May 8, 2021 | Jhumpa Lahiri has inspired a school of good immigrant fiction: Lahirism, in which pretty prose and realist narrative culminate in subtle revelation ... more »
May 7, 2021 | The age of swagger. Late Victorian and Edwardian England was marked by empire builders, activists, and rich men behaving badly ... more »
May 6, 2021 | Why does a piece of art endure? Is it the quality of the work that matters most, or the artist’s skill at self-promotion and provocation? ... more »
May 5, 2021 | D.H. Lawrence long endured a reputational deep freeze. What he needed, most of all, was to be saved from himself ... more »
May 4, 2021 | Milman Parry died at 33, the victim of an accidentally jostled handgun. He'd already changed the humanities forever ... more »
May 3, 2021 | Joan Didion learned how to read at the University of California at Berkeley. She learned how to write at Vogue... more »
May 1, 2021 | Aerial bombardment, war ethics, and the bloodiest six hours in all of human history... more »
April 30, 2021 | By the end of his life, Edward Said's arguments were being directed at him. He'd run afoul of the PC brigade ... more »
April 29, 2021 | Simone Weil was an idiosyncratic extremist who managed to alienate everyone. Yet it's difficult to find nothing compelling in her work... more »
April 28, 2021 | What’s to be learned from Blake Bailey’s Roth biography? Judith Shulevitz unpacks a bad book by a bad person ... more »
April 27, 2021 | If it's true that we are born with differing academic abilities, is it fair to connect status and wealth to intelligence? ... more »
April 26, 2021 | The least-loved member of the Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell earned his bad reputation. But his contributions to modernism are real ... more »
April 24, 2021 | What are the odds that the intellectual openness characterizing American universities for the past half-century will survive 50 years from now? ... more »
April 23, 2021 | On the origin of exercise. Socially productive effort has degenerated into fake toil. Work has become working out. Is capitalism to blame? ... more »
April 22, 2021 | “I dread the whole of the rest of my life,” the academic Monica Jones wrote in her 30s. Death has done little to rescue her reputation... more »
April 21, 2021 | Alison Bechdel will cure your PTSD! Sappho will improve your love life! Enough with the calculated utilitarianism of our aliterate age... more »
April 20, 2021 | The shared moral project of the next decades is to green the economy. Rowan Williams explains ... more »
April 19, 2021 | A new biography of Faulkner is “among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist” ... more »
April 17, 2021 | Dürer prepared the way for modern art in two ways: by embracing existentialism, and by maniacally self-publicizing... more »
April 16, 2021 | The 20th-century American novel is stuffed with stuff: baseballs, red wheelbarrows, and other bric-a-brac. What’s the point?... more »
April 15, 2021 | Traversing the internet, Patricia Lockwood finds a surfeit of self-righteousness recorded for posterity ... more »
April 14, 2021 | The tragedy of Edward Said: By his life’s end, the causes for which he fought had been defeated... more »
April 13, 2021 | Thorstein Veblen’s reputation for adultery has been exaggerated. But his relations with women did affect his career... more »
April 12, 2021 | Simone Weil produced a fragmentary oeuvre, almost none of which appeared in her lifetime. Her posthumous mythology makes her hard to pin down ... more »
April 10, 2021 | Do terrible photographs make us feel real empathy, or make us more apathetic toward misery? ... more »