Aug. 7, 2026
Articles of Note
As AI eats the internet, we’re witnessing the end of the messy, effortful, contestable business of finding things out... more »
New Books
What characterized the late-80s culture wars wasn't ideology alone, but a landscape where art itself still mattered. Paul Elie explains... more »
Essays & Opinions
An enfeebled grip, a depressingly slow gait, and the pitying kindness of others — Theodore Dalrymple searches for the consolations of age... more »
Articles of Note
Welcome to Combat U, the campy, inspiring, dismaying, downright confusing place where higher education meets organized fighting.... more »
New Books
The secret history of silence stretches from Pythagoras, who required years of quiet from his pupils, to the Anti-Noise League’s nearly silent lavatories... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Whatever potential hazards and unintended consequences flow from AI’s mass adoption, my own experience using it contradicted much of what I was being told"... more »
Articles of Note
M.F.A. programs teach pacing, structure, rhythm. They cannot teach a writer to have something worth saying... more »
New Books
Freudianism died in 1963, killed by Karl Popper. Yet in every generation there arises an attempt at rehabilitation. Meet Mark Solms... more »
Essays & Opinions
Sexual Personae was a scandal, and a ticket to infamy for its author, Camille Paglia. Its 700 pages remain incendiary — and exhausting... more »
Articles of Note
Medieval parents — they're just like us! Forget the cold and indifferent caricature that has persisted for decades... more »
New Books
Paul Celan met Martin Heidegger three times, an improbable pairing of Holocaust survivor and Nazi sympathizer... more »
Essays & Opinions
What connects the writer Ottessa Moshfegh, a fired professor in Florida, and a prudish college president? A creeping puritanism... more »
Articles of Note
What we lost when we lost the video-store clerk: The quirky sensibility of the movie geek has been replaced by the algorithm... more »
New Books
With age, Auden's brilliance on the page grew ever more estranged from his unwashed, drug-and-drink-addled private existence... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Sonny Rollins was the last feral master of an art that has become at least partly domesticated"... more »
Articles of Note
Two kinds of truth, two kinds of beauty, two kinds of art. One reproduces the world; the other creates it... more »
New Books
Mario Vargas Llosa spent decades exposing the seductions of ideology. Then he proved susceptible to a new one... more »
Essays & Opinions
Patrick O'Brian invented his Irish childhood, his years at sea, his very name. His readers forgave him ... more »
Articles of Note
Cabbage brought nightmares, turnips brought lust, beans brought confusion. Medieval vegetableswere less food than affliction... more »
New Books
"Chekhov the ingenious hack and Chekhov the latter-day master are connected by way of Chekhov the neighborhood observer"... more »
Essays & Opinions
What's with the boom in biographies of people who never existed? The strange rise of a new literary genre... more »
Articles of Note
Are you unable to earn a living as an artist but want to make art seriously and are willing to live modestly? Get a chickenshit job... more »
New Books
Seneca called it existential nausea. Medieval monks called it the noonday demon. Boredom changes names but always returns... more »
Essays & Opinions
Acupuncture meridians, Ayurvedic nadis, Egyptian metu. Every tradition imagined hidden channels. Has modern science finally found them?... more »
Articles of Note
Xanadu, the "Home of Tomorrow" that promised automation as liberation, was run on a "house brain," another word for mother... more »
New Books
Christopher Marlowe: alienated skeptic, government spy, counterfeiter, dead at 29. Shakespeare's debtto the man was simply inestimable.... more »
Essays & Opinions
No wave of riveting AI writing has arrived — only the diminution of the magic and excitement of human writing.... more »
Articles of Note
Increasingly “ancient history” is not just Greco-Roman, but leads through such locales as Kerala, Tillya Tepe, and Guangzhou... more »
New Books
Trenchant but sententious, John Berger could sound like Platonov one moment, the next like Alain de Botton... more »
Essays & Opinions
“I’m not a provocateur,” insists Alex Byrne, the MIT philosopher who decided to grab hold of a third rail: youth gender medicine... more »
Articles of Note
Nose hairs tweezed just so, and set with Krazy Glue. Gently dappled liver spots. Their art is increasingly rare, but a few morticians are hanging on... more »
New Books
Durkheim called it "collective effervescence." The rest of us call it getting gussied up to drink, dance, and have fun... more »
Essays & Opinions
No, we are not post-literate. The reading panic is merely the result of histrionic op-eds that misdiagnose the erosion of literary culture... more »
Articles of Note
In 1994, Stanley Fish described deconstruction as dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead: "It is everywhere.” He had a point... more »
New Books
For some conservatives, the Great Books are simply an anti-woke bulwark. But the case for them is much grander and more provocative ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Anonymity is what the aesthete fears above all," says Mark Lilla. One task of poetry is to assert the individual against the masses... more »
Articles of Note
AI distills “the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression.” That's why its output is, put simply, slop ... more »
New Books
The Canadian poet Margaret Avison lived with such intense inwardness that Northrop Frye called her “a conscientious objector to life”... more »
Essays & Opinions
At its American debut, half the audience walked out of Waiting for Godot. Now the whole world waits with it... more »
Articles of Note
What separates American architecture from European is a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle... more »
New Books
“Joyce stands out among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress, and the preciousness of the everyday”... more »
Essays & Opinions
For Marco Roth, the cardinal sin of elegy writing“is to make it about oneself more than the deceased”... more »
Articles of Note
Fueled by peyote, the anthropologist and cult leader Carlos Castaneda was one of the world’s most read authors in 1970. Today he’s an artifact... more »
New Books
"Treat me as though I were dead," Muriel Sparktold her biographer. Then she tried to bury the book... more »
Essays & Opinions
Vienna's coffeehouses bred inward-looking modernists. Belgrade's kafanas bred regicide and revolution ... more »