Arts & Letters Daily search results for “john dewey” (254)
2016-08-02 | A philosophy of education. Influenced by Hegel and Darwin, John Dewey launched a revolution that overthrew the methods of the day. Hannah Arendt was not pleased more »
2016-01-23 | John Dewey argued that publics never simply exist; they are created. Intellectuals should create the public for which they write. Few of them do more »
2011-01-01 | Step aside, Dale Peck. When it comes to sheer brutishness, no book critic compares to John Wilson Croker, who wrote the review that killed John Keats more »
2017-11-11 | The invention of John Wayne. He was hard, brutal, anachronistic, a rebuke to the softness of postwar affluence. He was a creation of John Ford more »
2013-05-31 | Long a landlubbers? province, the arts and social sciences can learn much from the planet's watery wilderness, writes John Gillis more »
2015-04-27 | John Gray, well-versed in literature of all brows, is among the best-read contemporary philosophers. He's also the bleakest more »
2018-07-19 | Literary theory is choked with jargon and oracular prose, which makes John Farrell's achievement all the more remarkable more »
2022-11-30 | "Can We Survive Technology?" John von Neumann posed the question in 1955. We still await an answer more »
2013-07-11 | John Gray against humanism. Influenced by Schopenhauer, Conrad, and an abiding cynicism, the philosopher has lost hope for mankind more »
2014-10-08 | The essay, as form, is part evidentiary proof, part amateurish sally. It's always been that way, explains John Jeremiah Sullivan more »
2011-01-01 | 'President Obama doesn''t pursue a foreign policy bent on global domination like his predecessors? Think again, says John Mearsheimer' more »
2022-09-23 | The last days of John Keats. He suffered greatly, self-medicated heavily, and wrote no poetry more »
2013-08-01 | Where the seashore is, history begins. John Gillis's scholarly advice: Never turn your back on the ocean more »
2014-06-12 | The American short story has long been dominated by small, minimalist tales of disaffection, longing, and boredom. Blame John Updike more »
2013-06-08 | John Gray ? glorious pessimist, passive nihilist ? is the great Schopenhauerian European Buddhist of our age. Simon Critchley explains more »
2015-01-20 | John Brockman's Edge question for 2015 asks 182 intellectuals: What do you think about machines that think? more »
2010-01-01 | 'John Brockman''s Edge question for 2010 asks over a hundred intellectuals, "Is the Internet changing the way you think?"' more »
2020-05-04 | John Carey has always been a strange critic: an anti-elitist don, avuncular but deadly, amiable yet formidable more »
2022-05-03 | Dali's "Christ of Saint John" inspires many responses, not least the urge to vandalize it more »
2022-02-10 | Eugenics was rejected after the Holocaust. Now it goes by a new name: transhumanism. John Gray explains more »
2020-08-28 | John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency more »
2023-02-04 | John Guillory is worried about the “professional deformation” of literary scholars. Can they transcend their training?... more... more more »
2010-01-01 | Whacky tabloid headlines can be quite literally true - but very misleading all the same. John Allen Paulos explains more »
2017-01-03 | John Berger, art critic, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, counterculture celebrity, cattle herder, is dead. He was 90 more »
2017-09-07 | John Ashbery, for whom writing was an immersive experience, like taking a bath in words, is dead at 90... Christian Lorentzen... Evan Kindley... Larissa MacFarquhar... Rae Armantrout... Ben Lerner... Tania Ketenjian... Paul Muldoon... David Orr... Katy Waldman... Alex Ross... Eileen Myles... Kimberly Quiogue Andrews... Luc Sante... The Guardian... The TLS... AP... Poetry Foundation... more »
2022-03-26 | John Keats, cad. While wooing Fanny Brawne, he “warmed with” a shady lady, Mrs. Jones more »
2020-10-23 | “Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics,” John Carey wrote. But not necessarily wiser more »
2014-07-05 | John Carey would rather read Shakespeare than see it performed. He prefers to experience life through literature more »
2020-03-02 | The idea of selfhood, taken for granted in secular societies, depends on a theistic worldview. John Gray explains more »
2022-02-25 | Well before Elton John and David Bowie came Charles Dibdin, 18th-century opera performer and merchandising pioneer more »
2021-02-01 | We inhabit a dystopian reality, says John Gray, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction more »
2021-06-26 | Avaricious, vain, envious, lazy: a previously unknown memoir paints a decidedly unflattering portrait of John Locke more »
2014-06-26 | The discredited notion that language determines thought refuses to die. John McWhorter wants to settle the matter once and for all more »
2012-11-25 | The story of the Book of Kells is a splendid romance, says John Banville. The ancient codex is fascinating, inspiring, pun-filled, and riddled with errors more »
2012-08-16 | John Updike thought James Agee was feckless, inadequate, and rambling. Perhaps he was right, but isn't there something magnificent about Agee's amateurism? more »
2013-04-17 | John le Carré, a spy who came out from shadows to reveal the tradecraft of espionage. The myth stuck. Too bad it wasn't true more »
2014-09-22 | John Brockman, literary über agent and intellectual arbiter, wrote a trilogy of experimental, divisive books. Then, at age 32, he retired from writing more »
2014-10-31 | On June 16, 1816, Byron told a group of friends, ?We will each write a ghost story." John Polidori wrote 'The Vampyre.' Byron took credit more »
2010-01-01 | In hospitals, beauty parlors, and construction sites, from rich countries to poor, the money stays in the family. John Gravois on remittance economies more »
2010-01-01 | If John Quincy Adams was the brightest president, he was also the least likable. But his wife, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams more »
2010-01-01 | Life with Elizabeth and John Edwards was a snake pit. Now one of the snakes gives us his memoir. You may want to shower after reading the book more »
2010-01-01 | Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who took natural foods from the crunchy fringe to the mainstream, is a vocal libertarian and admirer of Milton Friedman more »
2010-01-01 | Physicist John Polkinghorne surprised many in 1979 by deciding to become an Anglican priest. Science and religion both remain important for him more »
2015-06-25 | John Berryman: In his youth, a splendid dancer; later, a nervous, erratic man; finally, a broken alcoholic – and brilliant poet more »
2016-03-15 | Art and arson. Arshile Gorky, Robert Rauschenberg, Alfred Leslie, John Baldessari: Why do artists' studios so frequently go up in flames? more »
2010-01-01 | Attacks by critics left poet John Keats much more uncertain and deeply wounded than his admirers then, or even now, have been willing to admit more »
2010-01-01 | Dying languages. Would it be inherently evil, John McWhorter asks, if there were not 6,000 spoken languages, but only one? And what if it happened to be English? more »
2010-01-01 | African-American Studies departments tend to hold front and center the idea racism is immensely influential in American life. John McWhorter does not disagree, but more »
2010-01-01 | John Maynard Keynes offers us today not so much a well-defined economic doctrine as the attitude and the tools with which he attacked economic problems more »
2011-01-01 | When John Gravois and his wife bought a house last year in northern California, the first person to offer advice about growing marijuana was their realtor more »
2011-01-01 | 'John Cage''s music sounds like an argument between form and chaos. His curiosity bled into his art. "I''m interested in going to extremes"' more »
2011-01-01 | I have no tendency to be a saint, John Henry Newman said, in words that were part of his own self-outing more »
2019-09-16 | James Bennet makes party chat; an MSNBC anchor deplores "cancel culture"; John Podhoretz complains about Twitter: a Bari Weiss book party more »
2018-04-25 | John Gray has been called a misanthrope and a nihilist. But he doesn't believe that social improvements are impossible — only that they're reversible more »
2018-08-25 | For a rare group — Witold Gombrowicz, Anaïs Nin, perhaps Franz Kafka, especially John Cheever private diaries comprise their finest writing more »
2017-09-01 | During the Gilded Age, some rich people dabbled in séances and breakfasted with corpses. Consider the portrait subjects of John Singer Sargent more »
2020-05-30 | John Rawls’s work can take on the quality of a sacred text. Was his appeal related to the declining status of Christianity? more »
2022-10-04 | Raymond Geuss has made a career of critiquing liberal philosophers like John Rawls. With Rawls’s influence fading, is that wasted work? more »
2021-08-31 | For John Keats, literature was life. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, everything alive became literature. From both, literature exacted a high price more »
2021-11-04 | John Ashbery was a poet of experiment and verbal adventure, of charity and self-forgiveness, and also of “mandarin avoidance" more »
2022-03-25 | When he doubted his poetry, John Berryman doubted absolutely. But mostly he couldn’t understand why the world wasn’t celebrating his genius more »
2021-03-13 | John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald were two men who struggled to make it as writers. Does the connection go deeper? more »
2021-06-24 | Cats seem to “accept life as a gift,” while we anxiously speculate about death, writes John Gray, who has compiled 10 feline philosophical lessons more »
2013-09-28 | Dickens dabbled in it. So did Henry James, Somerset Maugham, and John Cheever. All were susceptible to the lure of supernatural fiction more »
2013-02-27 | The idea that humans are by nature free is persistent, powerful, and, says John Gray, 'ofne of the most harmful fictions that's ever been promoted? more »
2013-03-14 | John Martin Fischer directs a $5-million study of immortality. But the philosopher wants this known: He isn't hunting ghosts or attending seances more »
2014-08-29 | In an early poem, John Updike described trash as a ?wonderland of discard.' Now we know the wonders contained in his trash more »
2014-12-20 | 'I can't teach someone to write,' says John Casey, ?but I can sometimes teach someone to rewrite.' What he can teach them is craft more »
2015-01-06 | Greece without Greek? Japan with no Japanese? Of the world's 6,000 languages, by 2115 only 600 will survive. John McWhorter explains more »
2015-03-12 | If belief in God means nothing to you, why proselytize one way or another? John Gray on the strange nature of evangelical atheism more »
2010-01-01 | 'From wartime Britain to the glittering balls of John Kennedy''s D.C., Bill Patten Jr. tells his family saga. He may dislike the morality of his tale, but' more »
2010-01-01 | â??Keynes is backâ? is now a cliché. But hang on, did John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the 20th century, ever leave? more »
2010-01-01 | 'John Cage''s 4''33'''' was not greeted with anything like the riot provoked by The Rite of Spring. By the 1950s, audiences knew too much' more »
2010-01-01 | Despite some European political figures trying to rekindle old fires, Europe will survive its changing ethnic and religious composition, as it has before. John Bowen explains more »
2017-03-01 | When John Berger died this year, obituaries depicted him as a Marxist rabble-rouser. And he was. But that was only one of his modes more »
2011-01-01 | 'The satirical economist. John Kenneth Galbraith delighted in mockery. No sacred tenet was safe from his ridicule. But a sneer isn''t an idea' more »
2011-01-01 | Stuttering is "an obdurate barrier thrust into my throat," said John Updike. For him and others, verbal transcendence has existed only on the page more »
2011-01-01 | Scientific efforts to create life are heavily freighted by thousands of years of mythmaking about what science can and should be. John Gray explains more »
2018-09-15 | John Steinbeck was a bad husband. How bad? On his wedding night, he spent more than an hour on the phone with his mistress more »
2019-11-13 | Is most modern liberalism just the Christian heresy of Pelagianism by another name? A revisionist critique of John Rawls says yes more »
2017-06-22 | Whose bohemia? Ida Nettleship married the painter Augustus John, had five children, competed with his 21-year-old muse, and went unmentioned in his memoir more »
2022-08-29 | John Donne’s predatory mind was applied with equal force to sex, to politics, and finally to a religious vocation more »
2021-12-01 | Drawn to abstractions and game theory, John Rawls didn’t bother with obvious, nontheoretical injustices like Jim Crow more »
2021-01-02 | Charm, patience, and a big budget for cognac and cigars: how John le Carré got sources to tell him everything more »
2021-02-23 | Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray more »
2021-03-18 | Jane Cornwell was far more than a typist; she was John le Carré's first editor and indispensable collaborator more »
2020-10-02 | For John Steinbeck, individuals revealed little of humanity. Our true nature could only be grasped in the plural — by groups and phalanxes more »
2012-08-17 | John Keats was no mere star-crossed, sickly neurasthenic. He could walk 600 miles, and for a time he considered joining the forces of SimÛn BolÌvar more »
2012-08-16 | What's considered proper English is, like so much else, a matter of fashion. "I wish you was here," John Adams wrote to Abigail from France in 1778 more »
2013-01-07 | John Brockman's Edge question for 2013 asks more than 150 intellectuals, ?What should we be worried about?? more »
2013-12-07 | John Gray, incessant pessimist, has spent the past decade sharpening his attack on humanism. But look closely: He is himself a humanist more »
2010-01-01 | 'Unless we know how things are counted, says John Allen Paulos, we don''t know if it''s wise to count on the numbers' more »
2010-01-01 | 'John Adams''s library had more than 3,000 books - Thucydides, Plutarch, Cicero. Jefferson''s collection was massive. Presidents have been big readers' more »
2011-01-01 | The Japanese earthquake reveals once again our inability to predict events. Or our ability to avoid thinking about predictable events. John Brockman of Edge investigates more »
2016-01-02 | John Brockman's Edge question for 2016 asks scientists and other thinkers: What do you consider the most interesting recent news? What makes it important? more »
2015-06-15 | A “clerk” for migrants, peasants, and industrial workers. John Berger’s literary storytelling mixes politics and aesthetics. It defies categorization... more »
2011-01-01 | Lies can be "necessary and virtuous," says John Mearsheimer, who finds democracies - not dictatorships - to be most adept at political deceit more »
2011-01-01 | Last requests. In death, John Ross wanted his ashes mixed with pot, rolled into a joint, and smoked at his funeral more »
2018-09-14 | The aggression of Anthony Burgess. He skewered John le Carré, Stephen Hawking, and Umberto Eco. He even skewered himself more »
2018-02-17 | The comprehensive John Stuart Mill. He was out to combine Bentham with poetry, the Enlightenment with Romanticism, and to span the entire philosophy of his time more »
2019-07-26 | It is no secret that John Keats was intensely fascinated with death. But was he a grave robber? more »
2023-04-25 | John le Carré was disillusioned "in that special way which only affects those who have had very strong illusions in the first place" more »
2022-10-17 | John le Carré left behind brilliant, untidy letters for his biographers. More unexpected are the memoirs of his longtime mistress more »
2022-11-30 | The letters of John le Carré reveal his sense of shame and his moralizing streak — qualities many of his characters inherited more »
2022-01-03 | John Tierney raises a glass to the civilization-building power and distinct hedonic satisfaction of a stiff drink — or two more »
2022-03-09 | John von Neumann, who insisted on pure logic, wouldn't live with his daughter until she approached the "age of reason” more »
2021-09-16 | John Gray: “While Western liberalism may be largely defunct, illiberal Western ideas are shaping the future” more »
2021-09-23 | Literary success is increasingly dependent on cultivating a personal brand. John Ashbery reminds us of the power of remaining elusive more »
2020-12-16 | To say that John le Carré invented the modern spy novel doesn’t do justice to his achievement. His fictional world blurred into reality more »
2020-10-10 | John Steinbeck did not take feedback well. He scorned the Pulitzer and the Nobel. And criticism sent him into a rage more »
2021-04-14 | John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change” more »
2013-05-30 | John Richardson, 89, won't finish his multivolume biography of Picasso. The problem is not his age. 'I know too much. I know where the bodies are buried? more »
2013-07-23 | How John Farrar, Roger Straus, and Robert Giroux created their high-minded, scrappy, crucial publishing house, home to Eliot, Kerouac, Sontag, Sendak more »
2014-03-14 | Life among the toffs. Oxford in the 1950s was a daunting place. Ask John Carey, who planned to deflate Oxbridge snobbery from within. No luck more »
2014-03-28 | Perils of the author interview. William Ecenbargar got along with John Updike ? until recognizing himself, slightly fictionalized, in The New Yorker more »
2014-04-03 | John Updike's unremarkable life revolved around his determination to write three pages a day. His only hobbies were golf and cheating on his wife more »
2012-08-16 | Listening to silence. John Cage knew that nothing is not nothing. It is always something - a provocation, a joke, an invitation to pay attention more »
2015-03-17 | It's nice to think that humankind is becoming more empathetic and selfless. And less violent. But is it true? John Gray takes aim at optimism more »
2014-10-04 | Transfixed by his own mind, Richard Dawkins misses much that is important about human beings. John Gray on a monument to unthinking certitude more »
2010-01-01 | Promoting gender equity in the sciences is, all agree, a worthy cause. But varied career choices women and men make are not easy to analyze, says John Tierney more »
2010-01-01 | In 1807, a Broadwood square grand piano, no. 10651, was taken by canal from London north to Lancaster for a John Langshaw, organist. Therein lies a story more »
2016-09-01 | The boy who bullied Byron. John Charles Wallop loved blood, hangings, and funerals. He was considered insane. But what’s insanity to an English aristocrat? more »
2016-10-10 | Learning from John Cage means listening not just to his work but also to the world through his sensibility more »
2017-01-04 | John Brockman's Edge question for 2017 asks scientists and other thinkers: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? more »
2019-07-19 | John Stuart Mill was famous; Lord Byron was a celebrity. The distinction is rooted in history, culture, and how we consume our icons more »
2017-10-25 | John Rawls called it "the best of all games"; Mark Kingwell calls it "the most philosophical of games." What is it about baseball and philosophy? more »
2018-11-21 | In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would give rise to a 15-hour workweek. Instead it gave rise to pointless work more »
2019-02-22 | History has been unkind to John Ruskin, he of the beard and the wedding-night disaster. In fact, he was a prophet for our times more »
2020-03-02 | Presidents and their books. Thomas Jefferson was more of a reader than a writer. John Adams couldn’t stop writing more »
2020-04-29 | Clive James and John Burnside could hardly be more different, except in this: Both are masters of appreciation and models of the poet/critic more »
2019-11-16 | John M. Ford was a celebrated science-fiction writer and a dazzling storyteller. When he died, his works disappeared. How did this happen? more »
2020-05-23 | John Cage stroking bits of wire, Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Ninth: The strangely addictive joy of classical YouTube more »
2020-07-15 | The last of the Enlightenment intellectuals. John Maynard Keynes pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design more »
2018-02-26 | In the 1920s, John W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer and fly fisherman, set the literary world on fire with an idea: Dreams can predict the future more »
2018-03-29 | Hyper-liberalism is the academy's legitimating ideology, says John Gray. "The result is a richly entertaining mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signaling self-righteousness" more »
2023-01-31 | Was John Keats a thinker similar to Karl Marx, but working in a radically different mode? Jacobin makes the case more »
2022-06-28 | On Liberty is a canonical text of classical liberalism. Yet John Stuart Mill considered himself a socialist. How come? more »
2021-12-31 | John McWhorter’s Woke Racism caricatures antiracist thinking and reads like an extended Twitter rant more »
2021-11-27 | What did Stalin have in common with John Updike, Pablo Escobar, and Vladimir Nabokov? The intense discomfort of psoriasis more »
2020-12-25 | Fifty years ago, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. Is it still possible to reason together about the common good? more »
2021-08-10 | An outsider with the breeding of an insider, John Cheever sought rarefied air but resisted joining the ranks of the well-to-do more »
2012-08-17 | John Templeton had an interest in mysticism and science - and an eye for investing. His foundation is pouring money into philosophy. To what end? more »
2013-04-16 | Poems appeared in 1817. Reviews were vicious. The publisher wrote to the author, John Keats, irate at a book that was ?no better than a take in? more »
2015-03-21 | The bard of Madison Ave. L.E. Sissman ? poet, critic, advertising executive ? had an ?amiable, attentive intelligence,' according to John Updike. Sissman's muse: the office more »
2015-04-01 | When Friedrich Hayek became obsessed with John Stuart Mill, it wasn't Mill's intellect that captivated Hayek. It was his love life more »
2013-09-09 | John le Carré has always felt like an impostor in the literary world. An outsider is better placed to tweak the establishment more »
2014-06-14 | Philosophers tend to be terrified of bodies, so having sex can be a problem. John Kaag managed. But then he faced the question of fatherhood more »
2014-03-14 | Among literary Londoners, John Hayward was loved but feared. His parties were legendary, as were his temper and his talent for falling out with friends more »
2014-09-16 | The new chasm is not between science and art but between those who speak the language of money and those who don't. John Lanchester explains more »
2014-10-01 | The rags-to-riches narrative permeates the American psyche. From Franklin to Carnegie to his own father, John Swansburg ponders why more »
2014-10-13 | John Gray doesn't believe in beliefs. He strives to hold as few convictions as possible, a stance bizarre, perverse, and impossible to maintain more »
2010-01-01 | 'John Templeton wanted to hijack the meaning of life, to find a spirituality finally worthy of mankind''s great scientific achievements.' more »
2010-01-01 | Practical men, said John Maynard Keynes, "who believe themselves exempt from intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist." Keynes is far from defunct more »
2010-01-01 | Trying to decipher nonsense makes you smarter. At least for a while. So should John Cage be taught more in schools? more »
2015-09-17 | Outside of science, there isn't much progress in the history of thought. Bad ideas don't fade away, says John Gray. They simply recur more »
2015-10-13 | Before he went mad and declared himself Lord Byron, John Clare composed poems about acorns and wildflowers. At least his environmental vision lives on more »
2016-10-15 | Talking with the painter, writer, critic, and TV-and-film visionary John Berger is strenuous. He suffers neither bullshit nor idle conversation more »
2016-11-07 | Democracy is flawed: Citizens lack knowledge and judgment. John Stuart Mill proposed giving extra votes to those with university degrees. An idea whose time has come more »
2015-04-18 | John Searle has a bone to pick with Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and Kant. He blames them for the basic mistake of modern epistemology more »
2015-07-27 | Meet the world’s most lovable egomaniac: John Horton Conway, renowned mathematician, ambassador for curiosity, and unreliable interview subject more »
2016-01-21 | The folly of the New Atheists: They've turned science into a religion — and become evangelicals in the process. John Gray explains more »
2016-04-13 | Baffled by the rise of ISIS? Spasms of barbarism are the norm when modernization outpaces civilization. John Gray explains more »
2020-02-04 | After taking the London arts scene by storm, John Berger moved to a mountain village and discovered a new joy: shoveling manure more »
2018-11-28 | “What’s a hundred years?” asks John McPhee. “Nothing. And everything.” His quiet, meticulous writing style was built to last more »
2019-02-15 | John Stuart Mill is routinely seen by liberals and conservatives as a secular saint. Turns out he was decidedly less secular than we thought more »
2019-03-09 | Writers like Zola, Balzac, and Dickens — masters of a range of modes — are vanishingly rare. But we do have John Lanchester more »
2018-09-04 | What's the meaning of freedom? Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick disagreed on much. But they all emphasized universal values over group identity more »
2019-04-20 | John Coltrane was the archetypal creative obsessive, a trait obscured by his canonization as a spiritual seeker on a higher plane than mortal men more »
2019-04-30 | John Berger occasionally went awry in evaluating individual artists (like Picasso), but his bullshit detection and skepticism of fashionable ideologies were nonpareil more »
2019-05-29 | John Williams put a lot of himself into his most famous protagonist, William Stoner, a lackluster professor and difficult man more »
2019-07-12 | In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a rival drug dealer. Eighteen years of incarceration later, he reflects on the trials of literary life behind bars more »
2017-07-18 | Charles Fourier thought men would grow tails. John Humphrey Noyes had a penchant for awkward sexual metaphors. Meet the founders of America’s utopian experiments more »
2017-07-29 | John Cheever's favorite word was "venereal." Isaac Asimov's was "terminus." Such insights come from exposing language to mathematics. more »
2020-07-30 | John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on more »
2022-12-10 | The perfect spy — and the perfect spy novelist — is someone, like John le Carré, who feels like an impostor in their own life more »
2022-08-10 | John Locke in the New World. What explains the enduring affection of Americans for this liberal philosopher? more »
2022-01-28 | How to read the poetry of John Ashbery, who critic-proofed his work? With a healthy appreciation of paradox more »
2021-07-10 | Will future generations read The Dream Songs? John Berryman makes an easy target in today’s cultural climate more »
2021-06-22 | In his later years, John Le Carré lost what had been a strength: restraint and understatement. Politics began to intrude more »
2014-07-03 | John Cotter's past is set to music: Bach on a snowy afternoon, blues on a long night's drive, Velvet Underground when he lost his virginity. Doctors say his future will be silent more »
2012-12-03 | John Kaag was the kind of kid who worried about the bus crashing, or about getting hit by it, or about his ham sandwich. Naturally, he became a philosopher more »
2013-01-06 | What is a poet's biography for? A New Life, declares the subtitle of a book on John Keats. But the arguments are old, even if some details are not more »
2013-03-01 | John Milton was a misogynistic, heretical crank. It's hard to like a man who dismissed colleagues as buffoons and bawds. But he was more than a turgid little prig more »
2010-01-01 | Stephen Toulmin and John E. Smith were both philosophers in the grand sense that still draws young people around the world to the subject. Till logic-choppers drive them away more »
2017-05-17 | “The past is yours, to keep invisible if you wish,” wrote John Ashbery. His own past is quite public, including a 1,000-page teenage diary more »
2015-07-22 | The belief system of Silicon Valley can't account for a plateau of progress. But expectations have outrun reality, says John Markoff. 2045 is going to look a lot like today more »
2016-10-17 | Fiction in a time of climate change. John Updike defined the novel as an “individual moral adventure.” Not so for Amitav Ghosh, who thinks a collective aesthetic is needed now more »
2016-12-27 | John Stuart Mill believed that nobody can be a good economist who is just an economist. Yet most study nothing but economics. "Economists are the idiot savants of our time" more »
2019-11-01 | In John Hersey's day, all news was slow news. Hiroshima appeared more than a year after the bombing. The delay contributed to its style, substance, and accuracy more »
2018-06-14 | With Couples, John Updike brought “down-and-dirty sex" into the literary mainstream. Fifty years later, the novel seems less about sex than about loneliness more »
2019-12-12 | “Screw that arty-farty literary twaddle.” A month before Stoner, John Williams’s crass brother-in-law published a book. At first it outsold Stoner two to one more »
2016-10-31 | "From a very early age, I had this sense of harshness and the need for endurance.” John Berger at 90, still arguing about how to see art -- and the world more »
2016-12-12 | John D'Agata is a self-appointed expert on the essay. But he doesn't know what an essay is or what it does. And he's no essayist. He's a liar more »
2015-11-21 | John Horton Conway, a man of great ambition and wit, is a brilliant mathematician — but will be remembered best as a game inventor more »
2016-01-07 | John Clare claimed to be Shakespeare, Lord Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. His poetry, like the asylum he inhabited, was a place of introspection, delusions, and despair more »
2017-11-28 | “I had no idea that ____ was so interesting!” Canoes, oranges, the Merchant Marine – how does John McPhee get us to care about such subjects? more »
2018-02-01 | The fascinating, if now largely forgotten, life of John Selden: known as “England’s chief rabbi,” expert in Arabic chronicles, imprisoned in the Tower of London more »
2019-12-05 | John Berger’s 1972 TV series, Ways of Seeing, was a grenade lobbed at art history. But, as he learned, it’s not easy to follow an act of demolition more »
2019-08-06 | John Ruskin’s literary reputation is in tatters, but he offered some wisdom. For example: “The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless” more »
2019-09-14 | The political class feared John Ruskin’s anticapitalist thinking. “If we do not crush him … a moral floodgate may fly open and drown us all” more »
2019-10-03 | "You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling" more »
2019-10-31 | By the end of his life, John Rawls had a stature so great that he shaped the very idea of what philosophy is. Has this become a problem? more »
2019-11-15 | “Do we have to read every fucking word the guy writes?” Philip Roth asked about John Updike. The two had spats but saw beyond the rivalry more »
2019-03-12 | Were John Ruskin to see our society, he would find its two most notable features to be hatred of beauty and worship of machines. Alan Jacobs explains more »
2019-04-05 | George Bernard Shaw on Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir Nabokov on Nikolai Gogol, Henry Miller on Arthur Rimbaud, Nicholson Baker on John Updike, Karl Ove Knausgaard on ... Edvard Munch? more »
2023-04-20 | John James Audubon was a killer of birds by the barrelful, a racist, and an enslaver. We turn to him not for goodness, but for “a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge" more »
2013-05-09 | Sex and economics. John Maynard Keynes ? all mustache and bedroom eyes ? had many lovers. Is there any connection between the people he slept with and the ideas he espoused? more »
2016-04-09 | Marianne Moore’s poetry of the small produces “the feeling that life is softly exploding around us,” as John Ashbery put it. Is she our greatest modern poet? more »
2015-08-14 | David Foster Wallace dissected the chauvinism of writers like John Updike: “Just a penis with a thesaurus.” Yet Wallace is central to the pretensions of Updike's heirs more »
2011-01-01 | Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written: ecstatically. Lila Azam Zanganeh wanted to know more about what John Updike thought of Nabokov. So she picked up the phone more »
2016-09-16 | With a click, you can watch John Berryman down beers in Dublin or Marianne Moore throw out a first pitch. Is YouTube changing how we “read” poetry? more »
2016-11-28 | Poets like John Clare and William Blake found meaning in trees. Now we know more about their secret lives -- they communicated via the mysterious “wood wide web” more »
2011-01-01 | John Mitchell, Jr., the "Fighting Negro Editor," would "walk into the jaws of death to serve his race." A man of courage, passion, talent, and triumph in the face of racial hatred more »
2018-08-27 | John Coltrane said he wanted to play as though jumping into the middle of a sentence. After him, there is nothing left to say on the saxophone more »
2017-09-14 | John McPhee is the maestro of 40,000-word nonfiction articles. He spent weeks staring at the sky thinking about how to begin. Can anyone still afford to write like that? more »
2017-12-04 | “I am not a survivor,” says John Lukacs, 94. "I am a crumbling remnant” of the end of the 500-year-long Age of Books. more »
2018-01-22 | Pity John Milton. The 350th anniversary of Paradise Lost passed with hardly a word about the man or the poem. One reason: It's an unabashedly religious work more »
2019-10-28 | John Ashbery was famous for his impenetrability. "My poetry is disjunct," he said, "but then so is life." Fair enough. But is it fair to the reader? more »
2017-07-26 | The life and death of John Keats. His talent drew attention, as did his penchant for fighting. When death neared, he longed for it with frightening urgency more »
2019-07-06 | John Updike had a rule for book reviewing: Judge an author for what he wished to do, not what you wish he had done. Can we hold him to his own standard? more »
2010-01-01 | For John Tierney, there is blame enough to spread around all sides in the debates over global warming. But the pilfered East Anglia emails still give us a lesson or two about science more »
2015-09-26 | “No more portraits," John Berger demanded in 1967 — the genre stood for social status and celebrity. Now the critic has pulled an about-face more »
2015-10-21 | Rembrandt was the first modern painter. Just ask John Berger. If he had to choose an epitaph for himself, it’d be “The Polish Rider” more »
2011-01-01 | 'Science is capable of defeating death? That''s an old delusion, writes John Gray. "Science enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are"' more »
2011-01-01 | End the war on drugs and you end the black malaise in America, says John McWhorter. "Before long, the image of blacks as eternal poster children would fade away" more »
2011-01-01 | That John Stuart Mill, apostle of freedom, should have so enslaved himself to such a woman as Harriett Taylor shows that more is needed to be free than to live in a free country more »
2011-01-01 | While the intelligence needed to make a universe is superior to ours, it is recognizably similar to our own, argues John Gribbin. It need not mark an infinite and mysterious God more »
2016-10-07 | John O’Hara, part Wharton, part Fitzgerald, chronicled and envied well-to-do American society. At 65 he asked Yale for an honorary degree. Yale refused more »
2016-11-29 | John Berger is a painter, writer, critic, former soldier, and “the kind of Marxist who would be instantly dismissed from any Marxist organization he joined” more »
2015-05-28 | Bertrand Russell said that he feared argument with John Maynard Keynes, likening it to taking his life in his own hands. Keynes was ruthless, especially toward fellow academics. more »
2015-05-30 | John Berryman was 12 when he wrote his first lengthy work. He was 57 when he killed himself. In between were guilt, humiliation, failure, and breathtaking feats of imagination more »
2017-07-18 | “I have a natural horror of letting people see how my mind works,” wrote John Ashbery at 23. Why is he now engaged in a project of self-exposure? more »
2017-09-29 | In John McPhee’s cosmology, all the earth’s facts touch one another. How to connect disparate things like atoms, bears, and whiskey? You just need the right structure more »
2019-12-02 | John Simon and the art of the brutal pan. "When he saw something he hated, he eviscerated it and ate its liver, and those meals were not infrequent" more »
2018-04-12 | John Gray takes a dim view of reason. Indeed, he takes a dim view of humanity. He is a "card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance" more »
2018-06-13 | John Kidd, once the world’s leading Ulysses scholar, is said to have died in sordid conditions, communing only with pigeons. The truth is stranger more »
2013-10-25 | Irony pervades our lives, but it tends to fall flat on the page. That's an old problem. In the 17th century, the Rev. John Wilkins invented the ?irony mark? more »
2010-01-01 | John Mackey thinks capitalism, along with human creativity, can make the best world we might hope for, with "no limit to where humanity will be in the 21st century" more »
2017-02-07 | "Tell me what you like,” said John Ruskin, “and I’ll tell you what you are.” Such was the spell he cast, people of culture didn't know what to think until he told them more »
2017-04-06 | The writing of John Berger can seem kitschy, deluded, masculinist, creepy. But in his strangeness were kindness and sincerity. He sought above all to help us see more clearly more »
2011-01-01 | 'John Henry Newman''s conception of a university was a serene and beautiful vindication of an old ideal of the scholarly life. Perhaps it has no place in the world today' more »
2015-10-02 | John Updike was most openly himself as a poet. Thus his focus on the erotic and on bodily functions: “Fellatio,” "Mouse Sex," “The Beautiful Bowel Movement” more »
2015-06-23 | Everything you know about perception is wrong – and it’s the fault of Western philosophers, starting with Descartes. Or so John Searle would have you think more »
2018-11-23 | Atheism needs theistic ideas to give it life. “Some of the most radical forms of atheism,” says John Gray, are indistinguishable from “some mystical varieties of religion” more »
2018-12-08 | The world’s nicest know-it-all. Why does John McPhee know so much about Sophia Loren, the Moscow State Circus, and the golf habits of the Washington elite? more »
2019-02-25 | For his Stoner, John Williams has been called "the man who wrote the perfect novel.” So why are his other books so resoundingly terrible? more »
2019-03-23 | Literary parties are generally awkward disasters. This holds in fiction and in life. As John O’Hara put it, they are about “terrible people” getting “gloriously drunk” more »
2018-08-24 | The famously liberal philosopher John Rawls has been recast as a sharp critic of capitalism. If Rawls really was a socialist, why was he so reticent about it? more »
2017-07-13 | The emphasis on smarts, combined with black people’s grievous history in America, suggests an approach to the issue of race and IQ: Stop talking about it. John McWhorter explains more »
2021-12-31 | The history of the tractor. John Deere’s Model D squared off against Henry Ford’s Model F and an ingenious “Tractivator” more »
2023-04-25 | “I’ve taken enormous walks and lived on rice and codfish tongues and I feel like a new man.” John Dos Passos was at home on Cape Cod more »
2019-01-21 | Nathan Glazer, a seminal sociologist and nonideological neoconservative of a decidedly pragmatic bent, is dead at 95... NY Times... WSJ... The Bulwark... Adam Wolfson... John Podhoretz... Martin Peretz more »
2023-06-14 | Cormac McCarthy is dead at 89. “If it doesn’t concern life and death,” he once told Rolling Stone, “it’s not interesting”... Dwight Garner... Ed Caesar... A.O Scott... John Williams... Graeme Wood... more »
2017-03-21 | Robert Silvers, who described editors as middlemen and cautioned against taking credit away from writers, is dead. The founding editor of The New York Review of Books was 87... Laura Marsh... Adam Gopnik... Mary Beard... Hillel Italie... Cass Sunstein... Louis Menand... NYRB... Ian Buruma... ChinaFile... n+1... Andrew O’Hagan... John Banville... Daniel Mendelsohn... Alexandra Schwartz... Adam Thirlwell... Thomas Meaney... Phillip Lopate... more NYRB more »