June 9, 2025 | The 7,000 languages spoken in the world today can be divided into 140 families. The languages most of us speak belong to just five... more »
June 6, 2025 | How do we prove something is true? Tools like “statistical significance” can introduce arbitrariness to the establishment of facts... more »
June 5, 2025 | Literary theory’s method wars are a bleakly irrelevant sideshow, a panic over living-room decor while the house burns... more »
June 4, 2025 | Is beauty more powerful than argument? Robert Gooding-Williams believes it’s powerful enough to refute racism... more »
June 3, 2025 | "Flaming and undisciplined genius." The uneasy yet fecund sibling rivalry of Gwen and Augustus John... more »
June 2, 2025 | Robert Crumb was born into a dysfunctional family beset by alcoholism, abuse, and incest. Comics saved him... more »
May 30, 2025 | The many Machiavellis. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Carl Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries... more »
May 29, 2025 | The liberal university is collapsing because liberalism as America's governing consensus is collapsing. David Rieff explains... more »
May 28, 2025 | “Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s”... more »
May 27, 2025 | An existentialist before the label existed, Blaise Pascal regarded humanity as simultaneously great and wretched, noble and despicable... more »
May 26, 2025 | What is art for? It's a way to explore feeling without creating “inescapable consequences,” says Brian Eno... more »
May 23, 2025 | Artists don't need to declare their beliefs to use religious symbols, rich in meaning as they are. But we want them to be saying something... more »
May 22, 2025 | What would it take for 21st-century humans to learn once again how to see the cosmos as alive?... more »
May 21, 2025 | To Thomas Mann, Goethe was the “representative of the bourgeois age.” But he was less representative than prophetic... more »
May 20, 2025 | Christopher Hill is the scholar who brought history from below to the Oxford high table... more »
May 19, 2025 | Paul Gauguin abandoned his wife, five children, and Paris for French Polynesia. "The accomplishments of the selfish are real"... more »
May 16, 2025 | “All civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear — but, like any repression, waste returns in fantastical forms”... more »
May 15, 2025 | The history of free speech is a history of accidents — reforms that gave rise to unintended consequences... more »
May 14, 2025 | What made Mark Twain so irascible, profound, and unpredictable? A new 1,100-page biography has no clue... more »
May 13, 2025 | Is Trumpism fascism? The question has caused a deep rift among left-wing historians... more »
May 12, 2025 | “I believe in Spinoza’s God,” Einstein said in 1929. What exactly he meant has been debated ever since... more »
May 9, 2025 | At the center of the midcentury literati were the Paget Sisters, identical twins who were courted by Camus and Sartre... more »
May 8, 2025 | In 1691, the Athenian Mercury started soliciting questions from readers. Was this the birth of the modern advice columnist? ... more »
May 7, 2025 | What Gutenberg wrought. It seems unfair to pin the horrors and glories of modernity on one man, though it won’t stop us from trying... more »
May 6, 2025 | Helen Garner went from being a plagiarist of her own life to an acclaimed celebrator of the poetic quotidian... more »