April 16, 2024 | In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »
April 15, 2024 | “There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »
April 12, 2024 | Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »
April 11, 2024 | Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »
April 10, 2024 | The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »
April 9, 2024 | What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »
April 8, 2024 | Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »
April 5, 2024 | Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »
April 4, 2024 | What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »
April 3, 2024 | We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »
April 2, 2024 | “I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »
April 1, 2024 | "No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »
March 29, 2024 | Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... more »
March 28, 2024 | As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »
March 27, 2024 | Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »
March 26, 2024 | Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »
March 25, 2024 | “We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »
March 22, 2024 | The Monster of Ravenna, the Monk Calf, and, of course, the Pope Ass. Why were 16th-century luminaries printing pamphlets on monsters?... more »
March 21, 2024 | “Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”... more »
March 20, 2024 | Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. It took Min Jin Lee 28 years to write Pachinko. But slow writing has its virtues... more »
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 »