April 21, 2021 | How to become an intellectual in Silicon Valley: "Write like you talk, and talk like an asshole”... more »
April 20, 2021 | When it comes to explaining the dominance of American culture, few writers are as smart, witty, or elegant as Louis Menand... more... more »
April 19, 2021 | Denis Donoghue, a literary critic who opposed politicized theorizing and traditionalist pieties, is dead at 92 ... more »
April 17, 2021 | The absurdity of college admissions. Deluged with applications, some colleges are presuming to analyze applicants’ souls... more »
April 16, 2021 | Sam Sifton wants home cooking to be more like jazz: out with recipes, in with improvisation. Is that a good idea for all of us?... more »
April 15, 2021 | Merve Emre: "One of the most frustrating things about so much of literary criticism today... is that there's the sense that you have to pick your methodological camp" ... more »
April 14, 2021 | Baudelaire gave us not only the flaneur but also the convalescent: the addled thinker driven by feverish curiosity... more »
April 13, 2021 | The magic of fusion. If the technology works, the hydrocarbons that established society as we know it will be replaced with clean power... more »
April 12, 2021 | To stand in front of a Brutalist building is to be humbled, "confronted by a chunk of eternity. That can be comforting — or disconcerting" ... more »
April 10, 2021 | A film maudit, French for a cursed film, is one that is widely panned but staunchly defended by a devoted few ... more »
April 9, 2021 | In 2002, Maya Angelou set out to master the two-sentence epigram. She had a deal with Hallmark ... more »
April 8, 2021 | “About 40 years old, 175cm tall, slender, with an elongated face, black thinning hair, light-rimmed glasses": Philip Roth's Czech KGB file... more »
April 7, 2021 | Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books, has died. He published works no one else would publish, from the edges of American life ... more »
April 6, 2021 | We used to fear unpredictable robots we could not restrain. Now we worry about using machines to restrain unpredictable humans... more »
April 5, 2021 | Midnight's Children at 40: "For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight" ... more »
April 3, 2021 | "War to war, wife to wife, novel to novel." Hemingway's most constant mistress, says James Parker, "may have been concussion" ... more »
April 2, 2021 | Of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, says Katha Pollitt, decades-old children’s books are low on the list ... more »
April 1, 2021 | "The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions” ... more »
March 31, 2021 | Was Foucault abusing children in Tunisia in the late 1960s? A sordid story makes the rounds in Paris ... more »
March 30, 2021 | As early as 1957, Philip Larkin noted, poetry was losing its audience. The situation is worse now. Why don’t readers care?... more »
March 29, 2021 | Paul Theroux at 79. "I was once a hotshot, I was once the punk. And anyone who has once been a punk, eventually you're older, and you see the turning of the years as it is" ... more »
March 27, 2021 | Can a white person translate a Black poet? A fracas has broken out over identity and the translation of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” ... more »
March 26, 2021 | The mess at Medium. As the company’s latest “pivot” suggests, billionaires’ whims and sustainable journalism aren’t always compatible ... more »
March 25, 2021 | Falsification promises to help us separate science from pseudoscience. Only one problem: it doesn't work very well ... more »
March 24, 2021 | The cadaver known as Harriet Cole — a representation of the nervous system — is a product of anatomical bravado. But where did Harriet come from?... more »