Feb. 21, 2023 | Grotesque, comical, cruel: Kafka's drawings show that he was serious about the visual as well as the verbal ... more »
Feb. 20, 2023 | How was it that idea of the cosmos was invented in the ancient Greek city of Miletus in about 600BC? Credit two men: Thales and Anaximander... more »
Feb. 18, 2023 | When monobrows were all rage and cosmetics were an ethical quandary. Viewing the female body through a medieval lens ... more »
Feb. 17, 2023 | Martha Nussbaum on animals: “Living beings don’t want to just be put in a state of satisfaction. They want to be active architects of their own lives” ... more »
Feb. 16, 2023 | What is Enlightenment? A new answer to Kant’s question lurks in an investigation of a dozen 18th-century best sellers... more »
Feb. 15, 2023 | Think-tank Thucydides. In cool prose, Robert Kagan makes the case that military intervention is sometimes the only responsible option ... more »
Feb. 14, 2023 | The Wonders of Things Created and Rarities of Matters Existent. Largely forgotten, this 700-year-old text paints a world of alchemy and amulets and a divine cosmos... more »
Feb. 13, 2023 | Is literary criticism a political force? Do interpretations of Victorian novels really alter the culture? Justin Sider is skeptical... more »
Feb. 11, 2023 | We know that Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital on October 7, 1849. Just about everything else about his premature demise remains a mystery... more »
Feb. 10, 2023 | Palo Alto is a new Olympus, where flip-flopped geniuses save the world. Or so holds a common misperception... more »
Feb. 9, 2023 | What Robert Kaplan learned from the Iraq War: the folly of the modern notion that every human conflict is fixable... more »
Feb. 8, 2023 | Buckminster Fuller was seen as a jack of all trades but master of just one: self-promotion... more »
Feb. 7, 2023 | Jane and Anna Maria Porter are the most famous 19th-century British novelists you’ve never heard of... more »
Feb. 6, 2023 | Human institutions are rarely, if ever, all good or all bad. So is it possible to draw up a balance sheet on the legacy of colonialism? ... more »
Feb. 4, 2023 | As a critic, Richard Gilman was ferociously precise. As a teacher, he was agitating and inspiring. As a father, he was... complicated... more »
Feb. 3, 2023 | “The miniaturist of modernism.” Short of breath and short of time, Katherine Mansfield wrote in response to her life’s own brevity... more »
Feb. 2, 2023 | "There are two ways to write didactic fiction: with a straight face or playing it for laughs. Rushdie has always gone for the laughs"... more »
Feb. 1, 2023 | The “Outrider” tradition of peripatetic experimental artists extends from Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to the poet Anne Waldman... more »
Jan. 31, 2023 | Was John Keats a thinker similar to Karl Marx, but working in a radically different mode? Jacobin makes the case... more »
Jan. 30, 2023 | What constitutes an act of mourning? For Jonathan Lear, it is an attempt to turn loss into gain by imaginative alchemy... more »
Jan. 28, 2023 | Hemingway had four wives, Bellow five, Mailer six. Not all literary marriages are alike; each is unhappy in its own way ... more »
Jan. 27, 2023 | Epicurus was no debauched hedonist. The greatest pleasure, he thought, wasn't fame or fortune, but freedom from anxiety... more »
Jan. 26, 2023 | The modern man is struggling. Do his below-par outcomes deserve attention and policy solutions?... more »
Jan. 25, 2023 | Chekhov's stories have small titles — “A Trifle,” “A Misfortune,” “A Trivial Incident" — but carry big stakes... more »
Jan. 24, 2023 | Taking African agency seriously. Exaggerating the influence of colonialism, Olúfemi Táíwò argues, can disrespect Africans... more »