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 »


March 12, 2024 | “It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »


March 11, 2024 | “There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »


March 8, 2024 | Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »


March 7, 2024 | Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »


March 6, 2024 | Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »


March 5, 2024 | Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »


March 4, 2024 | Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »


March 1, 2024 | Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »


Feb. 29, 2024 | “Habermas is a blockhead. It is simply impossible to tell what kind of damage he is still going to cause in the future.” So wrote Karl Popper in 1969... more »


Feb. 28, 2024 | Christopher Hitchens was renowned and reviled for his pugnacity. But key to his style was the eloquent rejoinder... more »


Feb. 27, 2024 | Where Norman Mailer fulminated, Ellen Willis pontificated, and Stanley Crouch threw punches: The Village Voice... more »


Feb. 26, 2024 | Mid-century modern conundrum: Once American takes on Danish design caught on, Danish furniture makers started copying them... more »


Feb. 23, 2024 | Dictators need storytellers to maintain their grip on power. Good thing there’s no shortage of literary accomplices... more »


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