May 25, 2020 | How well do we know Philip Roth? Too well? Or not well enough? Let’s check his archive... more »
May 23, 2020 | Everyone wants a glimpse of the post-Covid world, so the public square is thick with prophets. Ignore them... more »
May 22, 2020 | We know Raphael as a painter, but his life might have turned out far differently — he was also a formidable architect... more »
May 21, 2020 | Behind Kepler’s discoveries was remarkable data compiled by Tycho Brahe, a fierce astronomer with an artificial golden nose... more »
May 20, 2020 | It's a trope of science fiction that machines will become human-like. The real threat: Humans will become machine-like... more »
May 19, 2020 | “What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” Virginia Woolf’s question has always been thorny for women... more »
May 18, 2020 | What did Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Walter Benjamin read? One woman was keeping track... more »
May 16, 2020 | Love and theft. How a stolen de Kooning ended up in the master bedroom of a pink stucco house in New Mexico... more »
May 15, 2020 | Magical mummy masks; the “finding” of a first-century fragment — why was the world’s leading papyrologist involved in such shenanigans?... more »
May 14, 2020 | Deep-speare is a computer that composes poetry. But an original sonnet isn’t necessarily a good sonnet... more »
May 13, 2020 | Lexicographer extraordinaire, paragon of learning, purveyor of practical wisdom, Samuel Johnson was above all a moralist... more »
May 12, 2020 | When he was 29, Mick Jagger was asked if he’d still perform at 60. “Yeah, easily, yeah." Why we never tire of the original rock ‘n’ rollers... more »
May 11, 2020 | Telling us what the pandemic means is a risky endeavor in charlatanry. But does Slavoj Žižek have a point?... more »
May 9, 2020 | Even before the pandemic forced all of us into quarantine, deprivation and isolation had become lifestyle signifiers. Meet the man who escaped into the dark... more »
May 8, 2020 | “It can’t be that all of this enormous emotional, financial, and scholastic investment goes toward creating the next meaningless app”... more »
May 7, 2020 | To understand how science works, you need to determine what makes theories fail. And there’s no better guide than the often-overlooked Imre Lakatos... more »
May 6, 2020 | Zhang Shoucheng, a brilliant scientist at Stanford, was caught between U.S. and Chinese national interests. When he was found dead, the intrigue only grew... more »
May 5, 2020 | What was most shocking about Machiavelli wasn't original, and what was original wasn't shocking: his realism... more »
May 4, 2020 | Within 10 years, all Holocaust survivors will be dead. The Shoah Foundation has stockpiled 115,000 hours of their testimony. Is anyone listening?... more »
May 2, 2020 | The author of The Marburg Virus, an improbable novel, is imploring his publisher to reissue it. That author is Boris Johnson’s father... more »
May 1, 2020 | Who gets to read Ulysses? For a book full of fart jokes, as Stephen Fry points out, it gets accused of pretentiousness quite a lot... more »
April 30, 2020 | Condé Nast was once known as “the Vogue company.” Now, as advertising revenue declines, is it “The New Yorker company”?... more »
April 29, 2020 | When the pandemic has receded, no doubt the main takeaway will be: Don’t get caught off guard again. That is the wrong lesson... more »
April 28, 2020 | Name the last novel to pass Andrew Ferguson's test: Would you be embarrassed at a cocktail party for not having read it?... more »
April 27, 2020 | In 1947, Evelyn Waugh traveled to America to negotiate the film rights to Brideshead Revisited. Here’s why the trip was a disaster... more »