Sept. 30, 2024 | A New Yorker staff writer takes a hard look at New York’s rave scene, and develops a cynicism — not of the scene — but of our literary culture... more »
Sept. 27, 2024 | Could it be that the story of money is the story of humanity itself, from 18,000 BC to the present? Not exactly... more »
Sept. 26, 2024 | One hermeneutic to rule them all. With sparring medievalists, Marxists, and right-leaning fans, Tolkienists are a fractious bunch... more »
Sept. 25, 2024 | In the university, philosophy is narrow and familiar. Becca Rothfeld shows that it can be extravagant, imaginative, and ambitious... more »
Sept. 24, 2024 | Culture in the sense we have understood it is eroding. Time to mourn – and to celebrate... more »
Sept. 23, 2024 | To be young when Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop Art and Minimalism was to know the art world before the art market... more »
Sept. 20, 2024 | “Violence as Fanon conceived it, then, was a cure for the almost incurable. It was a weapon in the hands of non-beings, a way out of nothingness”... more »
Sept. 19, 2024 | Anchovies, a dish of frugality, has represented excess — both “food for the poor” and “the famous meat of drunkards,” circa 1600... more »
Sept. 18, 2024 | James Lovelock upended our understanding of planetary science. Then his contrarianism turned in unreliable directions... more »
Sept. 17, 2024 | Auden’s desire for isolation. The ideas that brought him to the pinnacle of his fame also led him to leave England... more »
Sept. 16, 2024 | Yuval Noah Harari’s take on AI: “a fuzzy batch of misguided animal fables and often-unpersuasive reflections on technology”... more »
Sept. 13, 2024 | Shakespeare and Freud: What is the proper relationship between psychoanalysis and literature?... more »
Sept. 12, 2024 | Gauguin’s wild 1888 visit to Arles came to an end when Van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at him — then came at him with a razor... more »
Sept. 11, 2024 | East-West trade once went by sea via India, shipping pepper, ivory, cotton, and rhubarb. Is the historical Silk Road a myth? ... more »
Sept. 10, 2024 | Self-help meets the ancien régime in The Habsburg Way, which counsels having lots of children, dying well, and having a memorable funeral... more »
Sept. 9, 2024 | Sponges, corals, and cephalopods are very different from human beings. Do they nevertheless share aspects of our mental lives?... more »
Sept. 6, 2024 | Marilynne Robinson, pillar of moral seriousness, takes on the book of Genesis. Surprisingly, the result is dogmatism... more »
Sept. 5, 2024 | Some academics insist that children’s literature can be written only by children. "Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers"... more »
Sept. 4, 2024 | Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor does not sound like children’s literature — yet it was for W.H. Auden... more »
Sept. 3, 2024 | What is most indelible about Simone Weil is her mix of cosmic empathy and aggressive intolerance... more »
Sept. 2, 2024 | Monstrous motherhood. What can we learn from women who’ve abandoned their children?... more »
Aug. 30, 2024 | What it means to be a stone. Rocks can behave in ways that defy our imagination, and increase our access to awe... more »
Aug. 29, 2024 | We are all storytellers, certain assumptions embedded in our discursive maneuvers. Has that ability degraded?... more »
Aug. 28, 2024 | Some writers are at their best when denouncing idiocy rather than praising greatness. Consider Christopher Hitchens ... more »
Aug. 27, 2024 | Few poets have suffered more from the early overestimation of critics than Delmore Schwartz. He never quite recovered... more »