A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority.
-Booker T. WashingtonTruth didn’t stand a chance as the former president talked too fast to be factchecked and too shamelessly to be interrupted
May 12, 2023
Articles of Note
At 72, with cancer and a shattered family, the poet Jorie Graham might just have written the best book of her career... more »
New Books
Is multiculturalism an oxymoron? In an age of atomization a new book makes a case for cross-cultural transmission... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »
Articles of Note
"In mid-twentieth-century America, nuns were publishing widely in the finest literary publications. Something, it seems, was happening"... more »
New Books
Lauren Berlant’s writing flirts with meaning. Rhythmic and atmospheric, it’s somewhere between incoherence and poetry... more »
Essays & Opinions
Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »
Articles of Note
In search of lost time. In 1983 a thief stole 106 rare clocks from a Jerusalem museum. Investigators were stumped — until a deathbed confession showed up... more »
New Books
“They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »
Articles of Note
Death has been humanity’s central defining experience — our deepest existential theme. Birth, by contrast, is our least-explored subject... more »
New Books
Speaking, writing, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, radio, television, PR, A.I.: How we know what we know, and how that's changed... more »
Essays & Opinions
Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »
Articles of Note
Magical realism was invented not by Márquez or Llosa, but by the Guatemalan writer Miguel Ángel Asturias. Why isn’t he better known?... more »
New Books
Too flinty and realistic to be an aesthete, Shirley Hazzard nevertheless pursued a life steeped in aesthetic pleasure... more »
Essays & Opinions
Unusual writing can be eloquent writing. It can also be just plain unusual. Consider the essayist Brian Dillon... more »
Articles of Note
If you were devising an ecosystem for advancing scientific knowledge, would you emphasize merit?... more »
New Books
Rorty vs. MacIntyre: One was an ecumenical leftist, the other a powerful critic of liberalism. What matters about their lifelong argument?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Style tip from Christopher Lasch: Jettison ostentatious erudition, abbreviations, and acronyms. Initials are for desiccated bureaucrats... more »
Articles of Note
Dean Koontz, writer of terrifying tales of murder and mayhem, is scared of flying, fires, and gory movies. He’s the kind of guy who irons his underwear... more »
New Books
Ask a philosopher of a certain age to reflect on the state of the discipline, and the response is generally dour. Philip Kitcher is no exception... more »
Essays & Opinions
The history of the swing. From Greece to Borneo, swinging has been a form of magic, a means of warding off evil, a form of celebration... more »
Articles of Note
Sally Haslanger, Amia Srinivasan, and Anthony Appiah have resigned from the masthead of The Journal of Political Philosophy. What happened?... more »
New Books
Not long before descending into insanity, Nietzsche was moved to tears in Turin at a concert of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bizet... more »
Essays & Opinions
Semafor, Air Mail, Punchbowl News, Puck, Substack: Making sense of the cacophonous, paywall-inhibited online reading environment... more »
Articles of Note
For Murakami, art is not always about art, though it is about discipline. His daily goal: write 1,600 words... more »
New Books
Some of Osip Mandelstam’s poems are frivolous, others gnomic. Most are memorable, and hypnotically musical... more »
Essays & Opinions
Roger Scruton wasn’t judicious about his associates. Now he’s being used by more-brutish conservatives as a shield of sophistication... more »
Articles of Note
It started as a social club for fiddlers in Tennessee. How did it become what we know as the Ku Klux Klan?... more »
New Books
For decades, some bright minds have been consumed by a mundane problem: How to go viral on the internet... more »
Essays & Opinions
Libertarian critics of democracy make several valid points. But there's no evidence their alternatives are better, and much to suggest they'd be worse ... more »