May 20, 2024 | Polyamory used to be the domain of strange figures with strange views. Now we can't seem to stop talking about it ... more »
May 17, 2024 | Wake up, reach for your phone. The digital revolution prompts a question: Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? ... more »
May 16, 2024 | A vituperative 1979 debate pitted E.P. Thompson against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. At stake: Should history focus on realism or theory?... more »
May 15, 2024 | Are lessons from early human history useful to us? “Defend the coasts from marauders” can only take us so far... more »
May 14, 2024 | England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more »
May 13, 2024 | Surrealism: What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more »
May 10, 2024 | Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements... more »
May 9, 2024 | “The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more »
May 8, 2024 | In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more »
May 7, 2024 | “I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more »
May 6, 2024 | It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more »
May 3, 2024 | Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »
May 2, 2024 | Saskia Hamilton's parting gift. The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more »
May 1, 2024 | The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »
April 30, 2024 | Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. “The message is the message”... more »
April 29, 2024 | I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more »
April 26, 2024 | Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
April 25, 2024 | Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »
April 24, 2024 | Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »
April 23, 2024 | A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »
April 22, 2024 | “Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »
April 19, 2024 | A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »
April 18, 2024 | For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »
April 17, 2024 | Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »
April 16, 2024 | AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »