Oct. 12, 2019 | The competing visions for modernism included “Make it new,” of course, but also: “Art is dead,” “Realism = Abstraction,” and “victory over the sun”... more »
Oct. 11, 2019 | “There is a cure for everything. Except longing.” The imprisoned Turkish writer Ahmet Altan on the role of the imagination in prison... more »
Oct. 10, 2019 | What does sober creativity look like? To find out, Leslie Jamison went to the archives. Early results weren’t promising... more »
Oct. 9, 2019 | How Saul Bellow thought about America. The novelist began his career as a critic. He ended it as an eloquent guardian of the nation's soul... more »
Oct. 8, 2019 | Nietzsche’s lonely, desperate intellectual heroism: “Wherever you travel, in sunny climates or in the shadowlands, Nietzsche has gone before you”... more »
Oct. 7, 2019 | Against street art. "Kitsch, contrived and uninspiring," it is "the act of an entitled, middle-class narcissist"... more »
Oct. 5, 2019 | What's the secret to good science writing? Cormac McCarthy has some thoughts. Among them: ease up on the adjectives... more »
Oct. 4, 2019 | “If they’re killing people for poetry, that means they honor and esteem it, they fear it, that means poetry is power”... more »
Oct. 3, 2019 | "You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling"... more »
Oct. 2, 2019 | Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for its containment? Zadie Smith weighs the evidence... more »
Oct. 1, 2019 | “The art of rest,” “how to do nothing,” “digital minimalism” — new self-help books abandon productivity tips for a celebration of solitude... more »
Sept. 30, 2019 | Your taste in literature, music, and painting used to say something about you and your values. Now we have something worse: a collective taste truce... more »
Sept. 28, 2019 | An inestimably vast grid of rooms linked by an endless spiral staircase. Borges’s “Library of Babel” is a terrifying glance at the horrors of infinitude... more »
Sept. 27, 2019 | Behold the prose poem, "a mode of writing that allows the stylist plenty of slack” — to be ponderous, vague, clichéd, and repetitious... more »
Sept. 26, 2019 | All Ayn Randers aboard! Set sail on the anti-Paul Krugman cruise, where every Pictionary guess is “Ron Paul!”... more »
Sept. 25, 2019 | Widely dismissed, William Blake managed to capture the heart of one wealthy, credulous benefactor. It helped that they shared a passion for séances... more »
Sept. 24, 2019 | In “a marketplace of ideas,” accurate information and incisive arguments win out. Too bad no such place exists in real life... more »
Sept. 23, 2019 | Are millennials hesitant to have children because childlessness is a moral response to climate change? Or are they merely selfish?... more »
Sept. 21, 2019 | Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, pointing to evidence that justifies outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable... more »
Sept. 20, 2019 | The road to dictatorship is depressingly predictable. But there is one quality that distinguishes modern tyranny: the cult of personality... more »
Sept. 19, 2019 | There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity. The first is that it's modern. The second is that it's ancient. Both are true... more »
Sept. 18, 2019 | After Rawls. He is the central figure in political philosophy, despite a sea change in our political reality. It’s time for something new... more »
Sept. 17, 2019 | Walter Gropius was mocked by his first wife, scorned by art critics, and pushed out of Harvard — all before Tom Wolfe’s character assassination... more »
Sept. 16, 2019 | What comes after liberalism? A network of Catholic conservative thinkers sees in our grim present the opportunity for a better world... more »
Sept. 14, 2019 | The political class feared John Ruskin’s anticapitalist thinking. “If we do not crush him … a moral floodgate may fly open and drown us all”... more »