June 25, 2021 | In the West, we confine dreams to the realms of superstition and metaphysics. But in other societies, dream-sharing is a serious business ... more »
June 24, 2021 | Among the lousy job options for Venetians: serving pizza, selling fake local “artifacts,” and working at the Venice Biennale... more »
June 23, 2021 | The asterisk dates back at least to Aristarchus of Samothrace, who edited Homer. It has been used to signal caution — marking plagiarism, omissions, and vulgarity... more »
June 22, 2021 | In his later years, John Le Carré lost what had been a strength: restraint and understatement. Politics began to intrude ... more »
June 21, 2021 | The word blurb was coined in 1907, but marketing puff is as old as novels themselves. Nowadays it's a grubby economy of mutual back-scratching ... more »
June 19, 2021 | Janet Malcolm, whose literary reportage evinced an unsparing and precise gaze on the world, is dead. She was 86 ... NYTimes ... WaPo .. The New Yorker ... Guardian ... New Republic ... Ian Frazer ... Laura Marsh ... Leo Robson ... Jennifer Szalai ... David Graham... more »
June 18, 2021 | The history of early European encounters with African scripts is one of neglect, false assumptions, and outright destruction ... more »
June 17, 2021 | 1619, 1776 — America’s origins-obsessed historicism now dominates liberal circles. But origins are not our destinies ... more »
June 16, 2021 | Curators, academics, governments, boards, funders: This blob of cultural dominance, Dave Hickey is here to remind us, diverts our attention from beauty... more »
June 15, 2021 | Edward de Bono, champion of “lateral thinking” and many implausible creative-thinking schemes, has died. He was 88... more »
June 14, 2021 | Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis on and off from 1951 to 1985. It shaped her art but didn't relieve her misery ... more »
June 12, 2021 | “Have you ever made a decision that ended up ruining someone’s life?” A college dean has second thoughts ... more »
June 11, 2021 | Nero: Not that bad. The grisly and perverse crimes of the Roman emperor were very likely invented by vituperative historians ... more »
June 10, 2021 | Eve Babitz, trying to get the Doors to change their name: "The Doors of Perception ... what an Ojai-geeky-too-LA-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea" ... more »
June 9, 2021 | The U.S. Army’s dalliance with positive psychology was a carnival of unskilled intuition and exaggerated storytelling — a textbook misuse of science ... more »
June 8, 2021 | 18th-century anatomy lessons had one big problem: the stench. Enter Marie-Marguerite Biheron and her perfectly accurate wax models ... more »
June 7, 2021 | What are scientific papers meant to communicate? Reliable discoveries or messy, inspired guesswork? ... more »
June 5, 2021 | Cicero, the first intellectual to succeed in politics, was more rhetorician than philosopher. He owed his rise to his sense of humor ... more »
June 4, 2021 | Cantankerous and unwieldy, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man punctures the pieties of our time ... more »
June 3, 2021 | In June 1965, six boys washed up on a deserted island, where they stayed for a year. The real Lord of the Flies
... more »
June 2, 2021 | The heist was brazen: a Magritte snatched at gunpoint. Two years later, someone walked it into a Brussels police station. What happened? ... more »
June 1, 2021 | The misinformation age. Understanding the spread of wacky is about who you know, not what you think ... more »
May 31, 2021 | A horizontal suggests a landscape. A square evokes timelessness. A circle, the universe itself. How to frame our experiences? ... more »
May 29, 2021 | Why is it so easy to hate think tanks? Created to advance scientific thinking, they've become factories of partisan grift... more »
May 28, 2021 | In the 1940s, a fiery debate over inclusion, history, and identity swept a city: Whether to hyphenate “New-York”... more »