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 »


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 »


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