"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents"
~ Bob Ross
Articles of Note
Counterculture prophet, Whole Earth cataloguer, proto-internet evangelist, Stewart Brand has a new obsession: maintenance... more »
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
New Books
An Emerson for our times? Terry Tempest Williams’s “epic documentation of the Glorians” is full of celestial beings and desert miracles... more »
Essays & Opinions
He championed Joyce, mentored Eliot, and broadcast fascist propaganda. Ezra Pound was indispensable as an artist and irredeemable as a man... more »
Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
Articles of Note
Bolster civil discourse and the Great Books, or purge “commies”? The right is at war with itself over how to reform the university... more »
New Books
Shut out of plum positions because of his political sins, Malcolm Cowley became a triple-threat hired gun: reporting, reviewing, editing... more »
Essays & Opinions
Adam Phillips: "Psychoanalysis is not better than aromatherapy or worse than neurology, it’s simply something for people who find it intriguing"... more »
Articles of Note
In 2013 Mary Gaitskill told students: “Go home and look between your legs and tell me if that is a social construct.” All hell broke loose... more »
New Books
College students’ sense of meaning and purpose is transactional and internet-based. For them, the campus is a hustler’s paradise... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harold Bloom made academics wince and general readers swoon. The asymmetry was the point... more »
Articles of Note
Our dreams are our own — or are they? Meet the researchers behind the new science of TDI: targeted dream incubation... more »
New Books
A cow carcass, buckets of blood, poisoned dogs: A lot of death went into the making of Chaim Soutine’s art... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 2002, the college essay was declared dead. More than three years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the college essay lives on... more »
Articles of Note
John Brockman was more than a literary agent — he was a networker and salon impresario. Was he also Jeffrey Epstein's conduit to the academy?"... more »
New Books
Despite science's efforts, consciousness isn't quantifiable. The hard problem remains stubbornly hard, but reading poetry may help... more »
Essays & Opinions
“How we live as ethical people and behave and think wisely is not something to optimize, or, crucially, to even let ourselves think about in this way”... more »
Articles of Note
Rose Lesniak, the magnetic feminist poet who heckled John Ashbery and trained dogs, is dead. She was 70... more »
New Books
There were two Thomas Manns: the early, coolly ironic author of Death in Venice — and the later, literary spokesman for democracy... more »
Essays & Opinions
Werner Herzog has spent 50 years insisting that lies reveal deeper truths. That argument has become harder to make... more »
Articles of Note
On February 3, 1967, Jimi Hendrix pushed the electric guitar past its known limits. He wasn't just a musician. He was an engineer... more »
New Books
Laid off from The Washington Post, the critic Ron Charles turns to books that ask a fundamental question: Do I matter?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendarily fat G.K. Chesterton, William James climbed a ladder to peer into his garden — to no avail... more »
Articles of Note
The New York Review of Architecture, The Manhattan Art Review, San Francisco Review of Whatever — we’re living in a reviewnaissance... more »
New Books
Minimally competent fathers are lavished with unearned admiration. The concept deserves a name: oppressive praise... more »
Essays & Opinions
We are wealthier than Aristotle could have imagined, yet we spend little of that wealth on what he believed it was for: leisure... more »
Articles of Note
Across 48,000 minutes of recorded conversations with countless authors, Michael Silverblatt established a reputation as our greatest reader... more »
New Books
Was Elizabeth Bathory, aka “the Blood Countess,” a torturer of young maidens or a victim of a disinformation campaign?... more »
Essays & Opinions
How come a person who can’t focus on a novel can sit through a three-hour video? The problem isn't the screen. It's the environment... more »
Articles of Note
What does it look like when the largest funder in the humanities goes all in on social justice?... more »
New Books
"It’s weird: in Updike’s teenage letters he sounds preternaturally sophisticated; in his forties, he sounds like a horny kid"... more »
Essays & Opinions
If you memorize the classic fallacies — ad hominem, post hoc, straw man — you inoculate yourself against them. That’s a nice, but false, idea... more »
Articles of Note
“Rather than being a footnote to premodern folly, the Rosicrucian affair turns out to sit at the narrative center of the modern world”... more »
New Books
For leftists, philanthropy is often simply an expression of plutocratic power. How then to make sense of the surprisingly radical Garland Fund?... more »
Essays & Opinions
"What is it to live near to light, in sustained awareness of it? How does it braid itself into our sense of revelation, our communion with grace?... more »
Articles of Note
Did Kamel Daoud steal the story in his Goncourt-prize-winning novel? “I felt betrayed,” said a patient of his wife’s therapy practice... more »
New Books
Trotsky in Mexico. How Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and a Kremlin-hatched plot led to an ice axe in the head... more »
Essays & Opinions
Staunch anti-Nazis, the members of Berlin’s Fest family were penalized first for their politics, and then as defeated Germans... more »
Articles of Note
AI can summarize an email, but it can't make a genuine intellectual contribution. Right? Wrong, as Yascha Mounk found out... more »
New Books
Often invoked, rarely read, the work of the philosopher Alexandre Kojève is finally landing in the spotlight... more »
Essays & Opinions
David Brooks on the sins of the educated class, what Trump gets right, and why Brooks is leaving The New York Times for Yale University... more »
Articles of Note
Confessions of a midlist writer. Once it was okay for a writer’s debut to sell only a few thousand copies. No longer... more »
New Books
The film critic A.S. Hamrah has no use for plot description, boosterism, or takedowns. He focuses, instead, on continuities and contradictions... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it”... more »
Articles of Note
In the 1950s, Foucault sped around Sweden — quite dangerously — in a spectacular Jaguar... more »
New Books
In the Victorian era, discoveries upended humanity's place in the cosmos. Tennyson turned this metaphysical crisis into poetry... more »
Essays & Opinions
"I find myself being more and more difficult," Toni Morrison once said. "It's something I really relish." The difficulty was the point... more »
Articles of Note
The Mellon Foundation has put huge sums of money toward the idea that arts and letters is not for wisdom, but for advocacy... more »
New Books
“Being a literary sex symbol can really take it out of you, making it tougher to maintain your lofty dignity as a quoter of Kafka”... more »
Essays & Opinions
What happens when a novel’s plot comes uncannily close to major breaking news? The case of Murder Bimbo is instructive... more »
Articles of Note
Can an AI be endowed with a sense of morality? Amanda Askell is fashioning a soul for Claude... more »
New Books
“Revolution” initially signaled destruction. Why did the word take on a more optimistic tenor?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word”... more »
Articles of Note
At a film screening, Salvador Dalí, in a fit of envy, turned on the director: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my unconscious mind!”... more »
New Books
“Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity”... more »
Essays & Opinions
We associate confessional poetry with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Larry Levis’s confessionalism was different... more »
Articles of Note
The overworked phrase “rewiring your brain” suggests mechanical precision. The process is slow, messy, and incomplete... more »
New Books
Peter Matthiessen went to Paris to spy and write the Great American Novel. But he was, in his words, “always in the club drinking martinis”... more »
Essays & Opinions
In publications like New Masses and The Anvil, the proletarian literary movement had a message for Ezra Pound: “See you in hell”... more »
Articles of Note
George Scialabba is no fan of political theory: “Imagination, sympathy, solidarity — by whatever name: this is the true engine of political progress”... more »
New Books
Walking “a fine line between principled opposition and crankdom,” the film critic A.S. Hamrah rails against Rotten Tomatoes, texting at the movies, and digital projection... more »
Essays & Opinions
It should be as good to remember a past joy as to anticipate a future one, reasoned Derek Parfit. Nonsense, argues Samuel Scheffler... more »
Articles of Note
Typists, editors, arbiters of art. Literary amanuenses like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot shaped modern literature... more »
New Books
How did Western psychiatric taxonomieshandle such non-Western disorders as “pibloktoq” (a wintertime psychosis) and “kufungisisa” (thinking too much)?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and John Ruskin were exemplars of socialist aesthetics, advancing the view that more leisure would result in better art... more »
Do we misuse our leisure time?
