Feb. 18, 2020 | Judith Butler: Opening up possibilities requires radical imagining that can make you seem a little crazy, or that puts you in an embarrassing light... more »
Feb. 17, 2020 | Are literary men abhorrent? Indeed so, says Adrienne Miller, former literary and fiction editor of Esquire, who counts the ways... more »
Feb. 15, 2020 | Bertrand Russell found prison life agreeable — plenty of time for reading and writing. The only problem was a guard shushing his laughter... more »
Feb. 14, 2020 | In the early 20th century, Newyorkitis was a disease. Its symptoms? Egotism, pompousness, greed, and “a circumscribed mental horizon"... more »
Feb. 13, 2020 | "The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress"... more »
Feb. 12, 2020 | Scientific authority never conveys moral authority. So why do economists, posing as philosopher-kings, claim insight into matters of right and wrong?... more »
Feb. 11, 2020 | "What is the correct response to a ruinous history? What, if anything, is the artist’s “duty”? Zadie Smith on Kara Walker... more »
Feb. 10, 2020 | Why is pop music so depressing? Fifty years ago, it was all about love, joy, and happiness. Now, it's hate, sorrow, and pain... more »
Feb. 8, 2020 | Ross Douthat is not sold on Silicon Valley: “The farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilization has entered into decadence”... more »
Feb. 7, 2020 | “Philosophers should strangle their wives,” and other dubious thoughts — an evening with the charming, monstrously narcissistic George Steiner... more »
Feb. 6, 2020 | Against Althusser. The theorist was an out-and-out wacko who composed oracular gibberish... more »
Feb. 5, 2020 | Academic literary criticism is mired in the formal, modernist project of the 1930s. The persistence of this orthodoxy is baffling — but perhaps now it will change.... more »
Feb. 4, 2020 | T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale traded painful and ecstatic love letters for decades. When they were finally free to marry, he demurred... more »
Feb. 3, 2020 | "How does the once unthinkable become not only thinkable but self-evident?" asks Lorraine Daston. "How does the unthinkable become something we cannot think away anymore?"... more »
Feb. 1, 2020 | Far from the hater he's made out to be, James Wood is an enthusiast. And when he does write a pan, "his disapproval is only a correlate of his abiding love"... more »
Jan. 31, 2020 | As a student, de Beauvoir experienced love as injustice and suffering. She dreamed of a freer, fairer love, and then theorized it into being... more »
Jan. 30, 2020 | Khmer Rouge, Ground Zero, melting ice caps: Tragedy began as a form of art, writes Terry Eagleton. It is now a way of life... more »
Jan. 29, 2020 | Minimalism can be a spur to action and political innovation. But that requires philosophical engagement, not the KonMari method... more »
Jan. 28, 2020 | The hatred of literature, "almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of our literary culture”... more »
Jan. 27, 2020 | Intellectuals have been so busy ignoring or dismissing self-help that they've failed to recognize its impact. We are living in self-help’s world... more »
Jan. 25, 2020 | The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb was a nuanced parser of the Enlightenment. When it came to Modernism, however, she could only recoil in horror... more »
Jan. 24, 2020 | What is the enemy of writing today? Fear — of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. The mob has the final edit... more »
Jan. 23, 2020 | Allan Bloom argued that a generation out of touch with great music, literature, and philosophy is a diminished generation. What's gleaned from reading him today?... more »
Jan. 22, 2020 | Anger, grudges, revenge — philosophers dismiss them as backward-looking and unhelpful. But there’s a moral case to be made in their favor... more »
Jan. 21, 2020 | Howard Jacobson confronts his Russianness: “The only reason my father never wrestled a bear is that there were none on the streets of Manchester”... more »