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 »
Nov. 30, 2023 | How four women – Arendt, de Beauvoir, Rand, Weil – concluded that philosophy had to be utterly reimagined... more »
Nov. 29, 2023 | Schoenberg, stigmatization. The argument that classical music took a wrong turn in the middle of the 20th century is downright wrong... more »
Nov. 28, 2023 | The chapter. It dates to 13th-century narrative units in the Gospels, before the separation of sentences and even of words... more »
Nov. 27, 2023 | Humans make machines, and machines remake humans. Small devices have revolutionized humanity in big ways... more »
Nov. 24, 2023 | For the 11th-century Benedictine monk Saint Anselm, reading was a form of communion. It still is... more »
Nov. 23, 2023 | Who was the greatest writer of the Latin American Boom? Not Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, but José Donoso... more »
Nov. 22, 2023 | The liberal’s dilemma. Are they suffering from their own success, or from the fact that liberalism has never been tried?... more »
Nov. 21, 2023 | Dickens the devious? A new biography stretches credulity to portray the writer as pathologically deceitful... more »
Nov. 20, 2023 | Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more »
Nov. 17, 2023 | “To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more »
Nov. 16, 2023 | Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more »
Nov. 15, 2023 | George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more »
Nov. 14, 2023 | Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more »
Nov. 13, 2023 | Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more »
Nov. 10, 2023 | John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more »
Nov. 9, 2023 | Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more »
Nov. 8, 2023 | In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more »
Nov. 7, 2023 | Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more »
Nov. 6, 2023 | Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more »
Nov. 3, 2023 | “Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more »
Nov. 2, 2023 | Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more »
Nov. 1, 2023 | Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more »
Oct. 31, 2023 | Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more »