Dec. 12, 2024 | Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »
Dec. 11, 2024 | In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »
Dec. 10, 2024 | “The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »
Dec. 9, 2024 | Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »
Dec. 6, 2024 | “A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »
Dec. 5, 2024 | Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »
Dec. 4, 2024 | What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »
Dec. 3, 2024 | Jackson Lears is among the most original historians of our time. He chronicles cranks and conjurers... more »
Dec. 2, 2024 | Perry Anderson, pillar of Britain's Marxist left, tackles a thorny question: What really caused World War I?... more »
Nov. 29, 2024 | Many atrocities have been committed in the name of communism. But communism is not an atrocity. It is a tragedy... more »
Nov. 28, 2024 | Nostalgia, greed, and streaming have taken hold of the music industry. Do we even want new music anymore?... more »
Nov. 27, 2024 | The power of ignorance. “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Mark Lilla explains... more »
Nov. 26, 2024 | Walter Benjamin in Capri. An extended holiday helped shape one of the most influential diagnoses of modernity... more »
Nov. 25, 2024 | Nostalgia began not as an emotion but as a disease. Now it afflicts us all, with great political consequence... more »
Nov. 22, 2024 | Richard Dawkins has long been the doyen of grandiloquent science writing. His new book feels like the end of an era... more »
Nov. 21, 2024 | America’s “Bone Wars”: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns... more »
Nov. 20, 2024 | In the absurd guise of Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire took devastating aim at his real foil: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz... more »
Nov. 19, 2024 | Milton, dismembered. In 1790 his coffin was pillaged. Several thousand people bought what they believed to be one of his teeth... more »
Nov. 18, 2024 | The love affairs of Thomas Hardy followed a pattern: He would give his beloved a ring and then break off the engagement when he met someone else... more »
Nov. 15, 2024 | No matter how brilliant or original their work, environmental historians face a challenge: Are they just doomsayers?... more »
Nov. 14, 2024 | “Gluttony is the forechamber of lust.” In premodern Europe, how to eat was a way to answer questions about how to be... more »
Nov. 13, 2024 | “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Joan Didion infuriated Eve Babitz... more »
Nov. 12, 2024 | Plunder and provenance. The origins of many museum collections are scandalous, criminal, and impossible to reduce to any one story... more »
Nov. 11, 2024 | The bubonic plague’s origins were in the Tien Shan mountains in modern Kyrgyzstan. It spread not via rats and ships, but with gerbils... more »
Nov. 8, 2024 | Cynicism and despair make one seem sophisticated. David Graeber taught intellectuals a riskier commitment: hope... more »