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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 »

Sept. 2, 2020

Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »

Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »

What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »

Sept. 1, 2020

Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »

For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »

Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »

Aug. 31, 2020

To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »

A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »

More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »

Aug. 29, 2020

Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »

Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others ... more »

Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »

Aug. 28, 2020

“After one finishes a story, one should cross out the beginning and the end," said Chekhov. "It is there that we writers lie most of all” ... more »

When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history ... more »

John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »