Saturday, June 28, 2025

The many Machiavellis

 Laugh at the absurd, ponder the peculiar, and celebrate the sheer randomness of existence…


What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.

 ~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar


Melbourne street sweeper Shaun Turner wins unfair dismissal case over Acknowledgement of Country comments

‘If we need to be thanking anyone, it’s the people who have worn the uniform and fought for our country to keep us free.’

Articles of Note

Freelance writing, informal DJ sets, working retail — even seemingly successful musicians are having trouble making ends meet... more »


New Books

Hubris and design thinking: The history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority”... more »


June 25, 2025

Articles of Note

In the 19th century, microphotography was a scientific marvel. In no field was it adopted more quickly than in espionage and erotica... more »


New Books

Steven Shapin: “The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people”... more »


Essays & Opinions

For influential 20th-century anthropologists, religion could not be reduced to its social function or explained away by other metadiscourses... more »


June 24, 2025

Articles of Note

In the ’60s and ’70s, the study of British royals was seen as elitist, trivial, even pointless. Today, however, royal studies are flourishing... more »


New Books

Those in Gen Z are having less sex, and when they do have it, they are doing so in arcane arrangements. Is that a problem?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Geoff Dyer: “The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign — immaturing with age”... more »


June 23, 2025

Articles of Note

Best sellers were once written by authors like Mary McCarthy and J.D. Salinger. Now they’re written by those like James Patterson. What changed?... more »


New Books

Technology elevates efficiency over friction and seamlessness over inconvenience. Is that a bad thing?... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Violence follows Harry Crews around like an oversized lapdog, eager to spring upon him with bone-crunching love”... more »


June 20, 2025

Articles of Note

Zelig with a paintbrush. Edward Burra was in Paris with Josephine Baker, in Mexico with Malcolm Lowry, and in Spain just before its civil war... more »


New Books

In America, has the backlash against Marxism been more influential than the theory itself? ... more »


Essays & Opinions

You won’t look to ChatGPT as a role model for the life of the mind, but A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality... more »


June 19, 2025

Articles of Note

In 1781 a semicolon appeared once every 90 words. Today it shows up once every 390 words. Is this progress?... more »


New Books

Tom Crewe on the “ridiculous, sententious” writing of Ocean Vuong: “It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life”... more »


Essays & Opinions

Politicians love to mock seemingly useless studies of shrimp treadmills and gecko mechanics — but silly science plays a vital role... more »


June 18, 2025

Articles of Note

What’s discussed at the Dull Men’s Club? Windshield wipers, coat hangers, and mailboxes, among other banalities... more »


New Books

Thomas Mallon has mastered the bitchy aperçu and brisk, summarizing detail. In short, he's an ideal diarist... more »


Essays & Opinions

James Schuyler, whose poems exuded calm, was prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes... more »


June 17, 2025

Articles of Note

Get published for $20, co-author with a Nobel Prize-winner for $700: With academic paper mills, anything seems possible — for a fee... more »


New Books

Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker seek to parochialize the human, showing that our activities may just be a cosmic sideshow... more »


Essays & Opinions

Geniuses behaving badly is a historical commonplace.  Indeed, it's enough to wonder if the label is a license to misbehave... more »


June 16, 2025

Articles of Note

The fact checker's improvised dance: Intuition, calculation, and the seeking of truth... more »


New Books

An architect’s eccentric residential design, a manifesto house, is a rare instance of an artist putting polemic into practice... more »


Essays & Opinions

The impossible genre. Biography incorporates every style and school. We categorize it as nonfiction, “but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation”... more »


June 13, 2025

Articles of Note

Patricia Highsmith asked one question when hiring an assistant: “Do you like Hemingway?” “No” was the only permitted response... more »


New Books

The Divine Comedy, repeatedly rescued from obscurity, has long perched awkwardly between canonical reverence and cultural neglect... more »


Essays & Opinions

“Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones”... more »


June 12, 2025

Articles of Note

Paleoanthropology, a notoriously cutthroat discipline, attracts "the most psychotic" scientists. Even so, the femur dispute stands out... more »


New Books

Analytic philosophy offers the fantasy of free inquiry, but really just leans on “common sense” to justify the status quo — or so charge its critics... more »


Essays & Opinions

From 1770 to 1790, a new view of liberty ascended to a position of ideological dominance. Why?... more »


June 11, 2025

Articles of Note

The end of Hollywood. The movie business has moved to cities like Albuquerque and Atlanta. Even films set in L.A. are now shot elsewhere... more »


New Books

In 1959, Richard Ellmann published a biography of James Joyce. The genre would never be the same ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Sandra Cisneros: “Every woman writer could use a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But what really serves a woman, in my opinion, is a house”... more »


June 10, 2025

Articles of Note

What makes Thomas Mann’s liberal cosmopolitanism so compelling is that, temperamentally and philosophically, he remained a conservative... more »


New Books

To the ancients, revolution was a perversion. To French philosophes, it marked human progress. How did that change in meaning come about? ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Yes, much about poetry gets lost in translation. But to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to misrepresent both poetry and translation... more »


June 9, 2025

Articles of Note

There’s no gay writer whose career Edmund Whitedidn't influence, “even if they don’t know it: He made all of us possible”... more »


New Books

The 7,000 languages spoken in the world today can be divided into 140 families. The languages most of us speak belong to just five... more »


Essays & Opinions

Critics take Shulamith Firestone’s schizophrenia to reveal some truth about feminism, or family tragedy, or psychiatry. That’s nonsense... more »


June 6, 2025

Articles of Note

Is it a good idea to posthumously publish someone's private notes from psychiatry sessions? What if they were written by Joan Didion?... more »


New Books

How do we prove something is true? Tools like “statistical significance” can introduce arbitrariness to the establishment of facts... more »


Essays & Opinions

Jordan Peterson somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook... more »


June 5, 2025

Articles of Note

AI will free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of what we now call “the author”... more »


New Books

Literary theory’s method wars are a bleakly irrelevant sideshow, a panic over living-room decor while the house burns... more »


Essays & Opinions

What made the Enlightenment extraordinary? Not just a set of ideas or what was said but also how it was said... more »


June 4, 2025

Articles of Note

Trust the experts.” But many people would sooner accept ignorance than acknowledge an epistemic superior... more »


New Books

Is beauty more powerful than argument? Robert Gooding-Williams believes it’s powerful enough to refute racism... more »


Essays & Opinions

Avoid adverbs” is advice commonly encountered by writers. It's also bad advice. By all means, use adverbs – carefully, not exuberantly... more »


June 3, 2025

Articles of Note

Old Tom Parr was said to have married at 80, committed adultery at 105, and died at 152. His life helped kick off the longevity business... more »


New Books

"Flaming and undisciplined genius." The uneasy yet fecund sibling rivalry of Gwen and Augustus John... more »


Essays & Opinions

Modern aesthetics encouraged a warm relationship between an artwork and its viewer. What happens to art in an age of enmity?... more »


June 2, 2025

Articles of Note

Is Dana Gioia a privileged Boomer hectoring us about the dying of the light? Or a prescient critic with a stark warning of decline?... more »


New Books

Robert Crumb was born into a dysfunctional family beset by alcoholism, abuse, and incest. Comics saved him... more »


Essays & Opinions

John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Mark Twain revival: “How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent?”... more »


May 30, 2025

Articles of Note

Can sexy elves, hot dragon-riders, and fornicating faeries save publishing? Romantasy now generates 20 million sales a year... more »


New Books

The many Machiavellis. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Carl Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries... more »


Essays & Opinions

The missive mania of Seamus Heaney. He once wrote 14 letters during one flight, and routinely wrote 15 per day... more »


May 29, 2025

Articles of Note

Among the Amis diehards. How to celebrate one of the last great literary celebrities? Throw a party for Martin... more »


New Books

The liberal university is collapsing because liberalism as America's governing consensus is collapsing. David Rieff explains... more »


Essays & Opinions

Some of Edward Said’s ideas have become canonical. Others are as contentious today as they were 30 years ago... more »