April 16, 2024 | AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »
April 15, 2024 | Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »
April 12, 2024 | A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »
April 11, 2024 | Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »
April 10, 2024 | “[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »
April 9, 2024 | Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »
April 8, 2024 | Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »
April 5, 2024 | Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »
April 4, 2024 | Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »
April 3, 2024 | The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »
April 2, 2024 | Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
April 1, 2024 | Classics in crisis. What the field needs is a sweeping history of Roman emperors and their influence beyond Europe... more »
March 29, 2024 | Contemporary Stoicism is all aphorism and motivational cliche. It is toothless — practically to the point of meaninglessness... more »
March 28, 2024 | By the 19th century, educated elites had little time for ghosts, demons, and other apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research, on the other hand... more »
March 27, 2024 | For women among the New York Intellectuals, men wanted to sleep with you or write like you. Or both... more »
March 26, 2024 | “Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Paradoxes sound absurd, but they can be logically sustained... more »
March 25, 2024 | Jesus, and other magi. Early variants of Christianity championed Pontius Pilate, Apollonius, and a holy snake... more »
March 22, 2024 | Cities have become frictionless, optimized sites of consumerism and productivity. In other words, they have lost their humanity... more »
March 21, 2024 | In 1959, Sonny Rollins vanished. No performing and no recording for two years. Turns out he kept a diary... more »
March 20, 2024 | Shakespeare’s “sisters.” Women writers in the Renaissance were constrained by disinheritance, marital disputes, legal troubles, and humiliation... more »
March 19, 2024 | Lauren Oyler’s essays “contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality”... more »
March 18, 2024 | The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »
March 15, 2024 | Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
March 14, 2024 | Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
March 13, 2024 | If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »