Articles of Note
Thirty-seven paintings, 15 children, 43 years, and almost no paper trail: Vermeer is known to us only through crumbs and scraps... more »
New Books
Swift, Pope, and Gay gathered at Twickenham in 1726. They shared a villa, and a witty contempt for their age... more »
Essays & Opinions
What killed the masquerade ball: the rise of evangelical moral values or an increasing affordability, which rendered it less appealing to the aristocracy?... more »
Articles of Note
Plagiarism: Nabokov called it unconscious. Bob Dylan told his accusers to rot in hell. Both had a point... more »
New Books
Dwight Macdonald opposed U.S. entry into World War II, denounced the atom bomb, and never found an ideological home. Was he right?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Debate over whether David Foster Wallace was a virtuosic bully or a genius with a heart of gold has eclipsed consideration of his work... more »
Articles of Note
AI may be sycophantic, but that is just one expression of its structural bias toward familiarity and averageness ... more »
New Books
The Renaissance was a golden age invented by people who believed they were living through a dark one... more »
Essays & Opinions
Toni Morrison believed that racial blackness and whiteness and redness — potent though they may be — are just that: stories ... more »
Articles of Note
Is a new academic report with a dry title a “diabolically evil” plot to undermine the humanities? Or will it save them? ... more »
New Books
When Duchamp took New York: Europe spurned him, so he decamped to America, where he was met with exaltation and outrage... more »
Essays & Opinions
Children’s literature used to get reviewed in serious outlets. That’s stopped — and has that turned the genre to “crud”?... more »
Articles of Note
“After all the testing and lotteries and nail-biting, this is it?” Even New York parents are growing tired of gifted and talented programs... more »
New Books
Being Auden's typist. The experience left James Schuyler feeling awed, fascinated, and discouraged... more »
Essays & Opinions
The great AI divide. All writing — novels, poems, screenplays, even love letters — will be judged according to which side it falls on... more »
Articles of Note
How the pursuit of mathematical understandingbuilt the tools now poised to replace it... more »
New Books
Are we really in “the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press”?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Peter Hujar and Paul Thek shaped Manhattan's art scene. They died before anyone fully understood what they'd made... more »
Articles of Note
“I said I would do it before I die.” At 90, the esteemed American historian Gordon Wood turned to Proust... more »
New Books
A mediocre student, a crushing bore, a compulsive seducer. How an improbable group of spieshelped Stalin build an empire... more »
Essays & Opinions
Daniel Greco is a professor of philosophy at Yale. Why is he training an AI to replace him?... more »
Articles of Note
To America, a country built on an idea, the inability to tell a story in common might well prove fatal... more »
New Books
There are plenty of reasonable grounds on which to criticize the Frankfurt School. Why resort to delusional fantasies? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Obstinate pedantry and an endless focus on commercialism — in the world of the film critic A.S. Hamrah, one misrepresentation leads to another... more »
Articles of Note
Read by a crowd of “envious para-intellectuals,” The Drift seems like it’s written, first and foremost, to avoid the possibility of critique... more »
New Books
What makes Great Books great? Their honesty, rigor, seriousness, and sensitivity — all qualities they can lend to their readers... more »
Essays & Opinions
In a classic case of therapeutic culture run amok, professors are refusing to punish their students for cheating with AI... more »
Articles of Note
There are two types of anti-woke intellectuals. The first type criticizes ideas; the second is consumed by them... more »
New Books
“To see like a dog in a work of art is to have moral perceptions about human beings”... more »
Essays & Opinions
"AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting," says Malin Hay, "as well as a lot of promising"... more »
Articles of Note
Denis Johnson's life was a mess. His prose, somehow, was immaculate. How to explain the distance between life and art?... more »
New Books
Psilocybin is doing what decades of philosophy couldn't: turning committed materialists into reluctant mystics... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harold Bloom, flatterer. John Ashbery was “THE POET ABSOLUTE,” yet A.R. Ammons’s work was “larger and better” — and then there was Henri Cole... more »
Articles of Note
The humanities spent decades decentering the human. Now Big Tech is doing it better... more »
New Books
To anyone in love with the precious, fleeting things of this world, resistance to disappearance seems only natural and proper. And yet... more »
Essays & Opinions
Imagine a metastasizing heap of incalculable, forgotten junk. That’s what we’re all storing away in “The Cloud”... more »
Articles of Note
The publishing midlist isn't shrinking. It's growing faster than the pool of available readers... more »
New Books
The dons of Oxbridge have traded the BBC for podcasts. Is this decline or progress?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. Now there’s data to back it up... more »
Articles of Note
Not simply trivia, not simply a hobby — for the believer, quiz verges on a way of life... more »
New Books
Harold Bloom read everything, praised lavishly, and struggled mightily with self-doubt ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The grand tour’s most enduring truth: Even the most miraculous work of art is born not just into history, but also out of it... more »
