Dec. 19, 2020 | How to start an independent publishing house in 2020? Recruit billionaire backers, make podcast and film-rights agreements, figure out distribution... more »
Dec. 18, 2020 | In the aggregate, high expectations for the future have made the world a better place. Individually, however, it's made us miserable... more »
Dec. 17, 2020 | Beethoven and freedom. "We may judge what is merely beautiful, but sublime art judges us, or better said, it challenges us to judge ourselves” ... more »
Dec. 16, 2020 | To say that John le Carré invented the modern spy novel doesn’t do justice to his achievement. His fictional world blurred into reality... more »
Dec. 15, 2020 | Book thieves come in two varieties: the rogue custodians, who exploit their access to literary treasures, and the academics ... more »
Dec. 14, 2020 | Why were doctors and nurses uniquely attracted to Nazi philosophy, enlisting in much higher proportions than any other profession? ... more »
Dec. 12, 2020 | Just 11 percent of books published by large presses in 2018 were written by people of color. Why is publishing so white?... more »
Dec. 11, 2020 | For Barbara Guest, writing poetry meant no planning — just waiting for a poem to compose itself spontaneously... more »
Dec. 10, 2020 | “Steer clear of adjectives!” is an ancient piece of writerly wisdom. And yet adjectives are what reveal the genius of writers like Nabokov and Borges... more »
Dec. 9, 2020 | Was Orwell's reputation protected by his early death? He avoided several controversies that would have altered how we see him ... more »
Dec. 8, 2020 | The tortured letters of T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale. He was a married man writing incessantly and “tampering insidiously” with her mind ... more »
Dec. 7, 2020 | What is cancel culture? Does it even exist? Ligaya Mishan has the long and tortured history ... more »
Dec. 5, 2020 | How did Citizen Kane become the greatest movie of all? Blame the French film critics who first recognized it as a masterpiece ... more »
Dec. 4, 2020 | How did Kurt, feckless Ivy frat boy, became Vonnegut, satirist to the galaxy? His early love letters offer clues ... more »
Dec. 3, 2020 | For the philosopher Alphonso Lingis, goodness and exultation are central to our sense of self. “How good it is to be alive!” ... more »
Dec. 2, 2020 | How did Roger Penrose pioneer a renaissance of gravity theory? He had the wisdom to ignore academic fashion ... more »
Dec. 1, 2020 | Corresponding with her future husband earned Adrienne Rich a rebuke from her father. Trading one man for another was hardly emancipation... more »
Nov. 30, 2020 | How has America changed Yiddish? Simple: It’s killed it. How has Yiddish changed America? That’s more complicated ... more »
Nov. 28, 2020 | William S. Burroughs didn't care much for music. Yet for a generation of musicians, he was a singular influence ... more »
Nov. 27, 2020 | Can a machine think like a physicist? That’s the promise of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Is it realistic? ... more »
Nov. 26, 2020 | Frida in France. The accommodations were unsatisfactory; the politics, lamentable; the intellectuals, boring. But there was a silver lining... more »
Nov. 25, 2020 | The science of personal space. Lessons from zebras, porcupines, and people show how close is too close for comfort ... more »
Nov. 24, 2020 | Pankaj Mishra: We focus too much on minor disputes, ignoring the reality that “the default intellectual culture in Anglo-America is overwhelmingly right wing”... more »
Nov. 23, 2020 | Man of many dreams. In the early 1930s, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli began recording his dreams for Carl Jung. Somehow he remembered 1,300 of them ... more »
Nov. 21, 2020 | Rose Dugdale was a 33-year-old British heiress with a Ph.D. and a glowing recommendation from Iris Murdoch. How did she end up an art thief? ... more »