Jan. 18, 2021 | In the late '90s, a professor began talking to Bruno Lohse, art agent to Hermann Göring. Then things got complicated ... more »
Jan. 16, 2021 | How many wives did King Henry VIII have? Where does the f-word come from? Wikipedia has the answers. But where did Wikipedia come from? ... more »
Jan. 15, 2021 | 1984 is again atop the best-seller list. Cue the rampant misuse of the term “Orwellian” ... more »
Jan. 14, 2021 | It was a “moral compass,” “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.” And then it was not. The inside story of American Dirt’s implosion ... more »
Jan. 13, 2021 | Cavemen have been widely studied. Cavewomen, less so. Now science is learning more about the Sheanderthal... more »
Jan. 12, 2021 | Being a beginner is hard at any age, but it gets harder as you get older. Kids, knowing less, can learn more ... more »
Jan. 11, 2021 | Hockney at 83. Pencil, pen and ink, charcoal, crayon, watercolor, photography, iPhone: No medium is uncongenial to his talent ... more »
Jan. 9, 2021 | What to do with Nazi art? Hundreds of works, collecting dust in an Army fort in Virginia, may stay there forever ... more »
Jan. 8, 2021 | Sylvia Plath is more than the way she died and the man she married. Her art transcends tragedy ... more »
Jan. 7, 2021 | What do writers and editors do? Karl Ove Knausgaard investigates an often fraught relationship ... more »
Jan. 6, 2021 | Sixty years ago, George Steiner declared tragedy dead. Terry Eagleton has come to bury that idea... more »
Jan. 5, 2021 | Do dashed expectations among elites lead to social unrest? If so, beware the downwardly mobile Ph.D.... more »
Jan. 4, 2021 | In the rush to turn Frida Kahlo into a symbol, we've lost her significance as an artist, not merely a martyr ... more »
Jan. 2, 2021 | Charm, patience, and a big budget for cognac and cigars: how John le Carré got sources to tell him everything ... more »
Jan. 1, 2021 | Marxism and religion. The Frankfurt School theorists understood that democracy requires a dialogue between theology and reason... more »
Dec. 31, 2020 | “They call me a psychologist; this is not true,” Dostoevsky wrote. “I am merely a realist in the higher sense” ... more »
Dec. 30, 2020 | Trotsky’s sidekick. Jean van Heijenoort was his secretary and bodyguard for seven years, and then built another life ... more »
Dec. 29, 2020 | Is our sedentary lifestyle slowly killing us? Is sitting the new smoking? "Let’s relax. The chair is not the enemy" ... more »
Dec. 28, 2020 | Being Roger Penrose. At the heart of the Nobel-winning physicist's work are his artistry and his ideas about beauty... more »
Dec. 26, 2020 | Prisons are everywhere in the work of Charles Dickens, who knew the costs of confinement and the ubiquity of sequestered lives ... more »
Dec. 25, 2020 | Fifty years ago, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. Is it still possible to reason together about the common good? ... more »
Dec. 24, 2020 | Does instant communication mean the death of the literary letter? It depends on how you define a letter ... more »
Dec. 23, 2020 | To understand why science is so widely distrusted, we must see how that attitude has arisen ... more »
Dec. 22, 2020 | For Leonora Carrington, humanity was a seductive costume donned by dummies. Abandoning the costume courted madness but also brought liberation... more »
Dec. 21, 2020 | Liberalism, a never-ending quest to find the best way for diverse people to live together, is in decline. We need a better liberalism... more »