“Here with a Loaf of Fresh Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
Researchers find heart benefits in tea, coffee, nuts and berries.
Our Brains Have Five Major Eras In Our Lifetimes
A reader asks a science-fictiony question: “Who is your idea of the Ideal Writer? Either a real writer from the past or a list of characteristics that describes the Ideal Writer.” It’s a silly question, probably related to the “Desert Island Books” gambit, and almost irresistible, though any informed answer would have to be heavily qualified.
The obvious response is Shakespeare, as universal a writer as one can imagine. Or Dante. Or Tolstoy. Or Proust. You see the dilemma. How to define “ideal”? What balance of stylish flair, moral heft and gravitas qualifies? Something that entertains (in the broadest sense, not just escapism -- Dickens, for instance, or Shakespeare, for that matter) and educates. Such thoughts remind us how ephemeral most writing is, though one of the great consolations of literature is its vastness and variety. Something for everyone. Think how our tastes change across time. Let me make an admittedly whimsical nomination.
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Talk “unclever, unsophisticated, simple goodness,” advised Robert Frost, aka Mr. New Hampshire, spokesman for the old Yankee ways
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In defense of clichés. They are democratized wordplay, metaphors for the masses, ways to connect to readers with warmth... more »
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Rising auction prices are an illusion. Collectors, dealers, and institutions prosper at the expense of working artists... more »
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Werner Herzog, “the strangest of all living directors,” has also directed several operas and written more than a dozen works of prose... more »
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Why is close reading having a moment? Because it asks students to take their own thinking seriously... more »
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Ernest Hemingway owned 9,000, Thomas Jefferson 6,487, and Hannah Arendt 4,000: How to understand the urge to harbor more books than you can read?... more »
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Malcolm Cowley, who made American literature an identifiable movement, shaped a canon based on his tastes and convictions... more »
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Dogs have a strict notion of fairness; tigers exact revenge. To hone our senses of virtue, egalitarianism, and morality, we can learn from animals... more »
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For one underpaid, up-and-coming author, the chance to write a literary biography promised to make her career. There was just one problem... more »
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Updike on Updike: “I have fallen to the status of an elderly duffer whose tales of suburban American sex are hopelessly yawnworthy period pieces.”... more »
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Psychedelics had an unusual effect on Justin Smith-Ruiu. They became a gateway drug to Catholicism... more »
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“Viewpoint diversity” has become a glib euphemism, a way of smuggling conservatives through liberalism’s squeaky back door... more »
New Books
Leah Libresco Sargeant argues that feminism should recognize “women as women,” not demand that they imitate men. What does it mean to treat “women as women”?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Christian Wiman: “If consciousness precedes matter, it’s a pretty good bet that it survives it”... more »
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Who wrote the gospel of witches? Ancient Italians, a 19th-century Tuscan fortune teller, or a well-heeled Brit with family ties to Queen Victoria... more »
New Books
Peter Singer’s “shallow pond” is less a thought experiment and more an extended gotcha exercise: “Caught you out, didn’t I, you bourgeois oaf”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Few great visual artists are especially good writers. Eugène Delacroix was one of the exceptions... more »
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Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet, supposedly the crown jewel of a major Sotheby’s art auction, received only one bidder: Ripley’s Believe It or Not!... more »
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For guidance on 21st-century conundrums like polyamory and burnout, turn to the wisdom of 16th century nuns... more »
Essays & Opinions
Invention of the foodie. He “sits at the intersection of necessity and privilege, with the potential to bridge this divide—or to further entrench it”... more »
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Why would a woman with children she loved, writing at the peak of her powers, want to die? Revisiting Sylvia Plath's suicide... more »
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To understand modern individualism, consider late-18th century tea consumption and the engraved portraiture of French revolutionaries... more »
Essays & Opinions
"For a long time now, the signature style of the contemporary art world has been something like real estate aestheticism — growth for growth’s sake"... more »
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Sickly, ambitious, and entirely unknown, young Robert Louis Stevenson moped around graveyards for the specific purpose of being unhappy... more »
New Books
The reactionary radical Paul Kingsnorth fears a future in which the realities of human life — sex, death, environment — are negotiable... more »
Essays & Opinions
William Blake, Marxist revolutionary? His call to cast off the “mind-forged manacles” was one step toward utopian socialism... more »
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A decade ago, things changed for the worse at colleges, says Jill Lepore, who looks back with “considerable shame at my unwillingness to really speak out"... more »
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Philosophers have often fastened on animals as emblems of the unknowable. Then there’s Kafka and dogs... more »
Essays & Opinions
Is the right path a full embrace of AI or a radical set of precautions against its widespread use? Both. Yascha Mounk explains ... more »
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Forty years after Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” the effective altruism movement took off. What happened to it?... more »
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When Virginia Woolf met Gertrude Stein: "wheres the harm in this stupidish, kindly, rather amusing woman”... more »
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“What matters on a visit to Vegas is how much money you have, how much more you want, and how much you are willing to set on fire”... more »
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Linguists are parsing a new mystery: What explains the baby boomers' penchant for ellipses?... more »
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For Leah Libresco Sargeant, feminism should treat “women as women" rather than demanding that they imitate men... more »
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Are ants sentient, and thus worthy of our moral concern? Objective answers are lacking — and so we turn to probabilistic approaches... more »
Articles of Note
From spycraft to starting a magazine. Was the Paris Review started as a CIA cover for Peter Matthiessen?... more »
New Books
Seamus Heaney rarely struck a note of inspired weirdness. Then again, he was never as boring as some canonical poets... more »
Essays & Opinions
“How dumb are we?” asked an episode of Oprah in 1988. Part of the show’s offering: a debate between Gerald Graff and Allan Bloom ... more »
Articles of Note
Upon publication, The Picture of Dorian Graywas condemned as “vulgar” and “poisonous.” It’s now a modern classic... more »
New Books
Not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture. Is this progress?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Today roughly half the countries in the world have a below-replacement fertility rate — and so David Runciman asks, “Are we doomed?”... more »
Articles of Note
"There’s a vastness in Woolf, an inexhaustibility and an eagerness, that in turn sparks procreativity in others"... more »
New Books
Wittgenstein’s self-recriminations: He was an ambivalent Jew, a brutal teacher, a bad soldier, an occasional masturbator... more »
Essays & Opinions
To Harold Bloom, he was an “American Proust.” To New York magazine, he was “THE GENIUS.” To himself, Harold Brodkey was a writer set for posthumous discovery... more »
Articles of Note
Mahmood Mamdani is ready to talk politics, culture wars, and the academy. But not about his son, Zohran... more »
New Books
For too long, Shakespeare has been regarded as a kind of minor deity. He was, in fact, a laboring writer... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Globalization, among other things, is about people from anywhere reading about people from nowhere"... more »
Articles of Note
“The newspaper industry, again and again, has flubbed its chance to propel itself into the future”... more »
New Books
Why do paranormal phenomena like precognition, telekinesis, and clairvoyance keep popping up in the most rational-seeming places?... more »
Essays & Opinions
John Searle was a leading light of American philosophy. He was also one of the sharpest analysts of campus revolts... more »
Articles of Note
"There are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI"... more »
New Books
As an editor and writer, Malcolm Cowley had one aspiration: to raise the status of American literature... more »
Essays & Opinions
The late 1980s to the early 2010s, the post-theory and pre-wokeness period, was a golden age for the humanities... more »
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"The male gaze" turns 50. The theory’s origins were modest, its meaning long misunderstood... more »
New Books
Under continual assault by technology and mass culture, our inner spaces — intimacy, privacy, the unconscious — are shrinking... more »
Essays & Opinions
Thomas Pynchon’s latest, Krasznahorkai’s Nobel win, Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s collaboration — it’s a glowing season for postmodernism... more »
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Remembering Jonathan Lear: "He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him"... more »
New Books
The most widespread vampire panic ever documented took place in the mid-17th-century Moravian bishopric of Olomuoc... more »
Essays & Opinions
That Plato was hostile to poets is dogma. But it is untrue, and the consequences have been severe. Elaine Scarry explains... more »
Articles of Note
Even if the Stoicism bubble bursts, the publishing industry will have no trouble continuing to recycle ancient philosophy into advice manuals... more »
New Books
Every era produces its own forms of memoir, shaped by its cultural preoccupations and oversights. Enter Arundhati Roy... more »
Essays & Opinions
Americans spend about 17 minutes a day reading. As our literary culture deteriorates, repetition and cliché take hold... more »