Armed and ready for the apocalypse, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s followers went underground in 1990. What happened next?... more »
In 1990, Stephen Greenblatt dismissed psychoanalysis. Now he's giving Freud a second chance, not least to point out that Shakespeare got there first... more »
Liberalism was originally an ethical doctrine that addressed the fundamental question of how to live well. Why has it become a narrowly political project? ... more »
“If writers see editors, with some justification, as a necessary evil, true editors often see themselves, appropriately, in the same way”... more »
Reading Rushdie in Tehran. Iranian intellectuals approach his work with a mix of repulsion and admiration... more »
There is a distemper in American social life — arguments pass rapidly from vulgar declamation to sickly apology and back... more »
Grandmaster Hans Niemann beat the world’s best chess player but was accused of cheating. Now he’s been vindicated — or has he?... more »
Nostalgia has been dismissed as sick, sentimental, stupid, reactionary, and intellectually vacuous. Is it really that bad?... more »
For Emily Dickinson, letter writing was a form of publication, of circulating her work to a select group of readers... more »
What should college students read in a time of protest? Noah Feldman, Martha Nussbaum, Sam Moyn recommend some books... more »
Besides harp playing, medieval minstrelsy featured baking, spying, diplomacy, propaganda, carpentry, and the training of dancing bears... more »
Before the 20th century, splendid buildings were heavily ornamented. No more. Blame a Swiss-trained clockmaker and a clique of radical German artists... more »
Despite being seen as second rate, Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd defined mid-century American opera... more »
Polyamory used to be the domain of fringe figures with strange views. Now we can't seem to stop talking about it... more »
A History of British Ferns was published to acclaim in 1840, spawning 50 years of Pteridomania — fern fever... more »
"Her legacy is very uncomfortable," Benjamin Moser says of Susan Sontag. "It’s very spiny. It’s cactus-y. It’s like chewing the cactus without removing the exterior"... more »
Wake up, reach for your phone. The digital revolution prompts a question: Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? ... more »
Since the Renaissance, the fine artist has been elevated above the merely decorative artist or furniture maker. That line is blurring ... more »
The art of noise. When is a clamor an affliction on the ears, and when is it beautiful music?... more »
A vituperative 1979 debate pitted E.P. Thompson against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. At stake: Should history focus on realism or theory?... more »
“The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble”... more »
The world is divided between music people and lyrics people. Which one are you?... more »
Are lessons from early human history useful to us? “Defend the coasts from marauders” can only take us so far... more »
Jack Conroy, poet of the proletariat, dug ditches and scrapped sheet metal. His literary magazine had double the circulation of Partisan Review... more »
Melancholia, ennui, call it what you will. The feeling has a long history and a surprising political power... more »
England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more »
What can we learn from filler words? Wilfred M. McClay makes the case that “like” is different from “uh” and “um”... more »
We tend to think of wilderness as a physical thing. It is in fact an idea that stems from a particular culture and has a particular history... more »
Surrealism: What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more »
Economics is just fancy equations and — in Thomas Piketty’s words — a “childish passion for mathematics.” Are such critiques fair?... more »
Ice-age artists: Were they shamans high on mind-altering drugs? Or sober-minded chroniclers of the changing seasons?... more »
Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements... more »
Is the field of postcolonial studies inauthentic, a prisoner of Western mentalities? Amitava Kumar reflects on fierce debates in India... more »
Why have children stopped reading for fun? Blame screens, but not only screens... more »
“The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more »
How did Richard Owen, a pioneering Victorian paleontologist, inspire such intense hatred among his contemporaries?... more »
In the 1920s, young Cecilia Payne answered a vexing scientific question: What are stars made of? The scientific establishment was not pleased... more »
In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more »
Diversity is a master concept of our time, but what happens when diversity of identity and diversity of ideology conflict?... more »
Paul Auster’s career is a reminder that writers' lesser efforts can go unnoticed in the presence of their masterworks... more »
“I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more »
“There is no end to war and no end, it would seem, to the uses Shakespeare can be put to in war”... more »
Walter Kirn, the conspiratorially minded counter-elite journalist, tries a new way of sticking it to the ruling classes: founding a literary magazine... more »
It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more »
A paradox of modern political life: The more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels... more »
The dictionary people. These tweedy, eccentric amateur lexicographers made the Oxford English Dictionary possible... more »
Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »
The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly dying for years... more »
Since 1739, 130 Roman dodecahedrons have been discovered by archaeologists. But a mystery endures: What were they used for?... more »
Saskia Hamilton's parting gift. The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more »
We think we remember works of art rather well, says Julian Barnes. But we often don't, and that's not a bad thing ... more »
The Argentine writer and perennial Nobel candidate César Aira writes for hours before revising. The result is an obscene number of books... more »
The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »
“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more »
Derek Parfit set out to that prove progress in moral philosophy is possible. He failed, but in so doing salvaged the study of ethics... more »
Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. “The message is the message”... more »
The Order of the Third Bird is a somewhat secret society of artists and avant-gardists who congregate suddenly at museums, then vanish... more »
People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases?... more »
I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more »
"Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth... more »
Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »
Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »
Armed and ready for the apocalypse, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s followers went underground in 1990. What happened next?... more »
“If writers see editors, with some justification, as a necessary evil, true editors often see themselves, appropriately, in the same way”... more »
Grandmaster Hans Niemann beat the world’s best chess player but was accused of cheating. Now he’s been vindicated — or has he?... more »
What should college students read in a time of protest? Noah Feldman, Martha Nussbaum, Sam Moyn recommend some books... more »
Despite being seen as second rate, Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd defined mid-century American opera... more »
"Her legacy is very uncomfortable," Benjamin Moser says of Susan Sontag. "It’s very spiny. It’s cactus-y. It’s like chewing the cactus without removing the exterior"... more »
The art of noise. When is a clamor an affliction on the ears, and when is it beautiful music?... more »
The world is divided between music people and lyrics people. Which one are you?... more »
Melancholia, ennui, call it what you will. The feeling has a long history and a surprising political power... more »
We tend to think of wilderness as a physical thing. It is in fact an idea that stems from a particular culture and has a particular history... more »
Ice-age artists: Were they shamans high on mind-altering drugs? Or sober-minded chroniclers of the changing seasons?... more »
Why have children stopped reading for fun? Blame screens, but not only screens... more »
In the 1920s, young Cecilia Payne answered a vexing scientific question: What are stars made of? The scientific establishment was not pleased... more »
Paul Auster’s career is a reminder that writers' lesser efforts can go unnoticed in the presence of their masterworks... more »
Walter Kirn, the conspiratorially minded counter-elite journalist, tries a new way of sticking it to the ruling classes: founding a literary magazine... more »
The dictionary people. These tweedy, eccentric amateur lexicographers made the Oxford English Dictionary possible... more »
Since 1739, 130 Roman dodecahedrons have been discovered by archaeologists. But a mystery endures: What were they used for?... more »
The Argentine writer and perennial Nobel candidate César Aira writes for hours before revising. The result is an obscene number of books... more »
Derek Parfit set out to that prove progress in moral philosophy is possible. He failed, but in so doing salvaged the study of ethics... more »
People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases?... more »
Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »
Penelope Fitzgerald, long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more »
“A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute?... more »
When did it become embarrassing to like classical music? When it became thought of as an elite art... more »
Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more »
A homogeneous Harlem Renaissance? The period’s art depicts pool halls, jazz clubs, formal dinners, and social groups at odds with one another... more »
We read the classics but ignore much of what readers once enjoyed: forgeries, pseudotranslations, and other ephemera from the dustbin of literary history... more »
“The Recluse of Amherst.” Emily Dickinson’s life, it turns out, was full of baking, corresponding, and humor... more »
Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »
Is Glenn Loury’s new memoir a brave act of self-reckoning or a reckless act of self-sabotage?... more »
“That is right,” Joseph Priestley said when he completed editing the manuscript. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was dead... more »
“I will dedicate all my work to her, forever.” The novelist Carson McCullers had a habit of overdoing her romantic pronouncements... more »
George Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and 1984 a weirder novel, than we’ve appreciated... more »
How do artists think? Where do they begin? How do they know when they’re done? Adam Moss looks for answers... more »
In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton audited a course given by Robert Lowell. They were forever changed as poets... more »
“It was easy for people to just remember and regurgitate ‘r > g.’” Thomas Piketty reflects on his best seller a decade after its publication... more »
John Barth, who believed the old conventions of literary expression were “used up,” is dead. He was 93... more »
Contemporary writing on liberalism consists of two types: autopsies and demonologies... more »
Long a widely shared ideal, “equality” is now seen as promoting a specious universalism. A new virtue has replaced it: “equity”... more »
Jamaicans are ready to embrace Tacky’s Revolt, an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island in 1760. For a pioneering historian, that’s complicated... more »
In 1990, Stephen Greenblatt dismissed psychoanalysis. Now he's giving Freud a second chance, not least to point out that Shakespeare got there first... more »
Reading Rushdie in Tehran. Iranian intellectuals approach his work with a mix of repulsion and admiration... more »
Nostalgia has been dismissed as sick, sentimental, stupid, reactionary, and intellectually vacuous. Is it really that bad?... more »
Besides harp playing, medieval minstrelsy featured baking, spying, diplomacy, propaganda, carpentry, and the training of dancing bears... more »
Polyamory used to be the domain of fringe figures with strange views. Now we can't seem to stop talking about it... more »
Wake up, reach for your phone. The digital revolution prompts a question: Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? ... more »
A vituperative 1979 debate pitted E.P. Thompson against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. At stake: Should history focus on realism or theory?... more »
Are lessons from early human history useful to us? “Defend the coasts from marauders” can only take us so far... more »
England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more »
Surrealism: What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more »
Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements... more »
“The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more »
In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more »
“I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more »
It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more »
Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »
Saskia Hamilton's parting gift. The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more »
The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »
Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. “The message is the message”... more »
I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more »
Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »
Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »
A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »
“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »
A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »
For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »
Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »
AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »
Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »
A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »
Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »
“[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »
Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »
Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »
Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »
Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »
The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »
Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
Liberalism was originally an ethical doctrine that addressed the fundamental question of how to live well. Why has it become a narrowly political project? ... more »
There is a distemper in American social life — arguments pass rapidly from vulgar declamation to sickly apology and back... more »
For Emily Dickinson, letter writing was a form of publication, of circulating her work to a select group of readers... more »
Before the 20th century, splendid buildings were heavily ornamented. No more. Blame a Swiss-trained clockmaker and a clique of radical German artists... more »
A History of British Ferns was published to acclaim in 1840, spawning 50 years of Pteridomania — fern fever... more »
Since the Renaissance, the fine artist has been elevated above the merely decorative artist or furniture maker. That line is blurring ... more »
“The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble”... more »
Jack Conroy, poet of the proletariat, dug ditches and scrapped sheet metal. His literary magazine had double the circulation of Partisan Review... more »
What can we learn from filler words? Wilfred M. McClay makes the case that “like” is different from “uh” and “um”... more »
Economics is just fancy equations and — in Thomas Piketty’s words — a “childish passion for mathematics.” Are such critiques fair?... more »
Is the field of postcolonial studies inauthentic, a prisoner of Western mentalities? Amitava Kumar reflects on fierce debates in India... more »
How did Richard Owen, a pioneering Victorian paleontologist, inspire such intense hatred among his contemporaries?... more »
Diversity is a master concept of our time, but what happens when diversity of identity and diversity of ideology conflict?... more »
“There is no end to war and no end, it would seem, to the uses Shakespeare can be put to in war”... more »
A paradox of modern political life: The more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels... more »
The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly dying for years... more »
We think we remember works of art rather well, says Julian Barnes. But we often don't, and that's not a bad thing ... more »
“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more »
The Order of the Third Bird is a somewhat secret society of artists and avant-gardists who congregate suddenly at museums, then vanish... more »
"Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth... more »
“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »
As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »
In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »
Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »
Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »
“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »
“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »
How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »
In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »
“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »
Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »
The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »
What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »
Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »
Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »
What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »
We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »
“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »
"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »
Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... 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 »
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