Want Happiness? Compete To Be An Also-Ran
Fortunately, there is a formula to solve this problem without unrealistically suggesting that we dispense entirely with our competitive urge: Instead of always going for gold, shoot for the bronze
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Most Anticipated: The Great 2023B Book Preview
8. U Fleků
Prague, Czech Republic 🇨🇿
Restaurant founded in: 1499
Iconic dish: Svíčková
Consider the dagger. For the medieval crusader it was an object of holiness as well as a tool for shortening the agonies of tetanus... more »
New Books
Bach was aware of Enlightenment-style thinking. But he was more of a premodern religious extremist, and you can hear it in his music... more »
Essays & Opinions
“War may be less contentious.” The one constant in marriage, a new book suggests: it plays host to contradictions... more »
Articles of Note
Ben Wilson — sandy-haired, rosy-cheeked, nearing 50 — has a particular mission: to make sexy a most unsexy item... more »
New Books
David Harvey, Marx whisperer, sees revolutionary potential in the delivery driver, the barista, and the underemployed intellectual... more »
Essays & Opinions
True Grit was so successful, it overshadowed everything else its author, Charles Portis, wrote. That’s a shame... more »
Articles of Note
The allure of the wild suggests a space free from human interference. But to imagine us outside of nature is the same mistake as to imagine us mastering it... more »
New Books
The past is often explained with isms — feudalism, imperialism, capitalism. A new work recasts human history as a story of families... more »
Essays & Opinions
Weaponized feces in Gulliver’s Travels, masterful flatulence in Chaucer — Dwight Garner praises excretory adventures in literature... more »
Articles of Note
Cormac McCarthy's first five novels were commercial flops. His unlikely career arc would be nearly impossible to repeat now... more »
New Books
“Black philosophy must be the starting point of all philosophy.” Those who are dominated, argues Vincent Lloyd, are the experts at challenging domination... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1998, the neuroscientist Christof Koch bet the philosopher David Chalmers that the mystery of consciousness would be solved within 25 years. Chalmers just won. His prize: a case of wine... more »
Articles of Note
Stéphane Breitwieser stole a piece of art from a museum every two weeks, on average, for seven years. Here's how he did it... more »
New Books
In certain lefty circles, ambitions toward self-improvement are seen as neoliberal oppression internalized. It’s more complex than that... more »
Essays & Opinions
Being friends with a genius isn’t easy. Sometimes you are loved, sometimes you are loathed... more »
Articles of Note
“To soothe these whirlpools, I write here.” Virginia Woolf’s diary is part therapy, part writerly practice. It is entirely essential... more »
New Books
As a minor bureaucrat, Hermann Heideggerhad quite the undistinguished career. Still, he was chosen to administer his father’s literary estate... more »
Essays & Opinions
Book bans stem from a relentless, nihilistic logic, which can find subversion anywhere. There is no way to limit reading to just-right books... more »
Articles of Note
The science of bioacoustics. Complex ecological information is transmitted by sound. But who is listening?... more »
New Books
Seductive sinner, repentant prostitute, host to seven demons? The enigma of Mary Magdaleneremains inextinguishable... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The notion of ‘cancellation’ is an exemplary bit of ideology. It appears to be content-neutral… but in fact is substantively political”... more »
Articles of Note
John Banville on the casual indignities of the book tour. "Every reading, as every writer will tell you, attracts at least a couple of maniacs" ... more »
New Books
From the psychoactive rituals of ancient Greece to cannabis cafes and good old-fashioned bars, the desire to rejigger reality is a constant... more »
Essays & Opinions
Unlike the first Great Awakening, our current wave of puritanism is the preserve of highly educated urban sophisticates... more »
Articles of Note
For Lorrie Moore, writing is not for processing trauma or healing from pain. It is for art... more »
New Books
The Yuval Noah Hariri effect. Have you noticed all the thick tomes explaining humanity across deep history?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harry Fainlight was briefly the poet-prince of the New York underground. Then his paranoia tightened its grip... more »
Articles of Note
“Imitation and style, which modernists had rejected from art theory, are coming back to art practice through the window of technology”... more »
New Books
Jackson Lears is tracking animism's fugitive survival, showing how many things we know about the world are conventions, not reflections of truth... more »
Essays & Opinions
“If my arguments don’t succeed, my life has been wasted,” said Derek Parfit. He did fail, but more brilliantly than others have succeeded... more »
Articles of Note
In our search for meaning, we dream of roads not taken. And these alternative lives take on a reality of their own... more »
New Books
Hayden White wasn't so much a theorist of history as a theorist of the writing of history. Most potently, he was a critic of narrative... more »
Essays & Opinions
A seminar on fetishism, a proclamation of love: How to understand an undergraduate’s 1970s affair with a deconstructionist?... more »