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Sept. 26, 2020

Lettering was everywhere in Medieval Western Europe, but only about 1 in 10 could read. As a result, words were considered holy... more »

What is a Shakespearean sensibility? Via musicality, rhythm, grandeur, "we seem to hear words pushing restlessly through the soil of thinking." ... more »

Are we living in a historical inflection point — the exact moment at which the most consequential human decisions are being made? Probably not ... more »

Sept. 25, 2020

"If the only way to get anything done at a university is to raise money from a corporation, we’re not going to know what we need to know about the world and the human condition," says Jill Lepore. ... more »

Though their work is rooted in the visual, most art historians are readers rather than lookers. Leo Steinberg was different ... more »

Editing RBG. She was precise and unyielding. At the book party, she wore black-lace gloves. Scalia worked the door ... more »

Sept. 24, 2020

History and its futilities. Orlando Patterson brought social science to bear on postcolonial Jamaica. Now he chronicles the failures of such efforts ... more »

Streaming music is more efficient than CDs, right? Wrong. “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time” ... more »

Camus didn't do inspiration. And hope, he believed, is for suckers. But that doesn't mean he condoned despair ... more »

Sept. 23, 2020

G.E. Moore, who championed common sense, was an influential philosopher. But a great one? Probably not ... more »

Walter Gropius achieved fame by passing off Lucia Moholy’s work as his own. Meanwhile, she lived in poverty ... more »

The “encrappification” of America. From the Veg-O-Matic to Beanie Babies, the nation has a long, wasteful history of loving cheap stuff ... more »

Sept. 22, 2020

If Christopher Hitchens were still around, what would he make of the world today? Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie discuss ... more »

In the ’60s, predictive voter analytics was taken as science fiction, as dystopian, as a scandal. Now we meekly accept it... more »

Before Robin DiAngelo, there was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both reveal the limits of reading in pursuit of social justice... more »

Sept. 21, 2020

Disease in the time of Defoe. In 1722 he offered advice: Avoid excessive eating and drinking, and restore humoral balance ... more »

For Vivian Gornick, feminism was a new way of interpreting the world. Then, around 1980, she returned to literature ... more »

The tech gurus tell us that the future of higher ed is adaptive tutors, chatbots, AI, and virtual reality. They're wrong ... more »

Sept. 19, 2020

A museum is auctioning off a Jackson Pollock to raise money to diversify its collection. Laudable goal, bad plan ... more »

Was Beowulf a bro? A new, feminist version of the epic paints a fierce picture of masculine weakness ... more »

The tempo of life reaches a frenzy, and yet we feel stuck. One balm for our internet-accelerated age: read old books... more »

Sept. 18, 2020

Stanley Crouch, the jazz critic whose outsize opinions were rendered in scalding, pugilistic prose, has died. He was 74 ... more »

It’s been said that the correspondence of great artists and idealists is mostly about money. Van Gogh is no exception ... more »

The internet is not what you think it is. For one thing, its intellectual roots go back to 19th-century conjecture on snail copulation ... more »

Sept. 17, 2020

When Waltham was radical. How a suburb of Boston became an unlikely fount of new currents in leftism... more »

The Reformation was “one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge.” Why? Its fondness for book burning... more »

The “bad old days” of academia were full of favoritism, prejudice, and indolence. But sometimes the professors showed up fully clad and sober ... more »

Sept. 16, 2020

An Ancient Roman paradox: parricide was punished gruesomely, but revenge killings weren’t prosecuted at all... more »

How to think about disaster. Accepting one’s place in a vast, complex, and violent world is healthier than it sounds... more »

Down with the dons. English professors have all the book reviewer’s traditional faults — only more so... more »

Sept. 15, 2020

Despite the vitriol Philip Larkin held for his parents, he wrote home about every little thing — his red trousers, his allergies, his constipation... more »

When Christopher met Martin. It happened at the New Statesman in the early '70s. Now Hitchens is at the heart of Amis's new novel... more »

Synthesis, sweep, and all-encompassing theorizing are out of fashion in the academy today. Was René Girard the last of the hedgehogs? ... more »

Sept. 14, 2020

What will save the English department? Love, says Mark Edmundson. Professors need to remind themselves that their love for literature is what brought most of them into the profession ... more »

Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived ... more »

A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested? ... more »

Sept. 12, 2020

“A deluge of things.” We inherit our passion for clutter from Victorians like Marion Sambourne, who owned 66 upright chairs ... more »

Nathalie Sarraute is remembered as a “boring formalist” within the insipid “new novel” movement. She was much more than that ... more »

Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be? ... more »

Sept. 11, 2020

To read great books by flawed authors, we must recognize the sins of the past but also look for moments of shared human experience ... more »

When William James gave up on religion, he went in search of a new avenue to save his life. Can his approach help you save your own? ... more »

Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »

Sept. 10, 2020

New Yorker writers cultivate reticence, self-deprecation, and wit. As Janet Malcolm learned, those are the last things a jury wants in a witness ... more »

For more than a century, Wagner's music has been a "drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans" ... more »

Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »

Sept. 9, 2020

We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »

The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »

Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »

Sept. 8, 2020

Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »

Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »

Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »

Sept. 7, 2020

The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »

"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »

Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »

Sept. 5, 2020

The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »

The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »

Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »

Sept. 4, 2020

The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »

Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »

We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »

Sept. 3, 2020

Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »

Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »

In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »