Aug. 22, 2017 | Delmore Schwartz worried that he would be remembered as nasty, gauche, awkward — an overeager clown. The weight of his concerns, and his loneliness, hangs over his biographer... more »
Aug. 21, 2017 | The politics of identity is nothing new, especially on the right. Now the obsession with identity is strangling liberalism, and campus politics bears much of the blame... more »
Aug. 19, 2017 | Thoreau was a critic of triviality, gossip, and distraction. He preferred communing with dead authors to chatting with his neighbors. What would he have made of Twitter?... more »
Aug. 18, 2017 | Mr. Electrico, a magician, shouted “Live forever!” and electrified 12-year-old Ray Bradbury. The sci-fi writer is gone, but his work will last... more »
Aug. 17, 2017 | Intellectuals are unreliable students of populism, finding it too prone to ignorance and demagogy. Beware anyone who claims to speak for "the people," but listen... more »
Aug. 16, 2017 | A dream of Utopia, an Eden of innocence, and then the Fall: The Summer of Love was about the pursuit of pleasure. But there was a puritan streak, too... more »
Aug. 15, 2017 | Communists are unlikely entrepreneurs. But beginning in the 1930s, they set up bookstores across America. Turns out that even anticapitalists can't ignore the bottom line... more »
Aug. 14, 2017 | Art enriches life and helps engage us with mortality. And so Robert McCrum, after a stroke and a fall, began to catalog his inventory of dissolution... more »
Aug. 12, 2017 | Liberal democracy was meant to depoliticize society, to turn issues of public morality into private concerns. By that measure, it's been a failure ... more »
Aug. 11, 2017 | Freud the philosopher. Before psychoanalysis, he was primarily concerned with destroying what was then an intellectual orthodoxy: mind-body dualism... more »
Aug. 10, 2017 | The conventional story of philosophy treats Indian, Buddhist, Chinese, and Islamic thought as isolated from the Western tradition. Time for an integrated approach... more »
Aug. 9, 2017 | Journalism may never have been as public-spirited as some ink-stained nostalgics like to think. But the myth mattered, and now it's in tatters... more »
Aug. 8, 2017 | “There are no facts, only art,” wrote David Shields in 2010. It's a prescient description of our myopic and self-absorbed journalistic era... more »
Aug. 7, 2017 | Wherever there is anger and agony, there is Guernica. What is it about Picasso's mural that answers our need for an epitome of death – and for life in the face of it?... more »
Aug. 5, 2017 | Meet the New Optimists. This stubbornly cheerful lot rejects doom-mongering. But is the world really getting better?... more »
Aug. 4, 2017 | When did disagreeing with someone become akin to oppression? When we conflated our opinions and our identities... more »
Aug. 3, 2017 | Diogenes wanted his body, upon his death, to be thrown over a wall for the dogs — a rational and ecological approach. Why has no society followed suit?... more »
Aug. 2, 2017 | First the yuppie, then the hipster, now the “aspirational class.” These people consume conscientiously — and have no intention of relinquishing their status... more »
Aug. 1, 2017 | The ancient Greeks had color words for “pansy-like” and “wine-like,” but never sea or sky blue. Can we understand their descriptions if we can’t see as they did?... more »
July 31, 2017 | Two centuries is a long time to be contemporary. Do we read Jane Austen to escape our own times, or to see it clearly? Why would we need to do either?... more »
July 29, 2017 | Academic writing is obscure. More problematic, it's vague. Why? The vaguer you are, the less you can be held accountable for anything you say. See: Slavoj Zizek... more »
July 28, 2017 | Nazism and the supernatural. Of all the Third Reich’s bizarre experiments with the occult, none was embraced as effusively as World Ice Theory. Hitler thought it would replace Christianity... more »
July 27, 2017 | It happened gradually. The surges, surprising transitions, turns of phrases came less often. Then hardly at all. For Sven Birkerts, writing became a lot more difficult... more »
July 26, 2017 | The life and death of John Keats. His talent drew attention, as did his penchant for fighting. When death neared, he longed for it with frightening urgency... more »
July 25, 2017 | What do we get from poems and songs? The effects are probably as much a product of what you bring as what you take... more »