March 15, 2024 | Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
March 14, 2024 | Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
March 13, 2024 | If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »
March 12, 2024 | “It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »
March 11, 2024 | “There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »
March 8, 2024 | Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »
March 7, 2024 | Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »
March 6, 2024 | Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »
March 5, 2024 | Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »
March 4, 2024 | Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »
March 1, 2024 | Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »
Feb. 29, 2024 | “Habermas is a blockhead. It is simply impossible to tell what kind of damage he is still going to cause in the future.” So wrote Karl Popper in 1969... more »
Feb. 28, 2024 | Christopher Hitchens was renowned and reviled for his pugnacity. But key to his style was the eloquent rejoinder... more »
Feb. 27, 2024 | Where Norman Mailer fulminated, Ellen Willis pontificated, and Stanley Crouch threw punches: The Village Voice... more »
Feb. 26, 2024 | Mid-century modern conundrum: Once American takes on Danish design caught on, Danish furniture makers started copying them... more »
Feb. 23, 2024 | Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »
Feb. 22, 2024 | As a critic, Michiko Kakutani was fearsome and discerning. As an author of inert buzzword-laden books, she's pitiable... more »
Feb. 21, 2024 | Are you a feminist killjoy? For Judith Butler, that entails the joy of struggling against injustice... more »
Feb. 20, 2024 | Few writers have so deftly distilled the cloistered sensibility of the Small Circulation Lit Mag as Lauren Oyler... more »
Feb. 19, 2024 | The legend of Byron’s libertinism was propagated foremost by Byron. The fashionable parties, seduction techniques, and knowing small talk were all carefully calibrated... more »
Feb. 16, 2024 | Copyrights and wrongs. A well-intentioned idea has become a Frankenstein that’s now out of control... more »
Feb. 15, 2024 | A memoir of an open marriage was marketed as upbeat, sassy, and liberated. In reality it was just sad... more »
Feb. 14, 2024 | We are all in favor of equality: But equality of what? Of whom? Darrin McMahon on a powerful and contested idea... more »
Feb. 13, 2024 | Terry Eagleton on Hegel’s vision of things. “The only viable future is one with its roots in the present, not one that is parachuted into it by dreams or diktats”... more »
Feb. 12, 2024 | Hannah Arendt was shaped more by Kant than anything she learned in Heidegger’s lectures or his bed... more »