June 5, 2020 | Orwell, Pasternak, Hemingway, Greene: Remembering a time when literature was a weapon of cultural warfare... more »
June 4, 2020 | We celebrate the Renaissance, but consider this: The period contributed very little to innovation in science... more »
June 3, 2020 | Two things guide Barbara Ehrenreich: anger and curiosity. "I live for surprises”... more »
June 2, 2020 | Caravan, a little magazine in India, analyzes the news with “adversarial politics.” Bring on the harassment, defamation suits, and sleepless nights... more »
June 1, 2020 | What was it like to sit in the Thomaskirche in 1723 and hear Bach’s music the way that Bach heard it?... more »
May 30, 2020 | How to steal a Van Gogh: "Talk smooth, be cool, have a fast car, and never touch anyone”... more »
May 29, 2020 | As the cultural status of novelists has declined, the power of the provocateur has risen. For Lionel Shriver, the latter has overshadowed the former... more »
May 28, 2020 | Nothing about George Simenon’s career is like anyone else’s. He was wildly prolific at hackwork and writing detective novels. And then he dictated 22 autobiographical works... more »
May 27, 2020 | Jonathan Haidt on culture war: “This year or into next year will be kind of a pit of despair or a pit of darkness — and then we’ll emerge from it”... more »
May 26, 2020 | Why do we use categories — fantasy, literary, gothic — to describe novels? Tim Parks proposes a new taxonomy... more »
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 »