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 »
Sept. 13, 2019 | Eras of elite higher education: Christian college. Gentlemen’s college. Consumer’s college. Now a new era: Comfort college... more »
Sept. 12, 2019 | In the 1920s, Arendt was Heidegger’s “wood nymph.” When they met again in 1949, she found him childish and dishonest, a recluse lost in the hills... more »
Sept. 11, 2019 | Cutting edge linguistics research once meant an astute-eared German grocer surveying the nation by bicycle. Today, data miners do the legwork... more »
Sept. 10, 2019 | "For most of his life, Wendell Berry has written as a kind of elegist, detailing the tragic path that we have taken and recalling other paths now mostly fading"... more »
Sept. 9, 2019 | Poetry has grown boring, narcissistic, and precious — in short, easy to hate. It must recover its immediate, electric power... more »
Sept. 7, 2019 | Insults fly, the rowdy crowd beckons. But public incivility is truly righteous only under certain philosophical conditions... more »
Sept. 6, 2019 | Brown-corduroy suits, literary orthodoxy, and lots of D.H. Lawrence — inside the Leavisites’ ludicrous attempt to direct the reading public... more »
Sept. 5, 2019 | "Thinking together is riddled with pitfalls," says Agnes Callard, "but we can’t really claim to live together without doing it. That is why we need devil’s advocates"... more »
Sept. 4, 2019 | How exactly do literary prizes influence consumers’ book buying and academics' attention? Three professors crunched the numbers to find out... more »
Sept. 3, 2019 | Reading as therapy. Told to rest, a critic discovers that a personal, patient approach to literature can yield unexpected insight... more »
Sept. 2, 2019 | On March 27, 1961, Paul Robeson was found in the bathroom of a Moscow hotel with slit wrists and a razor blade in hand. Why did he try to kill himself?... more »
Aug. 31, 2019 | What does it mean to be serious? Who decides? How Emily Nussbaum uses the unseriousness of television to expose the machinations of seriousness more generally... more »
Aug. 30, 2019 | Peanuts, the philosophy: Life is hard. People are difficult. Happiness can and probably will vaporize. The best response: Laugh and keep moving... more »
Aug. 29, 2019 | Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, was published in 1959 under the name of Philip Rieff. For decades Susan Sontag claimed she wrote “every single word”... more »
Aug. 28, 2019 | The overtly political novel — genre of Orwell, Ayn Rand, Upton Sinclair — is thoroughly out of fashion. Does it deserve to be saved?... more »
Aug. 27, 2019 | The doctrine of the market — all desires are equal, all value only opinion — has led to the sacrifice of aesthetic judgment on the altar of consumer preference... more »
Aug. 26, 2019 | The Second Sex at 70. De Beauvoir, who claimed that a woman’s life should not be reduced to an erotic plot, has been reduced to an erotic plot... more »
Aug. 24, 2019 | From Babel to Orwell, Mao to Borges, the Cold War had a literary front. As Solzhenitsyn put it, books were “as dangerous as atom bombs”... more »
Aug. 23, 2019 | Apocalypse chic. Being radical used to be hard work. Now all one needs to do is succumb, conspicuously, to hopelessness... more »
Aug. 22, 2019 | Where books matter. Americans usually assume that literature exists to depict life, while Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature... more »