May 8, 2021 | Bloated by methodological hot air, literary studies is charged with callow polemicizing and careerist branding. Time to take a step back ... more »
May 7, 2021 | Ross Douthat scans the landscape for novelists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and everywhere sees torpor and repetition ... more »
May 6, 2021 | Are literary scholars aesthetic experts or moral experts? They haven’t claimed either mantle, and the result is a vacuum of expertise... more »
May 5, 2021 | Life as an underemployed academic can be paranoid, anxious, stupefying. It's the stuff of literature ... more »
May 4, 2021 | Humanists like Jill Lepore see data as an enemy epistemology. That doesn’t have to be the case ... more »
May 3, 2021 | It's not unusual for philosophers to receive death threats - especially if they are philosophers who deny that humans possess free will... more »
May 1, 2021 | What determines the thickness of novels? The 19th century favored lengthiness, the early 20th brevity. Now they’re long again. Why?... more »
April 30, 2021 | The authenticity hustle. Be yourself! Stay true to yourself! Find yourself! That's what the conformist poseurs say ... more »
April 29, 2021 | In a time of sanctimony literature, novelists and novels are stupefyingly smug and egregiously simplistic. Becca Rothfeld explains ... more »
April 28, 2021 | When did we start believing that colleges transform lives and change society? What happens when that notion starts to crumble?... more »
April 27, 2021 | Who determines what science means? For Andrew Jewett, the answer is philosophers, pundits, and polemicists — not scientists themselves ... more »
April 26, 2021 | In 2017, Black writers for the first time won more literary prizes, 38 percent, than writers of any other race or ethnicity ... more »
April 24, 2021 | “It is more than a terrible irony that a biographer of a man so dogged by claims of misogyny should himself stand accused of violence against women” ... more »
Duke Ellington led a formidable beast of an orchestra. But it lacked something essential. He found it in Jimmy Blanton's bass... more »
April 22, 2021 | “The first printed miscellany of English poetry,” which had “mouldered in manuscript,” Songes and Sonettes paved the way for modern anthologies... more »
April 21, 2021 | While Coleridge’s poetry has entered the pantheon, his philosophical tomes have mostly collected dust. It’s time to revisit them... more »
April 20, 2021 | Maria Stepanova: “Poetry is maybe the main thing happening now in Russian literature: powerful, daring, cutting-edge, diverse” ... more »
April 19, 2021 | Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look? ... more »
April 17, 2021 | A debate: What does it mean for the future of humanity if we soon share our living space with conscious machines?... more »
April 16, 2021 | If it weren’t for the fall of Rome, Walter Scheidel suggests, we’d all still be ploughing the fields, living in poverty, and dying young... more »
April 15, 2021 | Philip Johnson's Nazi past was long overlooked as he was showered with commissions. Twenty years after his death, the debate heats up ... more »
April 14, 2021 | John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change” ... more »
April 13, 2021 | “Trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration" ... more »
April 12, 2021 | George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward? ... more »
April 10, 2021 | Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists ... more »