Oct. 27, 2020 | Every writer is unique in some way; D.H. Lawrence was unique in many ways: his prose style, his personality, his opinions. George Scialabba explains... more »
Oct. 26, 2020 | Books bound in human skin have a long history, though one less sensational and more ambiguous than the urban legends ... more »
Oct. 24, 2020 | Many colleges are fighting for survival. Is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive? ... more »
Oct. 23, 2020 | “It’s not a love affair or a marriage; it’s a job," says the biographer Hermione Lee, who is taking on her first living subject... more »
Oct. 22, 2020 | Academia, a theater of “grinding competition and relentless banality,” is no longer a place to live the contemplative life... more »
Oct. 21, 2020 | What defines the literature of the far right? Pseudo-academic pretensions, worship of the male physique, and a fixation on technological determinism ... more »
Oct. 20, 2020 | An American Bacchus. James Beard was 310 pounds of blazing appetite — “for money, for applause, for butter, for more butter” ... more »
Oct. 19, 2020 | We all experience loneliness, but we experience it differently. For Hannah Arendt, it was the essence of totalitarianism... more »
Oct. 17, 2020 | The miracle of Jonathan Edwards. He was born into an austere society, far from centers of learning, and yet become an Aquinas of Protestants ... more »
Oct. 15, 2020 | The 1619 Project does not argue that 1619 is America’s true founding. Or maybe it does. The debate roils the New York Times and beyond ... more »
Oct. 14, 2020 | Stanley Crouch was an intellectual in an old-fashioned sense: someone who understands systematic ideologies but does not have one ... more »
Oct. 13, 2020 | Amid the volatile political scene of 1920s Austria, a group of thinkers — the Vienna Circle — set the agenda for postwar philosophy ... more »
Oct. 12, 2020 | You can say a lot of unkind things about Germaine Greer. But no one can confirm that she doesn't know how to enjoy herself ... more »
Oct. 10, 2020 | The Consolation of Philosophy, a best seller for centuries, has fallen out of favor. Uet we sorely need its lessons in epistemic humility... more »
Oct. 9, 2020 | What ruined D.H. Lawrence wasn’t second-wave feminism, but rather F.R. Leavis, who canonized the author’s blandest work ... more »
Oct. 8, 2020 | For the biologist and French resistance fighter Jacques Monod, love of truth was exceeded only by hatred of lies... more »
Oct. 7, 2020 | What happened at HAU? The hip anthropology journal imploded amid threats, rumors, and infighting. Is the editor to blame?... more »
Oct. 6, 2020 | Caravaggio’s Baroque art exploded against the orderliness of the Renaissance, pulling viewers into “some cosmic soup of slow knowing"... more »
Oct. 5, 2020 | Faux Fitzgerald. We think of him as frivolous and unfailingly rhapsodic, but that obscures the bracing acidity of his satire ... more »
Oct. 3, 2020 | For a while in the 1870s, Cézanne and Pissarro worked together. Their union is a mystery that holds key to understanding French painting ... more »
Oct. 2, 2020 | “Meritocracy is an attractive, even inspiring ideal, but it has a dark side: It generates hubris among the winners and humiliation among the losers” ... more »
Oct. 1, 2020 | Troy Young got Hearst magazines to abandon elegance and glamour for clickbait riches. It worked — and then it all fell apart... more »
Sept. 30, 2020 | What is “creative destruction”? In Silicon Valley, it’s the intellectual bedrock. Elsewhere, it’s nonsense ... more »
Sept. 29, 2020 | What's behind Agatha Christie’s enduring appeal? Her ability to change with the times, for one thing ... more »
Sept. 28, 2020 | Stanley Crouch’s position in the jazz world was formidable. Whether or not you agreed with his criticism, you had to deal with him ... more »