Laugh at the absurd, ponder the peculiar, and celebrate the sheer randomness of existence…
What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.
~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Melbourne street sweeper Shaun Turner wins unfair dismissal case over Acknowledgement of Country comments
Articles of Note
Freelance writing, informal DJ sets, working retail — even seemingly successful musicians are having trouble making ends meet... more »
New Books
Hubris and design thinking: The history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority”... more »
Articles of Note
In the 19th century, microphotography was a scientific marvel. In no field was it adopted more quickly than in espionage and erotica... more »
New Books
Steven Shapin: “The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people”... more »
Essays & Opinions
For influential 20th-century anthropologists, religion could not be reduced to its social function or explained away by other metadiscourses... more »
Articles of Note
In the ’60s and ’70s, the study of British royals was seen as elitist, trivial, even pointless. Today, however, royal studies are flourishing... more »
New Books
Those in Gen Z are having less sex, and when they do have it, they are doing so in arcane arrangements. Is that a problem?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Geoff Dyer: “The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign — immaturing with age”... more »
Articles of Note
Best sellers were once written by authors like Mary McCarthy and J.D. Salinger. Now they’re written by those like James Patterson. What changed?... more »
New Books
Technology elevates efficiency over friction and seamlessness over inconvenience. Is that a bad thing?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Violence follows Harry Crews around like an oversized lapdog, eager to spring upon him with bone-crunching love”... more »
Articles of Note
Zelig with a paintbrush. Edward Burra was in Paris with Josephine Baker, in Mexico with Malcolm Lowry, and in Spain just before its civil war... more »
New Books
In America, has the backlash against Marxism been more influential than the theory itself? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
You won’t look to ChatGPT as a role model for the life of the mind, but A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality... more »
Articles of Note
In 1781 a semicolon appeared once every 90 words. Today it shows up once every 390 words. Is this progress?... more »
New Books
Tom Crewe on the “ridiculous, sententious” writing of Ocean Vuong: “It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Politicians love to mock seemingly useless studies of shrimp treadmills and gecko mechanics — but silly science plays a vital role... more »
Articles of Note
What’s discussed at the Dull Men’s Club? Windshield wipers, coat hangers, and mailboxes, among other banalities... more »
New Books
Thomas Mallon has mastered the bitchy aperçu and brisk, summarizing detail. In short, he's an ideal diarist... more »
Essays & Opinions
James Schuyler, whose poems exuded calm, was prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes... more »
Articles of Note
Get published for $20, co-author with a Nobel Prize-winner for $700: With academic paper mills, anything seems possible — for a fee... more »
New Books
Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker seek to parochialize the human, showing that our activities may just be a cosmic sideshow... more »
Essays & Opinions
Geniuses behaving badly is a historical commonplace. Indeed, it's enough to wonder if the label is a license to misbehave... more »
Articles of Note
The fact checker's improvised dance: Intuition, calculation, and the seeking of truth... more »
New Books
An architect’s eccentric residential design, a manifesto house, is a rare instance of an artist putting polemic into practice... more »
Essays & Opinions
The impossible genre. Biography incorporates every style and school. We categorize it as nonfiction, “but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation”... more »
Articles of Note
Patricia Highsmith asked one question when hiring an assistant: “Do you like Hemingway?” “No” was the only permitted response... more »
New Books
The Divine Comedy, repeatedly rescued from obscurity, has long perched awkwardly between canonical reverence and cultural neglect... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones”... more »
Articles of Note
Paleoanthropology, a notoriously cutthroat discipline, attracts "the most psychotic" scientists. Even so, the femur dispute stands out... more »
New Books
Analytic philosophy offers the fantasy of free inquiry, but really just leans on “common sense” to justify the status quo — or so charge its critics... more »
Essays & Opinions
From 1770 to 1790, a new view of liberty ascended to a position of ideological dominance. Why?... more »
Articles of Note
The end of Hollywood. The movie business has moved to cities like Albuquerque and Atlanta. Even films set in L.A. are now shot elsewhere... more »
New Books
In 1959, Richard Ellmann published a biography of James Joyce. The genre would never be the same ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Sandra Cisneros: “Every woman writer could use a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But what really serves a woman, in my opinion, is a house”... more »
Articles of Note
What makes Thomas Mann’s liberal cosmopolitanism so compelling is that, temperamentally and philosophically, he remained a conservative... more »
New Books
To the ancients, revolution was a perversion. To French philosophes, it marked human progress. How did that change in meaning come about? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Yes, much about poetry gets lost in translation. But to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to misrepresent both poetry and translation... more »
Articles of Note
There’s no gay writer whose career Edmund Whitedidn't influence, “even if they don’t know it: He made all of us possible”... more »
New Books
The 7,000 languages spoken in the world today can be divided into 140 families. The languages most of us speak belong to just five... more »
Essays & Opinions
Critics take Shulamith Firestone’s schizophrenia to reveal some truth about feminism, or family tragedy, or psychiatry. That’s nonsense... more »
Articles of Note
Is it a good idea to posthumously publish someone's private notes from psychiatry sessions? What if they were written by Joan Didion?... more »
New Books
How do we prove something is true? Tools like “statistical significance” can introduce arbitrariness to the establishment of facts... more »
Essays & Opinions
Jordan Peterson somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook... more »
Articles of Note
AI will free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of what we now call “the author”... more »
New Books
Literary theory’s method wars are a bleakly irrelevant sideshow, a panic over living-room decor while the house burns... more »
Essays & Opinions
What made the Enlightenment extraordinary? Not just a set of ideas or what was said but also how it was said... more »
Articles of Note
“Trust the experts.” But many people would sooner accept ignorance than acknowledge an epistemic superior... more »
New Books
Is beauty more powerful than argument? Robert Gooding-Williams believes it’s powerful enough to refute racism... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Avoid adverbs” is advice commonly encountered by writers. It's also bad advice. By all means, use adverbs – carefully, not exuberantly... more »
Articles of Note
Old Tom Parr was said to have married at 80, committed adultery at 105, and died at 152. His life helped kick off the longevity business... more »
New Books
"Flaming and undisciplined genius." The uneasy yet fecund sibling rivalry of Gwen and Augustus John... more »
Essays & Opinions
Modern aesthetics encouraged a warm relationship between an artwork and its viewer. What happens to art in an age of enmity?... more »
Articles of Note
Is Dana Gioia a privileged Boomer hectoring us about the dying of the light? Or a prescient critic with a stark warning of decline?... more »
New Books
Robert Crumb was born into a dysfunctional family beset by alcoholism, abuse, and incest. Comics saved him... more »
Essays & Opinions
John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Mark Twain revival: “How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent?”... more »
Articles of Note
Can sexy elves, hot dragon-riders, and fornicating faeries save publishing? Romantasy now generates 20 million sales a year... more »
New Books
The many Machiavellis. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Carl Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries... more »
Essays & Opinions
The missive mania of Seamus Heaney. He once wrote 14 letters during one flight, and routinely wrote 15 per day... more »
Articles of Note
Among the Amis diehards. How to celebrate one of the last great literary celebrities? Throw a party for Martin... more »
New Books
The liberal university is collapsing because liberalism as America's governing consensus is collapsing. David Rieff explains... more »
Essays & Opinions
Some of Edward Said’s ideas have become canonical. Others are as contentious today as they were 30 years ago... more »
