every kind of egalitarianism. Odd that his reputation was rescued by leftist scholars... more »
Aug. 20, 2024 | Ideology, totality, utopia, form: Frederic Jameson, now 90, has never wavered in his obsessions... more »
Aug. 19, 2024 | The desire to unite art and life. The Russian and Soviet avant-garde wasn’t a school or a style. It was a mentality... more »
Aug. 16, 2024 | The Sylvia Plath stigma. Why are her female readers portrayed as unserious, depressive fangirls?... more »
Aug. 15, 2024 | Dickinson and Darwin. The poet's and the naturalist’s lives overlapped, as did their desire to synthesize the material world... more »
Aug. 14, 2024 | Fanny and Louis. She was wild and tiny and central to his literary achievements... more »
Aug. 13, 2024 | Cromwell: The name redounds as shorthand for villainy and political skill. The truth is far more interesting... more »
Aug. 12, 2024 | We’re all Faustians now. What’s at stake isn’t so much our souls as our privacy, along with much else... more »