Feb. 9, 2024 | “She is crazy!” Charles de Gaulle said of Simone Weil. That was a common view. Impractical and odd, she was also undeniably admirable... more »
Feb. 8, 2024 | Wolves howl, gibbons sing, dolphins whistle, cows moo, cats meow. But do animals talk?... more »
Feb. 7, 2024 | Willa Cather was nothing if not dedicated to her craft: “I could simply become a fountain pen and have done with it — a conduit for ink to run through”... more »
Feb. 6, 2024 | Frantz Fanon’s influence has not waned, even though the culture's ideological space for his ideas at large is minuscule... more »
Feb. 5, 2024 | Hope to cope with a world given over to “permanent crisis”? Modern strategies include detoxing, bingeing, filtering, and ghosting... more »
Feb. 2, 2024 | “At a moment when everything in America seemed to be accelerating, Thoreau … came up with a counterproposal: slow down”... more »
Feb. 1, 2024 | Memoir, autotheory, the personal essay — today’s first-personalism is a dark mutation of literary style, holds Anna Kornbluh... more »
Jan. 31, 2024 | A Lower East Side gallerist: “The art world is the way it is because not everyone has access to it”... more »
Jan. 30, 2024 | Rachmaninoff in America. In contrast to many of his peers, Rachmaninoff is the one who left Russia but stayed Russian... more »
Jan. 29, 2024 | Thomas Hardy is celebrated for his portrayals of women, leaving even him baffled at how he alienated the women in his life... more »
Jan. 26, 2024 | J.L. Austin brought a piercing clarity to his discussions. Among philosophers at Oxford, he wasn’t alone... more »
Jan. 25, 2024 | Russians in space. “The pantheon of cosmists includes numerous thinkers who propounded the preposterous as indubitable”... more »
Jan. 24, 2024 | Lou Reed loved misery – he embraced it, wallowed in it, and made the rest of us dance to it... more »
Jan. 23, 2024 | Frantz Fanon, foremost theorist of anticolonial struggle, was a subtler thinker than many of his contemporaries... more »
Jan. 22, 2024 | "The schism between ‘woke’ and more traditional left-wing attitudes reflects more than a divergence over style or tactics”... more »
Jan. 19, 2024 | Lavinia Greenlaw’s essays are curatorial and taxonomic. How much of the world do we know merely by seeing it?... more »
Jan. 18, 2024 | Keats was in a bind. He was penniless, homeless, and tubercular. No one would accompany him to the warm climate he needed... more »
Jan. 17, 2024 | All hail Guy Davenport, who praised androgyny in the National Review and translated the Greeks as he munched fried bologna... more »
Jan. 16, 2024 | To the extent that fatness is unfairly conflated with sickness, can a philosopher cure fatphobia? Kate Manne is trying ... more »
Jan. 15, 2024 | "Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt.” Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk is one of those books... more »
Jan. 12, 2024 | Free will is an illusion, argues much of 21st-century science. The neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell begs to differ... more »
Jan. 11, 2024 | The conglomeration of publishing explains some of our literary culture. But does it really explain all of it?... more »
Jan. 10, 2024 | Virginia Woolf likened her to a “giant cucumber” with “the freakishness of an elf” — but does Margaret Cavendish deserve a closer look?... more »
Jan. 9, 2024 | Katherine Mansfield flirted with the Bloomsbury set at their parties — then plotted how to crush them... more »
Jan. 8, 2024 | “Although the concept of equality may seem intuitive, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down with any precision”... more »