Richard and Corinthian at Marrickville
Articles of Note
The Egyptians, the Hittites, the Assyrians — what caused the collapse of a slew of regional powers around 1200 BC? ... more »
New Books
Perverseness drove Edgar Allan Poe to ruin, or the brink of it, again and again. It was also the source of his inspiration... more »
Essays & Opinions
AI doomers and apocalyptic futurists are weird. Also, their prophecies risk pernicious downsides. That doesn't mean they're wrong... more »
Articles of Note
There are to be “no jesters, no dogs, no weapons, or any such silliness.” Or so the Renaissance painterPaolo Veronese was told by an Inquisitor... more »
New Books
Egomaniacs, psychos, and informants. Why is it we look past all sorts of ugliness and insist on mythologizing revolutionaries?... more »
Essays & Opinions
As an AI-generated sameness permeates “creative” work and the knowledge economy, we’re entering an era of bleh... more »
Articles of Note
For four years, a fellow saxophonist taped John Coltrane's gigs: 26-plus hours of music. His subterfuge is our gift... more »
New Books
The phrase "fiercely private" is often applied to artists who secretly love the attention. Anita Brooknerwasn’t one of them... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harold Cruse was as pure an autodidact as any 20th-century university scholar. Tuskegee wouldn't hire him. Michigan gave him tenure... more »
Articles of Note
We fear AI as Frankenstein's monster – and forget that Mary Shelley's warning was about the scientist, not the creature... more »
New Books
In place of Middlemarch and Montaigne, we have Mr. Beast. The post-literacy thesis sounds compelling, until you begin to unpack it... more »
Essays & Opinions
In his diary, the Italian litterateur Cesare Paveseboasted: “I am king. In the course of ten years, I have done it all.” Then he set to arranging his death... more »
Articles of Note
Jonathan Franzen used to consider TV the "enemy." Now it looks like an ally: He's working on a script to adapt The Corrections... more »
New Books
For Chekhov, doomsaying was an ingeniously disguised form of sloth — and modern disenchantment an epidemic worth curing... more »
Essays & Opinions
Glenn Gould was fabulously neurotic, opinionated, and flamboyant. Seventy years on, his Bach still sets the standard... more »
Articles of Note
AI has solved the longtime Navier–Stokes problem, said the triumphant announcement. Well, sort of. A mathematician explains... more »
New Books
“Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Annie Dillard “was a sort of drill sergeant of human consciousness: determined, always, to force herself, and others, to see”... more »
Articles of Note
Saffron for joy, ostrich liver for melancholy: medieval mental health was absurd. Yet some aspects seem strangely modern... more »
New Books
Critical theory can be used to convey sophistication — but when it goes wrong, the whiff of pretension and arrogance is unmistakable... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The body could have been that of a hobo.” The life — and death — of Victor Serge is evidence that years spent on the barricades take a toll... more »
Articles of Note
In 2011, a reddish hair was found in Thomas Jefferson's Bible. That discovery prompted a decade of DNA testing – and a lot of ill will... more »
New Books
The split between Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye led to no shortage of bad blood. But were their theories of literary inheritance that far apart?... more »
Essays & Opinions
How a young Roger Scruton, an apolitical and unusually charming Cambridge undergraduate, became Britain's most reviled intellectual... more »
Articles of Note
Cormac McCarthy, apparent desert nihilist, was actually gregarious and fond of cream-colored suits and dancing on ocean liners... more »
New Books
Why collect stamps? Explanations include nostalgia, anal-retentiveness, erotic frustration, and the desire to escape into a remote, private world... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The precarity of art in the 21st century has led Gen Z to forsake subcultural credibility for an instrumentalized careerism”... more »
Articles of Note
Jonathan Swift envisioned a large wooden contraption that would allow anyone to write brilliantly, sans “genius or study.” Sound familiar?... more »
New Books
Stephen Hawking, brilliant and extraordinary, was spoken of with reverence and affection. Those who knew him have a dimmer view... more »
Essays & Opinions
To teach students how to think, shut down the Wi-Fi, scramble the cell signal, and send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods... more »
Articles of Note
Watched vertically on a phone, the Chinese “micro-drama” — under two minutes — may be the defining art form of our era... more »
New Books
Prophets of literary doom keep writing books about the death of reading. The genre refutes the thesis ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Dwight Macdonald was famous for writing with a sneer. His criticism now reads less like erudition than compulsive, gleeful bullying... more »
Articles of Note
Is all the hate for Rachel Cusk’s latest novel merely a misunderstanding of its genre, and the terms the book sets out for itself?... more »
New Books
Would an influential jeremiad against American literature’s devotion to emotional immaturitychange writerly habits? Alas, no... more »
Essays & Opinions
Nature rightly insists that we must learn from the tragedy of Jason Arday. Unfortunately the journal has learned the wrong lessons... more »
Articles of Note
The Atomphilosoph. In technologically driven catastrophes, Günther Anders saw cosmic arrogance — and also the need for a new moral code... more »
New Books
“In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” says Jill Lepore. “Instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions”... more »
Essays & Opinions
In the winter of 1988, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay while visiting his in-laws in Las Vegas. He's been fending off critics ever since... more »
Articles of Note
In an 8th-century Chinese text, Buddha warns of 50 “demonic states” in which meditators can be trapped. Now science is exposing those dangers... more »
New Books
At 83, Terry Eagleton is fixated on death, which he unnervingly describes as “the erotic bliss of yielding to an impregnable power"... more »
Essays & Opinions
Time speeds up and slows down; days blend together to the point of indistinguishability — time disorientation is real... more »
Articles of Note
The nonfiction collapse. We’re nearing the point at which one fiction blockbuster could outsell the entire nonfiction bestseller list... more »
New Books
Helen Vendler spent a lifetime writing about lyric poetry, yet her criticism always started from frustration, not certainty... more »
Essays & Opinions
The extraordinary achievement of Moby-Dick is to unroll the blank sheet on which modernity will write itself... more »
Articles of Note
He burned with no causes, claimed Tom Stoppard. That detachment let him dramatize ideas his committed peers couldn't touch... more »
New Books
Literature without lust? For Leslie Fiedler, the American canon comprised adventure books, sea tales, and other prepubescent diet fare... more »
Essays & Opinions
Once again this year, Vinita Prabhakar assigned her college students a short story she'd taught for a decade. This time, she lost her job... more »
Articles of Note
Pauline Kael was useless as a guide to movies. She was indispensable as an autobiographer of the Age of Cinema... more »
New Books
During the golden age of Oxbridge dons, intellectual elites were treated as a national treasure. Then came Margaret Thatcher... more »
Essays & Opinions
The political right often acts in bad faith in its attacks on academia; in response, academics lapse into tendentious moralism... more »
Articles of Note
Gooey, disgusting AI slop is everywhere these days, including the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Here comes the AI police... more »
New Books
Rachel Cusk’s new novel was billed as “literary scandal of the year.” Strip away the controversy and it’s instantly forgettable... more »
Essays & Opinions
Americans are indifferent to art but obsess over art heists. "It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars... more »
Articles of Note
Babitz bubbles, Renata revivals, Hardwick hurricanes: How NYRB Classics built its name by resurrecting old and overlooked novelists... more »
New Books
Sumerian tablets, Soviet cybernetics, Google server banks — human history can be seen via our ever more elaborate data apparatuses ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Broke and in search of a sinecure, Edgar Allan Poewent to Washington in 1843 to try to meet the president’s son. A fiasco ensued... more »
Articles of Note
A tour through Eve Babitz’s letters reveals that this glamorous, supremely insouciant writer was once boring... more »
New Books
A wine so thick you could write with it. Pâté made from cat meat. What did boys obsess over in the Renaissance? Food... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1970, 1 in 13 four-year degrees was in English. Today it's 1 in 60. What happened? “Canon" became a dirty word... more »