Jan. 4, 2024 | Ostriches beheaded, horses made into consuls. Embellishing the scandalous tales of Roman Emperors doesn’t make them useless... more »
Jan. 3, 2024 | Jill Lepore: “The internet is an astonishing product of human ingenuity and an incredible archive. But … it has not realized the promise of democratization”... more »
Jan. 2, 2024 | The way to get ahead in economics, Robert Solow quipped, is to provide a “brilliant argument in favor of an absurd conclusion.” Has anything changed?... more »
Jan. 1, 2024 | Wokeness, anti-wokeness, and the enduring allure of victim status. Geoff Shullenberger on why identity politics isn’t going anywhere... more »
Dec. 29, 2023 | Christian Wiman’s religious vision. God is more than us, more than we can ever know, and in that unknowing we find freedom... more »
Dec. 28, 2023 | Allen Ginsberg seems to have kept everything, even letters to the American Nazi Party. “I heard you want to kill me, can we meet and discuss it?!?”... more »
Dec. 27, 2023 | America’s founding philosopher? John Locke is central to the nation’s political thought, however historically dubious his place is... more »
Dec. 26, 2023 | The Russian Revolution changed the lives of a third of humanity for better or for worse. Robert Service is its indefatigable chronicler... more »
Dec. 25, 2023 | Sly Stone and the ever expanding influence – funk, fusion, new wave, pop – of one of the world’s most notoriously unproductive people... more »
Dec. 22, 2023 | During the Renaissance, beauty secrets were democratized, and women strove to become works of art... more »
Dec. 21, 2023 | Despair is painful, miserable, to be avoided. But as Kirkegaard understood, it is also essential... more »
Dec. 20, 2023 | Can you determine if a Warhol is an authentic Warhol? Depends on whom you ask... more »
Dec. 19, 2023 | Goo, gunk, gloop, slime. Whatever you call it, it is as fundamental to living beings as oxygen and sunlight... more »
Dec. 18, 2023 | Pessimistic fatalist that he is, John Gray sees new Leviathans, dangerous Leviathans on the march... more »
Dec. 15, 2023 | Willa Cather, who loathed biographers and critics, placed every trap, pitfall, and barrier in their path... more »
Dec. 14, 2023 | Notebooks by any name – rapiaria, zibaldoni, memoriali, giornali – represent a history of thinking on paper... more »
Dec. 13, 2023 | Falsehoods proliferate online because the history of human culture is a history of fake things... more »
Dec. 12, 2023 | The history of Marxism is written as either triumph or tragedy. Both approaches prevent an honest reckoning... more »
Dec. 11, 2023 | James Whistler wasn’t one to turn the other cheek. When John Ruskin panned his painting, Whistler sued... more »
Dec. 8, 2023 | The topic of how one’s life connects to one’s aesthetic judgments is a fraught one. Consider Sasha Frere-Jones... more »
Dec. 7, 2023 | “We can understand a culture by what it calls monstrous; the monster stands for everything a society attempts to cast out”... more »
Dec. 6, 2023 | Why did Janet Malcolm, late in life, confess to a prolonged extramarital affair with her New Yorker editor, decades after the fact?... more »
Dec. 5, 2023 | “As the centuries passed, what men of erudition had once considered ‘magic’ increasingly began to look like ‘technology’”... more »
Dec. 4, 2023 | Derek Parfit believed we should live more impersonally. By ignoring his friends and family, he lived up — or, rather, down — to this principle... more »
Dec. 1, 2023 | In 1966, Philip Rieff labeled and lambasted “therapeutic culture.” It is ever more apparent he was on to something... more »