Oct. 23, 2018 | Martin Duberman, godfather of gay studies, was warned by a therapist in 1955 about "the hopelessness of homosexual life." Now 88, he still feels damaged... more »
Oct. 22, 2018 | Russell Kirk was more littérateur than leader. But just think how different things might be had he, not William F. Buckley Jr., been the public face of conservativism... more »
Oct. 20, 2018 | Francis Fukuyama's instinctively dialectical habit of mind is at once precisely what America needs and what is precisely being ousted from the discourse... more »
Oct. 19, 2018 | In medieval texts, the planning and execution of a war might take up a paragraph. In modern writing, much less happens. How thinking supplanted action in literature... more »
Oct. 18, 2018 | Manure, wood shavings, hot peanuts, greasepaint, popcorn, burning sugar, sweat, despair: There's nothing like the smell of the circus... more »
Oct. 17, 2018 | Sotheby's and spectacle. Banksy’s autoshredding stunt reinforces how contemporary art is not so much about art but the documentation of an event... more »
Oct. 16, 2018 | Descriptions of the future are hopelessly tied to the gadgets of today. Ideas, not technology, drive the biggest historical changes... more »
Oct. 15, 2018 | Steven Pinker believes that we take the Enlightenment’s gifts for granted; Homi Bhabha believes that we must calculate the cost of those gifts. A debate... more »
Oct. 13, 2018 | Kandinsky has long been seen as the father of abstract painting. But Hilma af Klint predated him. Her art was informed by seances — what the spirits said, she did... more »
Oct. 12, 2018 | The New York Intellectuals changed the system, and the system changed them: a story of hollow affirmation, fading honor, and flamboyant decay... more »
Oct. 11, 2018 | William Hazlitt’s style, in the early 19th century, was strikingly modern. So were his challenges as a freelance writer: urgent deadlines and financial struggle... more »
Oct. 10, 2018 | The critic as curmudgeon. Before literary reviewing got so nice, even legendary writers could expect to be savaged, usually by Martin Seymour-Smith... more »
Oct. 9, 2018 | William Dudley Pelley was a novelist and screenwriter. He was also “Chief” of the Silver Shirts, a 15,000-member Nazi-copycat group... more »
Oct. 8, 2018 | A humorless, misogynistic Nazi? Nietzsche does not deserve his bad rap. After all, as Hitler said of him, “He is not my guide”... more »
Oct. 6, 2018 | Vicious infighting, secret identities, a whiff of plagiarism, plenty of money — the world of Instagram poetry is a huckster’s paradise... more »
Oct. 5, 2018 | We have plenty of “information” but not enough wisdom. It is the job of the novelist to turn information — and misinformation — into wisdom... more »
Oct. 4, 2018 | An improbable thesis: At the center of Dickens’s genius was not his prolific output or his public performances or public works, but his knowledge of ravens... more »
Oct. 3, 2018 | After 17 years in the gulag, Varlam Shalamov sought a radically new form of writing. In his bleak work, days churn by and nothing progresses... more »
Oct. 2, 2018 | Only pessimists survived the Holocaust, and Walter Laqueur was one of them. The scholar of seemingly everything is dead, at 97... more »
Oct. 1, 2018 | And now his struggle is ended. After six volumes, an open question about Knausgaard: Is he too self-centered to write of anything but himself?... more »
Sept. 29, 2018 | In 1924, Paul Jordan-Smith founded a one-man art movement: Disumbrationism. It was an elaborate hoax — or was it?... more »
Sept. 28, 2018 | So-called “Instagram museums” claim to reinvent art. But visiting them feels like a masochistic march through an existential void... more »
Sept. 27, 2018 | The making of “Axis Sally.” Her Broadway career stalled, and she found herself broke in Berlin in 1940. An opportunity with Reich Radio beckoned... more »
Sept. 26, 2018 | In 1921, William Faulkner went to work at the post office. He was comically ill-suited for the job. “The damndest postmaster the world has ever seen”... more »
Sept. 25, 2018 | “So sa-a-a-ad that you’re leaving.” With those reviled but revolutionary words, Cher ushered in the era of Auto-Tune... more »