Sept. 22, 2021 | In arguing for an anarchist approach to history, David Graeber's last book fired a fusillade, not much of which hit its targets ... more »
Sept. 21, 2021 | “As long as we can want, we are not yet lost,” says Becca Rothfeld. “Wanting often wounds us, but it can also give us wings” ... more »
Sept. 20, 2021 | The Dickens style. Trollope called it “jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules.” But rule-breaking was essential to Dickens’s art ... more »
Sept. 18, 2021 | The book index, a creation of the late Middle Ages, has been causing excitement and trouble ever since ... more »
Sept. 17, 2021 | The Lake District has long been a mecca for literary tourists. Does it risk becoming an “ecological disaster,” a mere “sheep museum”?... more »
Sept. 16, 2021 | Occam and his razor. Is simplicity always both preferable and closer to the truth?... more »
Sept. 15, 2021 | In an era crying out for radical thinking, George Packer offers only that damp squib of incrementalism - a defense of liberalism ... more »
Sept. 14, 2021 | In defense of judgment. It is an unavoidable feature of our deepest aesthetic experiences, and it shapes who we are ... more »
Sept. 13, 2021 | Early epidemiology was infused with racism, bigotry, and an imperial mindset. The U.S. Sanitary Commission is a case in point... more »
Sept. 11, 2021 | Shakespeare is our most recognizable literary cliché. Why do we still read him? Why do we still care? ... more »
Sept. 10, 2021 | Carl Zimmer's science writing is erudite, charming — and impenetrably sealed off from difficult political questions ... more »
Sept. 9, 2021 | “The problem with the CDC was precisely its prestige: It was determined to say or do nothing that might endanger its reputation”... more »
Sept. 8, 2021 | D.H. Lawrence is considered reactionary, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Can a new biography by France Wilson salvage his reputation?... more »
Sept. 7, 2021 | Susan Sontag once wrote that photography had become a way of “refusing experience”; porn has become a way of refusing intimacy... more »
Sept. 6, 2021 | Foucault arrived in Warsaw in 1958. A year later, he was ensnared in a secret operation and fled the country. What happened? ... more »
Sept. 4, 2021 | Book wars. “What happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time?” ... more »
Sept. 3, 2021 | What springs to mind when we think of Hemingway? “Bullfight,” “war wound,” “shotgun,” “drinking” — but also “craft”... more »
Sept. 2, 2021 | The sins of G.K. Chesterton. He was convivial, generous, sharply intelligent, and unforgivably anti-Semitic... more »
Sept. 1, 2021 | The downward trajectory of Robert Walser. Why did the Swiss modernist writer come to revile his own work? ... more »
Aug. 31, 2021 | For John Keats, literature was life. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, everything alive became literature. From both, literature exacted a high price... more »
Aug. 30, 2021 | Artificial intelligence attracts megalomaniacs, inspiring both overblown promises and existential angst. Enter Jeannette Winterson ... more »
Aug. 28, 2021 | If America is in the grip of an epistemological crisis, is there any evidence that philosophy can help? No ... more »
Aug. 27, 2021 | In 1470, a printer in Cologne published a short sermon and changed everything. He included page numbers... more »
Aug. 26, 2021 | Marie Aymard, born in 1713, was a shopkeeper's illiterate daughter. Can her story tell the story of France? ... more »
Aug. 25, 2021 | The romance between Sartre and Beauvoir was haunted by the friend whom she wrote about again and again ... more »