Nov. 4, 2022 | The novelist Amina Cain’s first foray into nonfiction is light reading — so light, in fact, it puts you to sleep ... more »
Nov. 3, 2022 | Asphyxiation by flower petals, macrophallocracy, 22-course dinners: Was Heliogabalus by far the most depraved of Rome's emperors? ... more »
Nov. 2, 2022 | In an Agatha Christie novel, "violent murder might happen at any moment—and yet the meals and tea still arrive on time”... more »
Nov. 1, 2022 | Bob Dylan’s new book, like his music, features scarlet women, jughead criminals, wanton judges, and unscrupulous gamblers ... more »
Oct. 31, 2022 | In the time of slavery, ghost stories were a way of keeping Black children safe from a host of terrors... more »
Oct. 29, 2022 | A journey into the interior of a cell — goopy cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, nucleus — offers hard-won lessons ... more »
Oct. 28, 2022 | Lee Siegel: “It is nearly impossible to have a rational argument that is not built out of the sticks and stones of emotion”... more »
Oct. 27, 2022 | Everyone has a story, sure, but don’t be seduced by the “mindless valorization of storytelling,” warns Peter Brooks.... more »
Oct. 26, 2022 | Self-injury as a form of expression can offer agency to the artist. But what's in it for the audience?... more »
Oct. 25, 2022 | Is thinking a sense, “just like sight, taste, hearing, feeling or touch”? The German philosopher Markus Gabriel makes the case... more »
Oct. 24, 2022 | In his 20s, Darryl Pinckney had a guide through Manhattan's literary life: Elizabeth Hardwick... more »
Oct. 22, 2022 | A literary love triangle. In the summer of 1910, things got complicated among Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Frances Gregg... more »
Oct. 21, 2022 | In 1974, Jan Morris became the highest-profile Brit to change genders. Every line of today's battles was scripted then... more »
Oct. 20, 2022 | Does moral progress advance in the same way as scientific and technological progress? Not exactly... more »
Oct. 19, 2022 | “Movement never lies.” Martha Graham developed new ways for dancers to move, and to say new things with their bodies ... more »
Oct. 18, 2022 | The challenge of Casanova: What’s left to say, in 2022, about one of history’s most notorious sexual predators?... more »
Oct. 17, 2022 | John le Carré left behind brilliant, untidy letters for his biographers. More unexpected are the memoirs of his longtime mistress... more »
Oct. 15, 2022 | How did young Charles Darwin transform from diffident specimen collector to scientific theorist? Luck had a lot to do with it ... more »
Oct. 14, 2022 | On too many campuses, philosophical inquiry ends with self-help bromides. Good for enrollment, bad for the mind ... more »
Oct. 13, 2022 | A great editor, such as Jann Wenner, requires several qualities: an understanding of audience, an ability to spot small stirrings, good taste, money ... more »
Oct. 12, 2022 | T.S. Eliot, popularizer. He wrote for magazines on middlebrow topics and once brought almost 14,000 Minnesotans to a sports stadium for a lecture ... more »
Oct. 11, 2022 | What drives cultural change? Status, according to W. David Marx – the need for it and the fear of losing it ... more »
Oct. 10, 2022 | Has there ever been a more confounding case of intellectual celebrity than Thomas Piketty? ... more »
Oct. 8, 2022 | In his fiction, Kafka satirized artistic representation. In his life, he immersed himself in images ... more »
Oct. 7, 2022 | Abolish the family! The nuclear family is a terrible way to organize and fulfill our emotional and economic needs, a new book argues ... more »