April 16, 2024 | Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »
April 15, 2024 | Is Glenn Loury’s new memoir a brave act of self-reckoning or a reckless act of self-sabotage?... more »
April 12, 2024 | “That is right,” Joseph Priestley said when he completed editing the manuscript. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was dead... more »
April 11, 2024 | “I will dedicate all my work to her, forever.” The novelist Carson McCullers had a habit of overdoing her romantic pronouncements... more »
April 10, 2024 | George Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and 1984 a weirder novel, than we’ve appreciated... more »
April 9, 2024 | How do artists think? Where do they begin? How do they know when they’re done? Adam Moss looks for answers... more »
April 8, 2024 | In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton audited a course given by Robert Lowell. They were forever changed as poets... more »
April 5, 2024 | “It was easy for people to just remember and regurgitate ‘r > g.’” Thomas Piketty reflects on his best seller a decade after its publication... more »
April 4, 2024 | John Barth, who believed the old conventions of literary expression were “used up,” is dead. He was 93... more »
April 3, 2024 | Contemporary writing on liberalism consists of two types: autopsies and demonologies... more »
April 2, 2024 | Long a widely shared ideal, “equality” is now seen as promoting a specious universalism. A new virtue has replaced it: “equity”... more »
April 1, 2024 | Jamaicans are ready to embrace Tacky’s Revolt, an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island in 1760. For a pioneering historian, that’s complicated... more »
March 29, 2024 | H.P. Lovecraft, philosopher. His fiction blended materialism, determinism, and atheism into a new school of thought: “cosmic indifferentism”... more »
March 28, 2024 | Daniel Kahneman, who marveled at “endlessly complicated” human psychology, is dead. He was 90... NYT... Daniel Engber... more »
March 27, 2024 | Caravaggio’s final crimes: carrying a sword without a permit, smearing excrement on a house, smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter... more »
March 26, 2024 | Joseph Epstein, with scores to settle, wrote a memoir. Why was he fired as editor of The American Scholar?... more »
March 25, 2024 | The physical world is full of inefficiencies. Cue the “digital twin,” where they can be ironed out virtually then reflected back into reality... more »
March 22, 2024 | Marilynne Robinson: “I consider the Bible to be the most complex document on the planet”... more »
March 21, 2024 | Does “coming out of the closet” turn gay men into oppressors of the more marginalized? Queer theory seems to think so... more »
March 20, 2024 | The publishing industry is notoriously sleepy. But here come the Silicon-Valley inflected CEOs spouting MBAisms... more »
March 19, 2024 | Whither the “litblog”? Blogs were once at the center of the online cultural ecosystem. The appetite for such work has diminished... more »
March 18, 2024 | Wicked baronets and disastrous marriages — the “sensation novels” of the 1860s updated Gothic elements for Victorian sensibilities... more »
March 15, 2024 | In 2020, a star physicist claimed an incredible advance: a room temperature superconductor. Retractions followed... more »
March 14, 2024 | Wonders emerge in the ocean’s deepest trenches: corals, crustaceans, a multitude of bizarre fish. Also: nuclear waste and tins of Spam... more »
March 13, 2024 | What can a generation of deeply religious thinkers in a moment of disenchantment teach modern humanists? Everything... more »