Jan. 18, 2021 | John Richardson once cracked: “Pampered lunatics often reach a great age.” And so it was with Lucian Freud... more »
Jan. 16, 2021 | Dostoevsky in love. What's romance to a man who believed that suffering gave value to existence? ... more »
Jan. 15, 2021 | Stop reading like a critic. It’s time we treat Beckett and de Beauvoir the same way we do Beyoncé and the Boss — with devotion ... more »
Jan. 14, 2021 | More than the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of two flesh-and-blood daughters ... more »
Jan. 13, 2021 | For George Saunders, fiction is fundamentally moral. Despite all that it can teach us, however, it is not our salvation ... more »
Jan. 12, 2021 | Anne Applebaum is deft at critiquing anyone to her left or right. She is far less willing to interrogate her own assumptions ... more »
Jan. 11, 2021 | “All things are made of elementary particles," says Frank Wilczek. Understanding them is a triumph of modern physics ... more »
Jan. 9, 2021 | When did "fitness" become not just a physical but a moral good, the obligatory aim of every citizen? ... more »
Jan. 8, 2021 | The age of wood. Lewis Mumford called it “the most various, the most shapeable, the most serviceable” of materials. It's also the most underappreciated ... more »
Jan. 7, 2021 | Amid these apocalyptic-seeming times, one philosopher’s vision stands out. This is a moment for Machiavelli... more »
Jan. 6, 2021 | Leïla Slimani wins literary accolades for busting taboos around sex and violence. But does her work actually reinforce those conventions?... more »
Jan. 5, 2021 | Harry Houdini could escape from seemingly impossible situations. But he couldn't escape his roots ... more »
Jan. 4, 2021 | Cary Grant's greatest role was Cary Grant, a persona of elegance, charisma, and charm ... more »
Jan. 2, 2021 | Was Louis Kahn a true sage, or just a bushwa artist talented at conning the eggheads at Yale and Penn? ... more »
Jan. 1, 2021 | The creative class flourished for decades in the middle of the 20th century, then was crushed. Can it be rebuilt?... more »
Dec. 31, 2020 | Knausgaard returns, with a collection of earnest, tedious, minor essays. Is excessive literary production a social offense? ... more »
Dec. 30, 2020 | Molded in the mythos of meritocracy, millennials have now become the burnout generation... more »
Dec. 29, 2020 | "I am a Christian," insisted Thomas Jefferson. But he had no patience for metaphysical claims. So he went about reinventing Jesus... more »
Dec. 28, 2020 | The survival of a moderate conservatism may have become inextricable from the survival of liberal democracy itself ... more »
Dec. 26, 2020 | "Demons are more than crazed hypotheses or ungrounded thought experiments; they are quietly central to our very understanding of the world" ... more »
Dec. 25, 2020 | A.J. Ayer quipped that the problem with logical positivism was that “nearly all of it was false.” But it was "true in spirit" ... more »
Dec. 24, 2020 | Harold Bloom viewed literature as a contest, measuring writers against a yardstick of purportedly timeless values ... more »
Dec. 23, 2020 | Merpeople: For Linnaeus, they were next to seals and manatees, for Darwin, they explained a missing link. Now they’re being connected to queer identity ... more »
Dec. 22, 2020 | Fredrik deBoer and Michael Sandel say meritocracy is a bad idea, but really their beef is with the imperfect implementation of the system... more »
Dec. 21, 2020 | Heinrich Heine was an idealistic devotee of German culture. That didn't blind him to what made it so dangerous ... more »