Sept. 22, 2021 | What does a fusty old poet like Yeats have to say now? A whole lot. His poems are "like stethoscopes held up to the hum of a mysterious world"... more »
Sept. 21, 2021 | Left-wing orthodoxy from the Einaudi publishing house once dominated the Italian literary landscape. Then a rival emerged ... more »
Sept. 20, 2021 | In an era obsessed with the political responsibility of the artist, remember what’s lost when art is used for politics. Remember Thomas Mann... more »
Sept. 18, 2021 | When American newsrooms changed “black” to “Black,” was it a radical, substantive shift in politics — or a signal of faux solidarity?... more »
Sept. 17, 2021 | The case for classroom trigger warnings has a significant problem: They don’t seem to work... more »
Sept. 16, 2021 | Novelists once cultivated a distinctive voice. Now they play it safe, embracing precision and betraying authorial anxiety... more »
Sept. 15, 2021 | Simone de Beauvoir's Inseparable has now been published - against her wishes. It's heavy-handed, schematic, and thin ... more »
Sept. 14, 2021 | Workers are tired of finding new ways to optimize their labor - and yet our productivity culture demands ever more ... more »
Sept. 13, 2021 | When Randall Kennedy enunciates the N-word in class, he does so with a pedagogical purpose in mind... more »
Sept. 11, 2021 | It is sobering to contemplate how the meaning of a word can be corrupted into its opposite. Consider performative... more »
Sept. 10, 2021 | There’s much to dislike about the irascible, virulently anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Why do some carry on his defense? ... more »
Sept. 9, 2021 | Four issues, 104 essays and poems, 1,400 pages: Let us now consider the journal Liberties, uncharitably... more »
Sept. 8, 2021 | Cultural elites are globally minded, liberal, and prone to self-critique. The power elites who make the most important decisions are entirely different ... more »
Sept. 7, 2021 | Assuming we can’t uninvent social media, we’re left with a question: Can it become a politically productive space?... more »
Sept. 6, 2021 | The Stoics were wrong: A failure to mourn is an act of treason, the violation of a duty. Leon Wieseltier on grief ... more »
Sept. 4, 2021 | Among the Beethovenites. Upon his death, a creepy fabulist concocted a life ... more »
Sept. 3, 2021 | We talk about race as closed off to interpretation and social reinvention. And so race talk is apart from the humanities... more »
Sept. 2, 2021 | In the fiction of both Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, artists fall comically flat. But such “punchline aesthetics” are culturally elite and racially coded ... more »
Sept. 1, 2021 | Intellectual life is now policed by a new mob justice. If you make a mistake, expect punishment and ostracism - not forgiveness ... more »
Aug. 31, 2021 | Is reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time a way of merely renouncing the wider world? ... more »
Aug. 30, 2021 | Exhausted by all the rancor? Try poetry. It restores the value of words in a culture intent on cheapening them ... more »
Aug. 28, 2021 | When Raymond Williams died, his influence seemed sure to endure. Then it dwindled — disastrously ... more »
Aug. 27, 2021 | Remember when the Jonathans -- Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer -- first roamed the earth? Novelists could still have careers as novelists ... more »
Aug. 26, 2021 | When high culture was in high regard, joining the counterculture meant rejecting its values. Now high culture is the counterculture... more »
Aug. 25, 2021 | Eric Rohmer’s films tend to be all talk and no sex. But embracing restraint, he recovered eroticism ... more »