March 19, 2024 | "The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape" ... more »


March 18, 2024 | Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »


March 15, 2024 | Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »


March 14, 2024 | The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »


March 13, 2024 | “Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »


March 12, 2024 | Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »


March 11, 2024 | Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »


March 8, 2024 | We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »


March 7, 2024 | Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »


March 6, 2024 | Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »


March 5, 2024 | Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »


March 4, 2024 | Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »


March 1, 2024 | The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »


Feb. 29, 2024 | Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »


Feb. 28, 2024 | “The people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies”... more »


Feb. 27, 2024 | What if writing history were less about archives and ideas and more about forensics and genomes?... more »


Feb. 26, 2024 | Do our lives consist of the stories we tell about our ourselves? Galen Strawson on a view that’s ascendant and plainly wrong... more »


Feb. 23, 2024 | The editor and memoirist Diana Athill’s philosophy was that fidelity is a faulty mechanism on which to base a relationship... more »


Feb. 22, 2024 | “The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food”... more »


Feb. 21, 2024 | Self-help is often glib, politically obtuse, and intellectually dishonest. Why, then, are philosophers writing it?... more »


Feb. 20, 2024 | The psychic entanglement of the generations, the tumult between old and the young: What we need Mary Gaitskill for... more »


Feb. 19, 2024 | After the suicide of his wife, Blake Butler wrote a book detailing her secret life. Was it art — or literary revenge porn?... more »


Feb. 16, 2024 | Maverick, crank, wisecracking economic pundit? Milton Friedman was thought too radical, then later — when his ideas won the day — too obvious... more »


Feb. 15, 2024 | Garrison Keillor, Leon Wieseltier, Otto Penzler: Is there still a role for grumpy old men in arts and letters?... more »


Feb. 14, 2024 | The legend of Eugène-François Vidocq. Circus performer, forger, and private detective, he claimed to have escaped from more than 20 French prisons... more »


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