The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
Articles of Note
Does progress in the arts and sciences purify or corrupt our morals? That question reduced Rousseau to tears... more »
New Books
Saints for supper. In the Middle Ages, consuming holy icons was thought to cure a range of intestinal ailments... more »
Essays & Opinions
When a letter is not just a letter. It’s a confession, a moral credo, a play, a plot, an existential quarrel. Cynthia Ozick explains... more »
Articles of Note
"You can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity," says Judith Butler. "If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties" ... more »
New Books
"Every era reinvents the biography form to suit its purposes," writes Laura Kipnis. "Call it the post-truth biography"... more »
Essays & Opinions
For Fredric Jameson, theory, in its turning away from common sense, offered a trip through the looking glass... more »
Articles of Note
The Zabihollah Mansouri riddle. Was one of the most popular literary figures of 20th-century Iran an utter charlatan?... more »
New Books
“Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1919, Charles Hoy Fort, the “enfant terrible of science,” wrote Book of the Damned: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”... more »
Articles of Note
“Picture a desert with old servers rusting into the sand beneath the sun like the state of Ozymandias.” Ryan Ruby on language, poetry, and civilizational collapse... more »
New Books
Piet Mondrian failed as a prophet. Today he's regarded as something more significant: an influencer... more »
Essays & Opinions
A weekend at the ventriloquist convention holds flirtation, aggression, corny jokes, and above all, faith in the art form... more »
Articles of Note
Harold Bloom claimed to be able to read 1,000 pages an hour. At that pace, it would still take 280 years to get through GPT-4’s training data... more »
New Books
Dicey, piece of cake, scrounge, and bonkers are all NOOB's — "not one-off Britishisms." Why have such words conquered America?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Literary criticism has become almost entirely cultural criticism. Was this shift an inevitable product of the academy?... more »
Articles of Note
Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »
New Books
The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »
Articles of Note
Kafka's dark humor is apparent in his weirdest, longest, and most underappreciated short story ... more »
New Books
Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »
Essays & Opinions
Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »
Articles of Note
Beatrix Potter wasn’t just a children’s book writer — she was a framer, sheep breeder, and conservationist... more »
New Books
In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »
Essays & Opinions
The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »
Articles of Note
100 pages a day. No exceptions. That’s how much Matthew Walther reads. You're skeptical?... more »
New Books
“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »
Essays & Opinions
We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »
Articles of Note
Why read novels? To recognize our preoccupations and escape from them; to be intellectually engaged and emotionally devastated... more »
New Books
Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »
Essays & Opinions
Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »
Articles of Note
Roger Scruton became a conservative in Paris, but refined his thinking in the “bohemian blur” of 1970s Britain... more »
New Books
“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »
Essays & Opinions
When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »
Articles of Note
Whose Aristotle? Ideologues of all varieties claim him as their own, distorting and even falsifying his views... more »
New Books
Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »
Essays & Opinions
AI and democracy. Had early technologists paid attention to John Dewey, we’d be in a much better place. Evgeny Morozov explains... more »
Articles of Note
The Simone Weil resurgence seeks to makes her “relatable” — by stripping away her eccentricity and religiosity... more »
New Books
What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »
Essays & Opinions
Literature professors gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to traditionalists and provocateurs... more »