July 17, 2019 | Iris Murdoch has fallen out of fashion, but her work is worth retrieving as a moral philosophy with a steely-eyed suspicion of intellectual confidence... more »
July 16, 2019 | Big books remind us how hard the work of understanding can be. Aphorisms offer "a micro-model of empirical inquiry"... more »
July 15, 2019 | Jenny Odell’s defense of empathy, attention, and doing nothing contains much that is true and little that is fresh... more »
July 13, 2019 | Chaucer has been reduced to “Jolly Geoff,” an unserious and ribald writer. Time to repair the reputation of the father of English poetry... more »
July 12, 2019 | Why miniatures matter. Alluring and inaccessible, they represent possibility and impossibility at once. They are tiny, but infinite in what they evoke... more »
July 11, 2019 | A literary celebration of the condom’s invention, 1744’s The Machine, or Love’s Preservative hailed he who “arm’d thus boldly wages am’rous Fight”... more »
July 10, 2019 | Telepathy, metamorphoses, fairy counterparts that haunt us in the shadows — so proposed a serious-minded 17th-century Scottish minister... more »
July 9, 2019 | What becomes of science when evidence is absent – as it is in some areas of physics? Other criteria, including aesthetic ones, come into play. So does speculation... more »
July 8, 2019 | Funny, aphoristically cynical, wisely paradoxical: Walter Bagehot could also be priggish, condescending, and just plain wrong, but he was piercingly intelligent in his views of Victorian economics... more »
July 6, 2019 | John Updike had a rule for book reviewing: Judge an author for what he wished to do, not what you wish he had done. Can we hold him to his own standard?... more »
July 5, 2019 | To love one’s country, one must acknowledge its past. In America, that means unpacking false universalism and examining its history of ideas... more »
July 4, 2019 | Will Google rule? We accede to governance by “objective” algorithms, writes Matthew B. Crawford, but at a high political cost... more »
July 3, 2019 | Our swimming pools, our selves. In place of the 20th-century throng of public bathing, we have the immersive solipsism of the infinity pool... more »
July 2, 2019 | “The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was a regime founded by freelance writers and editors. In other words, a nightmare.”... more »
July 1, 2019 | On loving Wordsworth. He was “a solemn and unsexual man” with a talent for making you believe things without really telling you what they were... more »
June 29, 2019 | A history of human imagination. Why the ability to see what isn't there is "the most essential bit of machinery we have"... more »
June 28, 2019 | The complex history of gestures. Our nonverbal communication — from the “flagrant pelvis” to fascist salutes to Friends — is deeply rooted... more »
June 27, 2019 | Lillian Ross’s brilliant viciousness spanned American letters: Capote was a leech, Nora Ephron a liar. And you wouldn’t have wanted to get her started on the NYRB... more »
June 26, 2019 | In the 1980s, George Will’s conservatism was prophetic. Today his political sensibility is antiquated, addressing problems that no longer exist... more »
June 25, 2019 | Thoreau was a fault-finder; Emerson, a showoff. They wanted to be friends, but, as Emerson put it, “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables”... more »
June 24, 2019 | Einstein during World War I. Cut off from scientists abroad, he tried to extend his untested ideas about relativity into a more powerful theory... more »
June 22, 2019 | Thirty years since Cass Sunstein's first steps as a public intellectual, the world has changed. But not his ideas, or his dreary prose... more »
June 21, 2019 | Sherlock Holmes and his world are an inexhaustible source of spinoffs, parodies, and adaptations. Michael Dirda has the latest... more »
June 20, 2019 | "If what makes humans unique is the power of seeing what is not there, what makes them so destructive is that they believe what they have seen to be real"... more »
June 19, 2019 | A psychologist studying empathy is like a climatologist studying polar ice: "We discover how valuable it is just as it recedes all around us”... more »