June 25, 2021 | In Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood’s recent novels, deceitfulness, conspiracy theories, and dumb jokes thrive online. Tell us something we don’t know ... more »
June 24, 2021 | Cats seem to “accept life as a gift,” while we anxiously speculate about death, writes John Gray, who has compiled 10 feline philosophical lessons... more »
June 23, 2021 | The economist Albert O. Hirschman’s insights have been watered down by Gladwell and Sunstein into “Hirschmanisms,” bland chestnuts repeated by the dinner-party bore... more »
June 22, 2021 | Edgar Allan Poe’s zigzags from astronomy to the occult suggest a tragic narrowing in what it means to be scientific... more »
June 21, 2021 | George Packer, one our best reporters and storytellers, has a knack for picking memorable subjects. His latest: his own anxieties about America's future ... more »
June 19, 2021 | The heroines of anthropology: One became a professor, one died, one was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and two quit academe ... more »
June 18, 2021 | The first of Dostoevsky’s seizures happened on his honeymoon. "If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married"... more »
June 17, 2021 | Borges to his English translator: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark…. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny” ... more »
June 16, 2021 | We take graphs and charts for granted, but in their earliest incarnations — to help understand longitude or train times — they were revolutionary ... more »
June 15, 2021 | Jon Meacham, a soft-spoken historian with the president’s ear, is impressively — and maddeningly — everywhere... more »
June 14, 2021 | "Within this wide great Universe,/Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare." The Faerie Queene approaches atheism ... more »
June 12, 2021 | Early 19th-century America was gripped by a war on science. Edgar Allan Poe battled for both sides... more »
June 11, 2021 | The way we grieve now. For the social-media influencer Amanda Kloots, going offline was never an option, even when the worst happened ... more »
June 10, 2021 | Dave Hickey's idiosyncratic blend of high and low - French theory and California surfing - gave him an unmistakable voice ... more »
June 9, 2021 | Much has been made of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt. What about her influence on him? ... more »
June 8, 2021 | The Homeric Question: Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer?... more »
June 7, 2021 | Before conquering Broadway and Hollywood, Mike Nichols was a bullied, hairless Jewish refugee without a word of English ... more »
June 5, 2021 | The shock isn’t that America’s fragile union broke apart so spectacularly in 1861, but that it didn’t happen sooner ... more »
June 4, 2021 | He invented or perfected the short story, the mystery, science fiction, and gothic horror: Is Poe the most influential American writer? ... more »
June 3, 2021 | Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: A history of political murder
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June 2, 2021 | What do two centuries of American self-help best sellers say about the country? Louis Menand digs in ... more »
June 1, 2021 | “Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.” In a pandemic, such theft is even more prevalent ... more »
May 31, 2021 | "It is startling to witness just how much the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at Jefferson's own university dislikes its patron, Thomas Jefferson” ... more »
May 29, 2021 | To understand architecture, look beyond surface materials, like brick and glass, to the technologies that fueled construction... more »
May 28, 2021 | Dilemma of the Dylan biographer: His fabulism is baked into his DNA. Explaining him is about as interesting as explaining a magic trick ... more »