Saturday, October 04, 2025

The History of Vanilla And Future of Tasmanian Tigers

 

Articles of Note

The dodo, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger: One company believes it can bring them back, making animal extinction a thing of the past... more »


New Books

The history of vanilla — the world’s favorite flavor — is rife with counterfeiting, pilfering, piracy, smuggling, and account fraud... more »


Essays & Opinions

In 1956, Gore Vidal declared: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag”... more »

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Oct. 2, 2025

Articles of Note

Rachel Ruysch’s reputation once rivalled Rembrant’s. Now, due to snobbery and sexism, her paintings are compared with wallpaper... more »


New Books

An instant classic that has endured for seven centuries, the history of the reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a history of Western taste... more »


Essays & Opinions

Many writers find writing agonizing. Few have expressed that feeling as vividly as Cynthia Ozick... more »


Oct. 1, 2025

Articles of Note

Biographers have been likened to fiction writers and professional burglars. Richard Holmes takes a different view... more »


New Books

Know your meme. In the early 2000s, technology, art, and amateurism combined to reach such cultural achievements as LOLcats... more »


Essays & Opinions

Mary Carleton, the “German Princess,” charged with bigamy and theft, was a sensation in 1660s London. More than 500 people visited her in jail... more »


Sept. 30, 2025

Articles of Note

The gallerist Mary Boone ruled the 1980s New York art scene. At 73, she’s fresh out of federal prison and back at work... more »


New Books

“If anyone builds it, everyone dies.” Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks hyperintelligent AI could be worse than nuclear war... more »


Essays & Opinions

Cormac McCarthy could remember nearly everything he had read or heard. He was also a hoarder, with an affinity for nonstick cookware and tweed coats... more »


Sept. 29, 2025

Articles of Note

The Gothic doesn’t moralize. There are no happy endings. Only intermingled, chaotic narratives of fear and transgression... more »


New Books

Charlotte Brontë was a secular saint who cared for her frail siblings in the face of their cruel, selfish father — or so the story goes... more »


Essays & Opinions

Why are even tenured professors, people with the most secure jobs on earth, so unwilling to speak their minds?... more »


Sept. 26, 2025

Articles of Note

In 17th-century Europe, an eclectic mix of aphorism, fiction, dialogue, and essay cultivated a new sensibility: aesthetic taste... more »


New Books

New York City saw its first traffic jam in 1913. The cause? A Henri Bergson lecture at Columbia... more »


Essays & Opinions

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the 18th century did. Welcome to the postliterate society... more »


Sept. 25, 2025

Articles of Note

Cheever, Updike, Bellow, Ellison — is anyone under 40 still reading the titans of mid-20th-century literature?... more »


New Books

To understand what’s lost when a waiter tells you to scan a QR code, peruse the history of the menu... more »


Essays & Opinions

Consider the snail. One lung, one heart, one foot, 15,000 teeth, and first appeared 200 million years before dinosaurs... more »


Sept. 24, 2025

Articles of Note

Michel Houellebecq’s writing is a serious, perhaps desperate effort to express directly the experience of total absorption... more »


New Books

Sally Mann is not just a taker of ethereal photographs. She is a Southern yarn-spinner, a humorist, and a darkly comic raconteur... more »


Essays & Opinions

What does an essayist need from a reader? To be willing to enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities... more »


Sept. 23, 2025

Articles of Note

Arvo Pärt is the most-performed living composer, after John Williams. His genre: holy minimalism... more »


New Books

What’s the greater scandal: A few bad actors producing shady studies — or major psychologists' apparent ignorance of basic data precautions?... more »


Essays & Opinions

Large language models vacuously reflect our writerly traditions back at us. So why does their embrace of the em dash shock us?... more »


Sept. 22, 2025

Articles of Note

The suburban novel’s concerns — conformity, consumerism, lack of fulfillment among plenty — have come to feel dated, almost quaint”... more »


New Books

What makes a good job for a poet? For Constantine Cavafy, a post at Egypt's Department of Irrigation Service gave him ample free time... more »


Essays & Opinions

To fend off the creeping prevalence of AI-written prose, one must adopt a new kind of literacy, an adaptive practice of bullshit detection... more »


Sept. 19, 2025

Articles of Note

The child art star. Is great art a justification for the extreme exposure of the children of memoirists or photographers? ... more »


New Books

"What growing up fundamentalist helped me learn early on is how terribly wrong you can be while thinking very hard”... more »


Essays & Opinions

What makes a literary “it” girl? Going to certain magazine parties, being beautiful, and writing on Substack, comprise the cliche... more »


Sept. 18, 2025

Articles of Note

Have you smelled that robot stink? It wafts off writing that's grammatically fluent but conceptually hollow... more »


New Books

Greenwich Village was “vicious” for James Baldwin— “partly because of the natives, largely because of the tourists, and absolutely because of the cops”... more »


Essays & Opinions

Gertrude Stein, clown princess. "All the attention directed at Stein has been unfair or misplaced, even from her admirers"... more »


Sept. 17, 2025

Articles of Note

The vanishing art of editing. Few have wielded a sharp No. 2 pencil with more skill than Star Lawrence... more »


New Books

Beware the AI Prophets and their horde of hype-mongers, grifters, techno-messiahs, and pseudo-intellectuals... more »


Essays & Opinions

A $23-million Stradivarius is just an instrument that tickles “human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat”... more »


Sept. 16, 2025

Articles of Note

Is physics in crisis? That's the ascendant view on YouTube. Cue the rise of "conspiracy physics"... more »


New Books

"Sometimes an era is graced with a gift — a book that is not merely deficient in the usual ways ... but epochal in its ineptitude"... more »


Essays & Opinions

The paradox of lexicography: A golden age for the appreciation of language coincides with the demise of the dictionary... more »


Sept. 15, 2025

Articles of Note

On July 15, 2021, Max Bazerman received upsetting news: The Harvard professor was complicit in a massive fraud... more »


New Books

Stupidity is one of those things that's always just there, forever and always. Can it really have a history?... more »


Essays & Opinions

The hoarder, the mansplainer, the guy with bad timing — we need character sketches to help us articulate, and change, our qualities... more »


Sept. 12, 2025

Articles of Note

“‘Cultural criticism’ is a term like ‘religion’ — that is, it exists, but it also doesn’t.” B.D. McClay explains... more »


New Books

The Medieval moon. The moon was taken to be a cause for the Black Death, a symbol of female foolishness, and a drinking partner... more »


Essays & Opinions

Substack “is the emerging locus of the literary world, and may swallow it completely in the next five years”...