Daniel Kahneman, who marveled at “endlessly complicated” human psychology, is dead. He was 90... more »
By the 19th century, educated elites had little time for ghosts, demons, and other apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research, on the other hand... more »
As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »
Caravaggio’s final crimes: carrying a sword without a permit, smearing excrement on a house, smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter... more »
For women among the New York Intellectuals, men wanted to sleep with you or write like you. Or both... more »
Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »
Joseph Epstein, with scores to settle, wrote a memoir. Why was he fired as editor of The American Scholar?... more »
“Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Paradoxes sound absurd, but they can be logically sustained... more »
Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »
The physical world is full of inefficiencies. Cue the “digital twin,” where they can be ironed out virtually then reflected back into reality... more »
Jesus, and other magi. Early variants of Christianity championed Pontius Pilate, Apollonius, and a holy snake... more »
“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »
Marilynne Robinson: “I consider the Bible to be the most complex document on the planet”... more »
Cities have become frictionless, optimized sites of consumerism and productivity. In other words, they have lost their humanity... more »
The Monster of Ravenna, the Monk Calf, and, of course, the Pope Ass. Why were 16th-century luminaries printing pamphlets on monsters?... more »
Does “coming out of the closet” turn gay men into oppressors of the more marginalized? Queer theory seems to think so... more »
In 1959, Sonny Rollins vanished. No performing and no recording for two years. Turns out he kept a diary... more »
“Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”... more »
The publishing industry is notoriously sleepy. But here come the Silicon-Valley inflected CEOs spouting MBAisms... more »
Shakespeare’s “sisters.” Women writers in the Renaissance were constrained by disinheritance, marital disputes, legal troubles, and humiliation... more »
Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. It took Min Jin Lee 28 years to write Pachinko. But slow writing has its virtues... more »
Whither the “litblog”? Blogs were once at the center of the online cultural ecosystem. The appetite for such work has diminished... more »
Lauren Oyler’s essays “contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality”... more »
"The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape" ... more »
Wicked baronets and disastrous marriages — the “sensation novels” of the 1860s updated Gothic elements for Victorian sensibilities... more »
The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »
Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »
In 2020, a star physicist claimed an incredible advance: a room temperature superconductor. Retractions followed... more »
Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »
Wonders emerge in the ocean’s deepest trenches: corals, crustaceans, a multitude of bizarre fish. Also: nuclear waste and tins of Spam... more »
Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »
What can a generation of deeply religious thinkers in a moment of disenchantment teach modern humanists? Everything... more »
If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »
“Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »
Nietzsche’s misogyny. Yes, he railed against intelligent women, said Helene Stöcker, but anyone could see he meant it ironically... more »
“It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »
Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »
For decades, rumors circulated about Charles Bukowski’s pro-Nazi letters. Now discovered, they reveal a surprise: Bukowski was joking... more »
“There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »
Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »
In 1819, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a philologist and theologian, was jailed. His crime: teaching gymnastics and calisthenics... more »
Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »
We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »
Gabriel García Márquez wanted his final novel destroyed. Now, a decade after his death, it will be published... more »
Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »
Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »
Unesco has tasked itself with safeguarding “intangible cultural heritage.” Does Belgian horseback shrimp fishing need protection?... more »
Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »
Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »
When philosophers had sharp elbows, idiocy was mercilessly mocked. Now the field is kindler, gentler, and awash in silliness... more »
Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »
Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »
Miles Davis’s Take 3 was nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of musical transcendence. His impromptu solo has gained immortality... more »
Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »
Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »
Hollywood’s obsession with constructed languages started with The Lord of the Rings and continues in the latest Dune movie... more »
Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »
The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »
Black weddings, vampire plagues, a blood tax — in Eastern Europe, storytelling and ritual were key to regional identity... more »
“Habermas is a blockhead. It is simply impossible to tell what kind of damage he is still going to cause in the future.” So wrote Karl Popper in 1969... more »
Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »
Daniel Kahneman, who marveled at “endlessly complicated” human psychology, is dead. He was 90... more »
Caravaggio’s final crimes: carrying a sword without a permit, smearing excrement on a house, smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter... more »
Joseph Epstein, with scores to settle, wrote a memoir. Why was he fired as editor of The American Scholar?... more »
The physical world is full of inefficiencies. Cue the “digital twin,” where they can be ironed out virtually then reflected back into reality... more »
Marilynne Robinson: “I consider the Bible to be the most complex document on the planet”... more »
Does “coming out of the closet” turn gay men into oppressors of the more marginalized? Queer theory seems to think so... more »
The publishing industry is notoriously sleepy. But here come the Silicon-Valley inflected CEOs spouting MBAisms... more »
Whither the “litblog”? Blogs were once at the center of the online cultural ecosystem. The appetite for such work has diminished... more »
Wicked baronets and disastrous marriages — the “sensation novels” of the 1860s updated Gothic elements for Victorian sensibilities... more »
In 2020, a star physicist claimed an incredible advance: a room temperature superconductor. Retractions followed... more »
Wonders emerge in the ocean’s deepest trenches: corals, crustaceans, a multitude of bizarre fish. Also: nuclear waste and tins of Spam... more »
What can a generation of deeply religious thinkers in a moment of disenchantment teach modern humanists? Everything... more »
Nietzsche’s misogyny. Yes, he railed against intelligent women, said Helene Stöcker, but anyone could see he meant it ironically... more »
For decades, rumors circulated about Charles Bukowski’s pro-Nazi letters. Now discovered, they reveal a surprise: Bukowski was joking... more »
In 1819, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a philologist and theologian, was jailed. His crime: teaching gymnastics and calisthenics... more »
Gabriel García Márquez wanted his final novel destroyed. Now, a decade after his death, it will be published... more »
Unesco has tasked itself with safeguarding “intangible cultural heritage.” Does Belgian horseback shrimp fishing need protection?... more »
When philosophers had sharp elbows, idiocy was mercilessly mocked. Now the field is kindler, gentler, and awash in silliness... more »
Miles Davis’s Take 3 was nine minutes and thirty-five seconds of musical transcendence. His impromptu solo has gained immortality... more »
Hollywood’s obsession with constructed languages started with The Lord of the Rings and continues in the latest Dune movie... more »
Black weddings, vampire plagues, a blood tax — in Eastern Europe, storytelling and ritual were key to regional identity... more »
In the 1960s a team of scholars explored interspecies communication with dolphins. Then the experiments with LSD began... more »
Tarek Masoud: “The problem is not our students. It is us: faculty and administrators who are too afraid”... more »
The case for ethical fandom. Being a sports fan doesn’t diminish one’s ethical obligations — it heightens them... more »
“In Somaliland, an autonomous region perched at the northern tip of Somalia, poetry had sparked wars, toppled governments, and offered paths to peace”... more »
A question hangs over the reputation of the writer Enrique Gómez Carrillo: Did he betray his lover, a spy, to the French in World War I?... more »
The A.J. Finn saga: After writing a best seller, the thriller writer was exposed as a serial liar. Now he’s back with a new novel... more »
“When the end is in sight, even the most successful careers seem haunted by the specter of failure” ... more »
The biggest art fraud in history? The number of fake Norval Morrisseau works could surpass 10,000, with criminal profits of up to $100 million... more »
A typical Alasdair MacIntyre insight is simple, surprising and – when you come to think about it – completely true... more »
On campuses across the country, students have lost something fundamental: the ability to parse complex texts and arguments... more »
The unmistakable earthiness of Dutch high art comes across via pissing cows and crapping dogs... more »
The “eyeball test” measures a society’s fellow feeling: Can people look one other in the eyes without fear or deference?... more »
What – or who – killed Pablo Neruda? That is just one of the questions dogging his legacy and reputation... more »
“Our premodern precursors often had a special mechanism for dealing with old people who faltered. Quite simply: they killed them... more »
“Lives of wives” books, like those about Véra Nabokov and Zelda Fitzgerald, often define their subjects via their spouses. That misses the point... more »
Artists used to obsess over what it means to be a person in the world. Now they obsess over how to turn themselves into a brand... more »
How did China Medical University and King Abdulaziz University overtake UCLA and Princeton in rankings of math departments?... more »
The asphalt whisperers. When noise pollution requires treatment, acoustic ecologists and urban soundscape planners get called in... more »
Humanist vs. non-humanist battles can feel narrow and academic. But the political and cultural stakes are enormous... more »
By the 19th century, educated elites had little time for ghosts, demons, and other apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research, on the other hand... more »
For women among the New York Intellectuals, men wanted to sleep with you or write like you. Or both... more »
“Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Paradoxes sound absurd, but they can be logically sustained... more »
Jesus, and other magi. Early variants of Christianity championed Pontius Pilate, Apollonius, and a holy snake... more »
Cities have become frictionless, optimized sites of consumerism and productivity. In other words, they have lost their humanity... more »
In 1959, Sonny Rollins vanished. No performing and no recording for two years. Turns out he kept a diary... more »
Shakespeare’s “sisters.” Women writers in the Renaissance were constrained by disinheritance, marital disputes, legal troubles, and humiliation... more »
Lauren Oyler’s essays “contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality”... more »
The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »
Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »
“It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »
“There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »
Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »
Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »
Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »
Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »
Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »
Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »
“Habermas is a blockhead. It is simply impossible to tell what kind of damage he is still going to cause in the future.” So wrote Karl Popper in 1969... more »
Christopher Hitchens was renowned and reviled for his pugnacity. But key to his style was the eloquent rejoinder... more »
Where Norman Mailer fulminated, Ellen Willis pontificated, and Stanley Crouch threw punches: The Village Voice... more »
Mid-century modern conundrum: Once American takes on Danish design caught on, Danish furniture makers started copying them... more »
Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »
As a critic, Michiko Kakutani was fearsome and discerning. As an author of inert buzzword-laden books, she's pitiable... more »
Are you a feminist killjoy? For Judith Butler, that entails the joy of struggling against injustice... more »
Few writers have so deftly distilled the cloistered sensibility of the Small Circulation Lit Mag as Lauren Oyler... more »
The legend of Byron’s libertinism was propagated foremost by Byron. The fashionable parties, seduction techniques, and knowing small talk were all carefully calibrated... more »
Copyrights and wrongs. A well-intentioned idea has become a Frankenstein that’s now out of control... more »
A memoir of an open marriage was marketed as upbeat, sassy, and liberated. In reality it was just sad... more »
We are all in favor of equality: But equality of what? Of whom? Darrin McMahon on a powerful and contested idea... more »
Terry Eagleton on Hegel’s vision of things. “The only viable future is one with its roots in the present, not one that is parachuted into it by dreams or diktats”... more »
Hannah Arendt was shaped more by Kant than anything she learned in Heidegger’s lectures or his bed... more »
“She is crazy!” Charles de Gaulle said of Simone Weil. That was a common view. Impractical and odd, she was also undeniably admirable... more »
Wolves howl, gibbons sing, dolphins whistle, cows moo, cats meow. But do animals talk?... more »
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 »
Frantz Fanon’s influence has not waned, even though the culture's ideological space for his ideas at large is minuscule... more »
Hope to cope with a world given over to “permanent crisis”? Modern strategies include detoxing, bingeing, filtering, and ghosting... more »
As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »
Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »
Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »
“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »
The Monster of Ravenna, the Monk Calf, and, of course, the Pope Ass. Why were 16th-century luminaries printing pamphlets on monsters?... more »
“Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”... more »
Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. It took Min Jin Lee 28 years to write Pachinko. But slow writing has its virtues... more »
"The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape" ... more »
Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »
Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »
The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »
“Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »
Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »
Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »
We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »
Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »
Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »
Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »
Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »
The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »
Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »
“The people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies”... more »
What if writing history were less about archives and ideas and more about forensics and genomes?... more »
Do our lives consist of the stories we tell about our ourselves? Galen Strawson on a view that’s ascendant and plainly wrong... more »
The editor and memoirist Diana Athill’s philosophy was that fidelity is a faulty mechanism on which to base a relationship... more »
“The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food”... more »
Self-help is often glib, politically obtuse, and intellectually dishonest. Why, then, are philosophers writing it?... more »
The psychic entanglement of the generations, the tumult between old and the young: What we need Mary Gaitskill for... more »
After the suicide of his wife, Blake Butler wrote a book detailing her secret life. Was it art — or literary revenge porn?... more »
Maverick, crank, wisecracking economic pundit? Milton Friedman was thought too radical, then later — when his ideas won the day — too obvious... more »
Garrison Keillor, Leon Wieseltier, Otto Penzler: Is there still a role for grumpy old men in arts and letters?... more »
The legend of Eugène-François Vidocq. Circus performer, forger, and private detective, he claimed to have escaped from more than 20 French prisons... more »
“Is it possible to imagine the ballet world without a primary teleology of aesthetic perfectionism and a baseline of low self-worth?”... more »
“Opera was pretentious, boring, effete, and effeminate… Opera represented everything that my childhood in postwar America asked me not to be”... more »
Barbara Johnson’s concept of muteness envy is the result when a culture needs a way to feel power and powerlessness at once... more »
A way of arguing — breathless, declaratory, aggressive, aggrieved — has taken root in the university. Call it the hyperbolic style in American academe... more »
The Free Press is a vital journalistic corrective to progressive consensus, says Jonathan Chait — but its politics are an overcorrection... more »
The art world is crawling with counterfeits. That creates not only confusion but also opportunity. Consider the "missing" Basquiats... more »
What is art for? Our answers are aimed at justifying art’s existence. But none of that is why we care about it... more »
Given its sub-disciplines and broad range of schools and methods, Jonathan Kramnick poses a question: What unites literary studies?... more »
What to make of Anthony Hecht, whose erudite and elegant writing produced bitter, creepy, sexist poetry?... more »
For Andrea Long Chu, writing is like flirting. “A lot of people think that when you flirt, you are trying to get the person to like you. This is wrong.”... more »
The divisive Alan Watts. Was he a sophisticated distiller of Eastern philosophy — or an unlettered, alcoholic dilettante?... more »
Is the distinction between large language models and human creativity one of degree or fundamental difference?... more »
Sontag, seriousness, and the freedom to be funny. Why writing a novel, The Volcano Lover, felt so transgressive and wild... more »
Tyranny of the QR code. Digitization is killing paper playbills and theater tickets — and our memories of Broadway will suffer... more »
British explorer Alastair Humphreys exchanges the Arctic ice for his local neighborhood. Cue the “microadventure”... more »
AI and literary style. Adam Kirsch wonders: Will we appreciate writing that is aesthetically coherent but chronologically incoherent?... more »
Why write criticism? For Greil Marcus, it’s to achieve the effects of art — the same sense of mystery, awe, and surprise... more »
What is it like to be an animal? The question has driven philosophical treatises — as well as the donning of a $23,000 human-sized wolf suit... more »
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