Jan. 24, 2019 | During World War II, the Nazis stole millions of books. Many of them are still hiding in plain sight on library shelves throughout Europe... more »
Jan. 23, 2019 | Before populism was an object of media fascination, it was an object of study. Scholars agree that the topic is important but not on what it is... more »
Jan. 22, 2019 | The war on bric-a-brac. Long before Marie Kondo, Unitarian ministers and interior designers fought against Victorian-era excess with calls for “Simplicity!” and “No junk!”... more »
Jan. 21, 2019 | Nathan Glazer, a seminal sociologist and nonideological neoconservative of a decidedly pragmatic bent, is dead at 95... NY Times... WSJ... The Bulwark... Adam Wolfson... John Podhoretz... Martin Peretz... more »
Jan. 19, 2019 | “A clueless lot of scruffs, potentially quite dangerous.” Were Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, and like-minded historians really Stalinists, as MI5 feared?... more »
Jan. 18, 2019 | Happy birthday, Norman Podhoretz. The author, at 89, reflects on committing “intellectual heresy” and the irony of the New York Review’s republishing Making It... more »
Jan. 17, 2019 | Susan Sontag, self-improvement guru. Her goals included better posture, eating less, writing home more, and not publicly criticizing anyone at Harvard... more »
Jan. 16, 2019 | Artistic citizenship can mean simply sharing a local identity. It can also convey a social responsibility. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on why she is not an “African writer”... more »
Jan. 15, 2019 | The real Socrates? Plato’s version is pure rationality. Xenophon’s dispenses practical advice, like the merits of dancing alone... more »
Jan. 14, 2019 | Online literary salons were unprofessional, charming, and reliant on free labor. No more. The golden age of book blogging is dead. In its stead: Bookstagram... more »
Jan. 12, 2019 | Elizabeth Anderson asks, ""What's the point of equality?"" Is she the philosopher best suited to this awkward moment in American life?... more »
Jan. 11, 2019 | When writers were considered dangerously influential. Inside the FBI dossiers on Sontag, Baldwin, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Du Bois... more »
Jan. 10, 2019 | A history of assassination. Firearms and explosives are the most popular methods, but perhaps not the most effective. Sometimes it takes an ice pick... more »
Jan. 9, 2019 | Editing Proust. When he died, in 1922, his manuscripts were riddled with inconsistencies: a character perishes on page 221, and is alive on page 257... more »
Jan. 8, 2019 | Degas, extraordinary artist and brilliant innovator, helped lead the 19th-century artistic vanguard. But he was a perfectly ordinary anti-Semite... more »
Jan. 7, 2019 | In 1842, Charles Dickens arrived in New York. He came to celebrate the American experiment. By the time he left, he was still enthralled — but also repulsed.... more »
Jan. 5, 2019 | Few spaces in American life today are exempt from the gentle but irksome dictates of mindfulness. Now the wellness-industrial complex has entrenched itself in the halls of art museums... more »
Jan. 4, 2019 | J.D. Salinger will forever be a writer oriented toward possibility. He never aged in public, and he wrote so compassionately about youth... more »
Jan. 3, 2019 | Wunderkind of socialism. How Bhaskar Sunkara built Jacobin, the most successful American ideological magazine to launch in the past decade... more »
Jan. 2, 2019 | James Watson in exile. More than a decade since his views on race and intelligence became public, he's been shunned but hasn't changed his mind... more »
Jan. 1, 2019 | In 2018 we said goodbye to Ursula K. Le Guin, Tom Wolfe, Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, and more than a few other writers. A look back at the year’s literary deaths... more »
Dec. 31, 2018 | In 1933, Houghton Mifflin published the first English edition of Mein Kampf — and then quietly profited from the book for decades... more »
Dec. 28, 2018 | Amos Oz, who chronicled over half a century of life in Israel, is dead. He was 79... Haaretz... The Guardian... Jane Eisner... Jonathan Freedland... Gal Beckerman... Amir Tibon... New York Times... Washington Post... Adam Kirsch... Tom Segev... Amy Wilentz... Dominic Green... more »
Dec. 27, 2018 | Harvard at 16, on Berkeley’s math faculty by 25, then ecoterrorism. Now the Unabomber’s ideas are spreading to a new generation... more »
Dec. 27, 2018 | A map of the moon. In 1647, Johannes Hevelius’s lunar atlas made him a celebrity. It featured continents, seas, bays, swamps, and marshes... more »