Making machines talk. Inventors have for centuries pursued the dream of devising an android that speaks... more »
While medieval witches used magic for harm, “cunning folk” performed simple spells to find lost objects, inspire love, and heal illness... more »
The role of the critic, as exemplified by Helen Vendler, is not to put oneself in front of the poet but to excite the reader to seek out the poet’s work... more »
Humanities scholars distance themselves from the idea that they produce knowledge. Why?... more »
Ella Fitzgerald learned to scat because she felt out-of-place during jam sessions. So she started improvising with her voice... more »
Interesting things are happening in postsecondary education. Just not, for the most part, on college campuses... more »
How did the tiger get its stripes, the cheetah its spots? Alan Turing set out to explain nature's patterns, and sort of succeeded... more »
Horror in architecture: Modernity has produced endlessly cloned suburban homes and dystopian, shuttered factories... more »
Growing up Friedman. In any disagreement, what mattered is who had the best argument, not who was older. Milton's son explains... more »
The Gulag Archipelago, which catalogs countless deaths, unimaginable cruelty, and the worst of human nature, is a work of optimism... more »
How can we believe in the power of language when our words are no longer reflective of any divine order? Charles Taylor investigates... more »
The aim of solitude, wrote Montaigne, was “to live more at leisure and at one’s ease.” Don’t confuse that with loneliness... more »
“The novel is the truth, and the rest is lies.” For René Girard, fiction alone preserves social and psychological configurations as they really are... more »
Randall Sullivan went in search of the origins of evil. Too bad he got hopelessly lost along the way... more »
Men have traditionally raged against the cutesy confines of fatherhood. What does it mean to give in to them?... more »
Armed and ready for the apocalypse, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s followers went underground in 1990. What happened next?... more »
In 1990, Stephen Greenblatt dismissed psychoanalysis. Now he's giving Freud a second chance, not least to point out that Shakespeare got there first... more »
Liberalism was originally an ethical doctrine that addressed the fundamental question of how to live well. Why has it become a narrowly political project? ... more »
“If writers see editors, with some justification, as a necessary evil, true editors often see themselves, appropriately, in the same way”... more »
Reading Rushdie in Tehran. Iranian intellectuals approach his work with a mix of repulsion and admiration... more »
There is a distemper in American social life — arguments pass rapidly from vulgar declamation to sickly apology and back... more »
Grandmaster Hans Niemann beat the world’s best chess player but was accused of cheating. Now he’s been vindicated — or has he?... more »
Nostalgia has been dismissed as sick, sentimental, stupid, reactionary, and intellectually vacuous. Is it really that bad?... more »
For Emily Dickinson, letter writing was a form of publication, of circulating her work to a select group of readers... more »
What should college students read in a time of protest? Noah Feldman, Martha Nussbaum, Sam Moyn recommend some books... more »
Besides harp playing, medieval minstrelsy featured baking, spying, diplomacy, propaganda, carpentry, and the training of dancing bears... more »
Before the 20th century, splendid buildings were heavily ornamented. No more. Blame a Swiss-trained clockmaker and a clique of radical German artists... more »
Despite being seen as second rate, Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd defined mid-century American opera... more »
Polyamory used to be the domain of fringe figures with strange views. Now we can't seem to stop talking about it... more »
A History of British Ferns was published to acclaim in 1840, spawning 50 years of Pteridomania — fern fever... more »
"Her legacy is very uncomfortable," Benjamin Moser says of Susan Sontag. "It’s very spiny. It’s cactus-y. It’s like chewing the cactus without removing the exterior"... more »
Wake up, reach for your phone. The digital revolution prompts a question: Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? ... more »
Since the Renaissance, the fine artist has been elevated above the merely decorative artist or furniture maker. That line is blurring ... more »
The art of noise. When is a clamor an affliction on the ears, and when is it beautiful music?... more »
A vituperative 1979 debate pitted E.P. Thompson against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. At stake: Should history focus on realism or theory?... more »
“The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble”... more »
The world is divided between music people and lyrics people. Which one are you?... more »
Are lessons from early human history useful to us? “Defend the coasts from marauders” can only take us so far... more »
Jack Conroy, poet of the proletariat, dug ditches and scrapped sheet metal. His literary magazine had double the circulation of Partisan Review... more »
Melancholia, ennui, call it what you will. The feeling has a long history and a surprising political power... more »
England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more »
What can we learn from filler words? Wilfred M. McClay makes the case that “like” is different from “uh” and “um”... more »
We tend to think of wilderness as a physical thing. It is in fact an idea that stems from a particular culture and has a particular history... more »
Surrealism: What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more »
Economics is just fancy equations and — in Thomas Piketty’s words — a “childish passion for mathematics.” Are such critiques fair?... more »
Ice-age artists: Were they shamans high on mind-altering drugs? Or sober-minded chroniclers of the changing seasons?... more »
Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements... more »
Is the field of postcolonial studies inauthentic, a prisoner of Western mentalities? Amitava Kumar reflects on fierce debates in India... more »
Why have children stopped reading for fun? Blame screens, but not only screens... more »
“The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more »
How did Richard Owen, a pioneering Victorian paleontologist, inspire such intense hatred among his contemporaries?... more »
In the 1920s, young Cecilia Payne answered a vexing scientific question: What are stars made of? The scientific establishment was not pleased... more »
In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more »
Diversity is a master concept of our time, but what happens when diversity of identity and diversity of ideology conflict?... more »
Paul Auster’s career is a reminder that writers' lesser efforts can go unnoticed in the presence of their masterworks... more »
“I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more »
“There is no end to war and no end, it would seem, to the uses Shakespeare can be put to in war”... more »
Walter Kirn, the conspiratorially minded counter-elite journalist, tries a new way of sticking it to the ruling classes: founding a literary magazine... more »
It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more »
A paradox of modern political life: The more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels... more »
The dictionary people. These tweedy, eccentric amateur lexicographers made the Oxford English Dictionary possible... more »
Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »
The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly dying for years... more »
Making machines talk. Inventors have for centuries pursued the dream of devising an android that speaks... more »
Humanities scholars distance themselves from the idea that they produce knowledge. Why?... more »
How did the tiger get its stripes, the cheetah its spots? Alan Turing set out to explain nature's patterns, and sort of succeeded... more »
The Gulag Archipelago, which catalogs countless deaths, unimaginable cruelty, and the worst of human nature, is a work of optimism... more »
“The novel is the truth, and the rest is lies.” For René Girard, fiction alone preserves social and psychological configurations as they really are... more »
Armed and ready for the apocalypse, Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s followers went underground in 1990. What happened next?... more »
“If writers see editors, with some justification, as a necessary evil, true editors often see themselves, appropriately, in the same way”... more »
Grandmaster Hans Niemann beat the world’s best chess player but was accused of cheating. Now he’s been vindicated — or has he?... more »
What should college students read in a time of protest? Noah Feldman, Martha Nussbaum, Sam Moyn recommend some books... more »
Despite being seen as second rate, Gian Carlo Menotti and Carlisle Floyd defined mid-century American opera... more »
"Her legacy is very uncomfortable," Benjamin Moser says of Susan Sontag. "It’s very spiny. It’s cactus-y. It’s like chewing the cactus without removing the exterior"... more »
The art of noise. When is a clamor an affliction on the ears, and when is it beautiful music?... more »
The world is divided between music people and lyrics people. Which one are you?... more »
Melancholia, ennui, call it what you will. The feeling has a long history and a surprising political power... more »
We tend to think of wilderness as a physical thing. It is in fact an idea that stems from a particular culture and has a particular history... more »
Ice-age artists: Were they shamans high on mind-altering drugs? Or sober-minded chroniclers of the changing seasons?... more »
Why have children stopped reading for fun? Blame screens, but not only screens... more »
In the 1920s, young Cecilia Payne answered a vexing scientific question: What are stars made of? The scientific establishment was not pleased... more »
Paul Auster’s career is a reminder that writers' lesser efforts can go unnoticed in the presence of their masterworks... more »
Walter Kirn, the conspiratorially minded counter-elite journalist, tries a new way of sticking it to the ruling classes: founding a literary magazine... more »
The dictionary people. These tweedy, eccentric amateur lexicographers made the Oxford English Dictionary possible... more »
Since 1739, 130 Roman dodecahedrons have been discovered by archaeologists. But a mystery endures: What were they used for?... more »
The Argentine writer and perennial Nobel candidate César Aira writes for hours before revising. The result is an obscene number of books... more »
Derek Parfit set out to that prove progress in moral philosophy is possible. He failed, but in so doing salvaged the study of ethics... more »
People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases?... more »
Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »
Penelope Fitzgerald, long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more »
“A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute?... more »
When did it become embarrassing to like classical music? When it became thought of as an elite art... more »
Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more »
A homogeneous Harlem Renaissance? The period’s art depicts pool halls, jazz clubs, formal dinners, and social groups at odds with one another... more »
We read the classics but ignore much of what readers once enjoyed: forgeries, pseudotranslations, and other ephemera from the dustbin of literary history... more »
“The Recluse of Amherst.” Emily Dickinson’s life, it turns out, was full of baking, corresponding, and humor... more »
Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »
Is Glenn Loury’s new memoir a brave act of self-reckoning or a reckless act of self-sabotage?... more »
“That is right,” Joseph Priestley said when he completed editing the manuscript. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was dead... more »
“I will dedicate all my work to her, forever.” The novelist Carson McCullers had a habit of overdoing her romantic pronouncements... more »
George Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and 1984 a weirder novel, than we’ve appreciated... more »
How do artists think? Where do they begin? How do they know when they’re done? Adam Moss looks for answers... more »
In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton audited a course given by Robert Lowell. They were forever changed as poets... more »
While medieval witches used magic for harm, “cunning folk” performed simple spells to find lost objects, inspire love, and heal illness... more »
Ella Fitzgerald learned to scat because she felt out-of-place during jam sessions. So she started improvising with her voice... more »
Horror in architecture: Modernity has produced endlessly cloned suburban homes and dystopian, shuttered factories... more »
How can we believe in the power of language when our words are no longer reflective of any divine order? Charles Taylor investigates... more »
Randall Sullivan went in search of the origins of evil. Too bad he got hopelessly lost along the way... more »
In 1990, Stephen Greenblatt dismissed psychoanalysis. Now he's giving Freud a second chance, not least to point out that Shakespeare got there first... more »
Reading Rushdie in Tehran. Iranian intellectuals approach his work with a mix of repulsion and admiration... more »
Nostalgia has been dismissed as sick, sentimental, stupid, reactionary, and intellectually vacuous. Is it really that bad?... more »
Besides harp playing, medieval minstrelsy featured baking, spying, diplomacy, propaganda, carpentry, and the training of dancing bears... more »
Polyamory used to be the domain of fringe figures with strange views. Now we can't seem to stop talking about it... more »
Wake up, reach for your phone. The digital revolution prompts a question: Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? ... more »
A vituperative 1979 debate pitted E.P. Thompson against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. At stake: Should history focus on realism or theory?... more »
Are lessons from early human history useful to us? “Defend the coasts from marauders” can only take us so far... more »
England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more »
Surrealism: What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more »
Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements... more »
“The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more »
In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more »
“I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more »
It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more »
Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »
Saskia Hamilton's parting gift. The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more »
The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »
Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. “The message is the message”... more »
I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more »
Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »
Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »
A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »
“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »
A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »
For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »
Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »
AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »
Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »
A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »
Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »
“[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 »
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 »
The role of the critic, as exemplified by Helen Vendler, is not to put oneself in front of the poet but to excite the reader to seek out the poet’s work... more »
Interesting things are happening in postsecondary education. Just not, for the most part, on college campuses... more »
Growing up Friedman. In any disagreement, what mattered is who had the best argument, not who was older. Milton's son explains... more »
The aim of solitude, wrote Montaigne, was “to live more at leisure and at one’s ease.” Don’t confuse that with loneliness... more »
Men have traditionally raged against the cutesy confines of fatherhood. What does it mean to give in to them?... more »
Liberalism was originally an ethical doctrine that addressed the fundamental question of how to live well. Why has it become a narrowly political project? ... more »
There is a distemper in American social life — arguments pass rapidly from vulgar declamation to sickly apology and back... more »
For Emily Dickinson, letter writing was a form of publication, of circulating her work to a select group of readers... more »
Before the 20th century, splendid buildings were heavily ornamented. No more. Blame a Swiss-trained clockmaker and a clique of radical German artists... more »
A History of British Ferns was published to acclaim in 1840, spawning 50 years of Pteridomania — fern fever... more »
Since the Renaissance, the fine artist has been elevated above the merely decorative artist or furniture maker. That line is blurring ... more »
“The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble”... more »
Jack Conroy, poet of the proletariat, dug ditches and scrapped sheet metal. His literary magazine had double the circulation of Partisan Review... more »
What can we learn from filler words? Wilfred M. McClay makes the case that “like” is different from “uh” and “um”... more »
Economics is just fancy equations and — in Thomas Piketty’s words — a “childish passion for mathematics.” Are such critiques fair?... more »
Is the field of postcolonial studies inauthentic, a prisoner of Western mentalities? Amitava Kumar reflects on fierce debates in India... more »
How did Richard Owen, a pioneering Victorian paleontologist, inspire such intense hatred among his contemporaries?... more »
Diversity is a master concept of our time, but what happens when diversity of identity and diversity of ideology conflict?... more »
“There is no end to war and no end, it would seem, to the uses Shakespeare can be put to in war”... more »
A paradox of modern political life: The more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels... more »
The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly dying for years... more »
We think we remember works of art rather well, says Julian Barnes. But we often don't, and that's not a bad thing ... more »
“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more »
The Order of the Third Bird is a somewhat secret society of artists and avant-gardists who congregate suddenly at museums, then vanish... more »
"Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth... more »
“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »
As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »
In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »
Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »
Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »
“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »
“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »
How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »
In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »
“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »
Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »
The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »
What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »
Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »
Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »
What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »
We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »
“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »
"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »
Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... more »
As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »
Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »
Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »
“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »
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