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VERITAS ODIT MORAS Wednesday November 29, 2023 Support Arts & Letters Daily × SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER Do not show this again Alternate view Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. » Nov. 29, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Moby-Dick had been out of print for decades when Melville died. Since then, we’ve rediscovered the Melville we need... more » NEW BOOKS Stigmatization of Schoenberg. The argument that classical music took a wrong turn in the middle of the 20th century is downright wrong... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Susan Sontag and George Steiner could be extraordinarily ill-mannered. But their unabashed critical ardor remains infectious... more » Nov. 28, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Spare a thought for cliché-verre. Part printmaking, part photography, this 19th-century artistic medium never caught on... more » NEW BOOKS The chapter. It dates to 13th-century narrative units in the Gospels, before the separation of sentences and even of words ... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS A best-selling philosophical text on Amazon is the decade-old dissertation of a writer best known as Bronze Age Pervert... more » Nov. 27, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Reassessing the work of Georg Lukács means expurgating Bolshevik themes and some long-outdated Marxist concepts. That’s asking a lot... more » NEW BOOKS Humans make machines, and machines remake humans. Small devices have revolutionized humanity in big ways... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Rescuing Pushkin from commemoration and co-optation: He “deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath”... more » Nov. 24, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE The jargon of 17th-century London, the slang of 1960s teens — if you can imagine it, it’s in Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection... more » NEW BOOKS For the 11th-century Benedictine monk Saint Anselm, reading was a form of communion. It still is... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Censorship is a widespread problem among scientists. It’s most often driven by the scientists themselves... more » Nov. 23, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE In the early 1900s, almost no Jewish person could be hired in publishing. By the 1960s, there was talk of a Jewish literary mafia. What happened?... more » NEW BOOKS Who was the greatest writer of the Latin American Boom? Not Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, but José Donoso... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Do animals need complex brains to experience consciousness? New work on scallops, jellyfish, and crabs suggests not... more » Nov. 22, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Undergoing cancer treatment, Paul Auster has thoughts on the American obsession with closure — “the stupidest idea” he’s ever heard of... more » NEW BOOKS The liberal’s dilemma. Are they suffering from their own success, or from the fact that liberalism has never been tried?... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS When Gawker went girly and created a home for radical self-disclosure and all-abiding contempt. Moe Tkacik looks back... more » Nov. 21, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Three days of “Rothdom” — a Newark festival dedicated to Philip Roth — spur a thought: His creative, licentious force is best consumed alone... more » NEW BOOKS Dickens the devious? A new biography stretches credulity to portray the writer as pathologically deceitful... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS My queue, myself. Ordering DVDs from Netflix served as a kind of biography of the various phases of my life... more » Nov. 20, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE In the 1960s, scientists believed in a connection between psychedelics and psychosis. Is there anything to that?... more » NEW BOOKS Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more » Nov. 17, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Beginning in the 13th century, a new paradigm of measurement and mathematics built the modern world... more » NEW BOOKS “To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more » Nov. 16, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Stanley Fish on teaching at Florida’s newly controversial New College: “Virtue is not the business of the academy”... more » NEW BOOKS Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more » Nov. 15, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Shakespeare’s first folio, in 1623, had an initial print run of 750. Today 233 copies survive, all of them unique... more » NEW BOOKS George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more » Nov. 14, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE “Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins”... more » NEW BOOKS Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more » Nov. 13, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Generative AI has put us in a unique and unsettling headspace. Claude Shannon got there first... more » NEW BOOKS Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more » Nov. 10, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE For decades, Andrew Wylie was the world's most audacious broker of literary talent. Has the Wylie moment passed?... more » NEW BOOKS John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more » Nov. 9, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Imagine tracking the winners and judges for top literary awards across 75 years. Now you can. Does it tell you anything? ... more » NEW BOOKS Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more » Nov. 8, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE The hard problem of consciousness is nowhere near an answer. Scientists and philosophers struggle on... more » NEW BOOKS In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more » Nov. 7, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Why are movies getting longer? They’re not. But the ones that are longer are the ones people pay to see... more » NEW BOOKS Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more » Nov. 6, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Whether you speak with a retroflex R, a bunched R, or a crispy R, it’s clear that R is the weirdest letter... more » NEW BOOKS Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more » Nov. 3, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Memoir of a momentary extremist. For two years, Michael Kazin was a wannabe revolutionary. It was both thrilling and sobering... more » NEW BOOKS “Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS “A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more » Nov. 2, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE The electricians of the 18th century dumbfounded their audiences. They were taken to be part miracle workers, part magicians... more » NEW BOOKS Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more » Nov. 1, 2023 ARTICLES OF NOTE Secular humanist definitions of morality face a dilemma: Choose a culture-centered ethics or return to a God-centered one... more » NEW BOOKS Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more » ESSAYS & OPINIONS Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign Up for our Newsletter × SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER Do not show this again ARTICLES OF NOTE Moby-Dick had been out of print for decades when Melville died. Since then, we’ve rediscovered the Melville we need... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Spare a thought for cliché-verre. Part printmaking, part photography, this 19th-century artistic medium never caught on... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reassessing the work of Georg Lukács means expurgating Bolshevik themes and some long-outdated Marxist concepts. That’s asking a lot... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. » The jargon of 17th-century London, the slang of 1960s teens — if you can imagine it, it’s in Madeline Kripke’s dictionary collection... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the early 1900s, almost no Jewish person could be hired in publishing. By the 1960s, there was talk of a Jewish literary mafia. What happened?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Undergoing cancer treatment, Paul Auster has thoughts on the American obsession with closure — “the stupidest idea” he’s ever heard of... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Three days of “Rothdom” — a Newark festival dedicated to Philip Roth — spur a thought: His creative, licentious force is best consumed alone... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the 1960s, scientists believed in a connection between psychedelics and psychosis. Is there anything to that?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Beginning in the 13th century, a new paradigm of measurement and mathematics built the modern world... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Stanley Fish on teaching at Florida’s newly controversial New College: “Virtue is not the business of the academy”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shakespeare’s first folio, in 1623, had an initial print run of 750. Today 233 copies survive, all of them unique... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Stalin’s one and only culinary extravagance in those days was a bathtub full of pickled gherkins”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Generative AI has put us in a unique and unsettling headspace. Claude Shannon got there first... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For decades, Andrew Wylie was the world's most audacious broker of literary talent. Has the Wylie moment passed?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Imagine tracking the winners and judges for top literary awards across 75 years. Now you can. Does it tell you anything? ... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The hard problem of consciousness is nowhere near an answer. Scientists and philosophers struggle on... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why are movies getting longer? They’re not. But the ones that are longer are the ones people pay to see... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Whether you speak with a retroflex R, a bunched R, or a crispy R, it’s clear that R is the weirdest letter... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Memoir of a momentary extremist. For two years, Michael Kazin was a wannabe revolutionary. It was both thrilling and sobering... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The electricians of the 18th century dumbfounded their audiences. They were taken to be part miracle workers, part magicians... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Secular humanist definitions of morality face a dilemma: Choose a culture-centered ethics or return to a God-centered one... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unherd prides itself on ideological eclecticism. But just how heterodox is the ascendant publication?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The quality of a whisper, the stress of a syllable, the pitch of a voice: Alexander John Ellis’s life as a word nerd... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Stinking fish,” “abominable wine,” “dirty taverns.” In 1783, the Continental Congress spent a rotten summer in New Jersey... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Academics tend to focus on enlarging the borders of their disciplines. Instead, they should think about how those disciplines come to an end... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Thirty-nine place settings, most of them displaying an aestheticized vulva. “The Dinner Party” almost broke Judy Chicago... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Musician’s dystonia. Some of the finest have suffered devastating hand spasms and shakes. Why?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although Louise Glück was often identified with post-confessional poetry, she was too interested in others to risk the solipsism of mere selfhood... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, in becoming the manual of magical practice, also advanced the idea that magic was a kind of philosophy... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The brass astrolabe, the water clock, and finally the mechanical timepiece: 14th-century Europe couldn’t get enough of clocks... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mermaid books, rainbow bookmarks, and one big headache. The Scholastic Book Fair has run into culture-war controversy... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The American Museum of Natural History holds the remains of at least 12,000 people. Who were they?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Louise Glück, whose "unmistakable poetic voice" made individual existence universal, has died. She was 80... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A 19-century “storm controversy.” Were North American hurricanes, blizzards, and thunderstorms rotational or centripetal in nature?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cubism, Dada, Pop, minimalism, and now “the contemporary.” Progress in art has ground to a stop... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today’s AI models, flawed as they are, someday will be acknowledged as the first to have achieved artificial general intelligence... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “It is hard, in the era of the AR-15, to fear a vampire.” And yet, Alexander Chee writes, Dracula remains a vital literary experience... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What happens when reading is governed largely by the logic of machines, rather than the inner dialogue of our own humanity? We're finding out... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Fosse — “our age’s great writer of light and darkness” — has won the Nobel Prize in literature... WaPo... Guardian... Alex Shephard and Mark Krotov... Damion Searls... Merve Emre...... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Identity politics doesn’t come from postmodernism, as is commonly held. In fact, it dates back to the 18th century... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW BOOKS Stigmatization of Schoenberg. The argument that classical music took a wrong turn in the middle of the 20th century is downright wrong... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The chapter. It dates to 13th-century narrative units in the Gospels, before the separation of sentences and even of words ... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Humans make machines, and machines remake humans. Small devices have revolutionized humanity in big ways... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For the 11th-century Benedictine monk Saint Anselm, reading was a form of communion. It still is... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who was the greatest writer of the Latin American Boom? Not Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, but José Donoso... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The liberal’s dilemma. Are they suffering from their own success, or from the fact that liberalism has never been tried?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dickens the devious? A new biography stretches credulity to portray the writer as pathologically deceitful... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is indeterminacy the goal of the humanities? Or are actual political goals — organizing, coalition-building — within its remit?... more »... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The thoughts and the career of Don DeLillo, an old soul from another era, prefigures our own, even now... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ibn Sina and Biruni were polymaths of the same time and place. But they differed in personality and perspective... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Where authors find jobs, where they go to school, how they get published: These social facts have aesthetic consequences”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John le Carré's serial philandering was more than a character flaw. It was integral to his literary life... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The tyranny of beauty. Empress Elisabeth of Austria washed her hair with raw egg and brandy, and sometimes she slept in a mask lined with raw veal... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You’ve heard it before: Digital disruption will sweep aside our staid universities. A new book asks: Has the time finally come?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lou Reed came to embody a New York that exists only in memory — a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 18th-century London, literary clubs offered debate and fine dining to their gentleman members. Joseph Johnson’s club was different... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 19th-century British literary celebrity Michael Field was not, in fact, a brilliant young man, but rather the nom de plume of two women... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For Martin Jay, intellectual life has both a transcendental side and a mundane side. The two are in conflict... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Edith Hamilton’s books on Greek and Roman mythology, written after she retired from teaching, were a publishing phenomenon... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What can we learn from the Dutch master painters? That beauty is to be taken seriously... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hearing Homer. A recent translation of the Iliad gives a new generation of readers a clearer understanding of the epic... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Visions of utopia can be grand, like the mega-city planned in the Saudi Arabian desert. Or they can be far more humble... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The birth of Bond. Agent 007 was forged in a crucible of Ian Fleming's marital strife and worsening health... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The anarcho-socialist musings of Jonathan Crary occasionally approach paranoia. That's in part why he's so interesting to read... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ESSAYS & OPINIONS Susan Sontag and George Steiner could be extraordinarily ill-mannered. But their unabashed critical ardor remains infectious... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A best-selling philosophical text on Amazon is the decade-old dissertation of a writer best known as Bronze Age Pervert... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rescuing Pushkin from commemoration and co-optation: He “deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Censorship is a widespread problem among scientists. It’s most often driven by the scientists themselves... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Do animals need complex brains to experience consciousness? New work on scallops, jellyfish, and crabs suggests not... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- When Gawker went girly and created a home for radical self-disclosure and all-abiding contempt. Moe Tkacik looks back... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My queue, myself. Ordering DVDs from Netflix served as a kind of biography of the various phases of my life... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said, “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A student stood up and said: ‘This author is a misogynist.” Gale Walden on dating, loving, and teaching David Foster Wallace... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A good novel is a good novel, and a bad novel is a bad novel, regardless of who – or what generative AI – wrote it... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unfairly besmirched as screechy, hectoring, and juvenile, the exclamation point is in dire need of a reputation reclamation... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We celebrate the humanities and we bash the humanities, but rarely do we pause to ask: What the hell are the humanities?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- George Eliot offers us “neither a gospel, nor imitable heroines, but a kind of negative wisdom about our relations”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As memoirists know, it is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. But memory is wet sand... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Teaching “problematic” writers is a minefield. Affronted students can generate a social-media scandal — and bad course evaluations... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Restructuring your inward being … is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Evolution is not over... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ben Lerner writes beautifully about meritocracy’s discontents. He has also “perfected the humblebrag as auto-fictional style”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The René Girard resurgence puts envy, rivalry, and scapegoating center stage in diagnosing the modern human condition... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RIP, literary fiction. The genre, born in response to conglomeration in 1980, has become an anachronism... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The varieties of feminism can be seen in the magazines their advocates created: Ms., Bitch, Bust, Sassy, Feministing, Jezebel... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Christian Lorentzen on the new alienations, obsolete vanities, and petty, unfulfilled apolitical careerism of his generation... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bookstores are full of tales of wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens. Who’s behind all this? Lester del Rey, inventor of fantasy... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Is there a greater dismissal of American literature’s achievement than the withholding of the Nobel from Don DeLillo?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alchemy, phrenology, astrology — it’s easy to know when an intellectual project fails. But how does one succeed?... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Technophobia is explicit in the text and implicit in the format of Liberties; the medium and the message are perfectly aligned”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more » -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign Up for our Newsletter × SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER Do not show this again NOTA BENE * Campus fiction * Attention wars * Best books of 2023 * Why Cass Sunstein is a liberal * A.S. 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