Curated essays on ideas, philosophy, literature, and the arts.
Editors were once heroic literary figures, spotting and nurturing hidden talent. Conglomeration in publishing has changed all that
The history of the telephone: It was a curiosity, then a luxury item, and then an ordinary necessity
Camus in love. He exchanged nearly 1,000 letters with Maria Casarès. They are intimate, poetic, unbridled
Janet Malcolm’s journalistic persona was terrifyingly sharp. But her personal letters? “Messy, confusing, repetitive, and frequently boring”
Major literary organizations rarely recognize works of science fiction. With M. John Harrison winning the Booker Prize, will that finally change?
Richard Posner described himself as cold, callous, snobbish, selfish, and cruel. It's a good line, but it wasn't true
In the silken, seductive, perilous literary world of Saki, wolves howl, cats speak, and epigrams are matters of life and death
In a Paris suburb, 60,000 readers gather to celebrate “an American literature that Americans don’t like”
David Remnick warned journalists against befriending their subjects. He made one exception for himself: Philip Roth
An anthology that merely reflects the market amounts to a passive index fund. The editor’s job is to pick winners. David Lehman explains
Critics and biographers alike have tiptoed around a momentous force in John Berger’s writing: sex
Lionel Trilling described the place where literature and politics meet as a "dark and bloody crossroads." Bad politics and bad books are buried there
Anthropologists love to debate: Is their field insufficiently reflexive, too reflexive, too relativistic, or too subservient to dominant norms? Enough!
"Academics routinely betray their best selves and lapse into a tendentious moralism when they enter the wider world of American political debate"
“We live in a time and a place when and where taste, inner resourcefulness, and fortitude are neither encouraged nor rewarded”
In medieval times, curiosity was seen as a largely vacuous interest in novel or forbidden information
For five decades, George Scialabba has carried the torch for secular progressivism and literary criticism
Electroconvulsive therapy appears to offer depressives an agonizing choice: their personality or their memory
Simon Winchester, a charming rogue who traded geology for journalism and became a prolific and peripatetic polymath, has died. He was 82
In 17th-century England, a flood could be blamed on a “Papistical Conspiracy of Traitors” — but general sinfulness could not be dismissed
Why did American departments of literature prove so hospitable, or susceptible, to French theory?
Robert Wilson created spectacles that defied interpretation. So his critics wrote about their own ideas instead
"All writers will be buried, but try to bury their books, and somebody will always dig them up again"
Sometime between the late Middle Ages and the 18th century, people came to believe that love should play a role in the selection of a spouse
Sylvia Plath’s verbal calisthenics. Nothing was off limits, including sonnets, villanelles, poems in terza rima, even Audenesque quatrains
Annie Ernaux: “Alfred Nobel’s intentions were noble. But everything that follows — the mountains of mail, the endless requests — is a burden”
Edward Hopper bristled at the “lonely” label: “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint”
The philosopher Bernard Williams refused every ism. That made him hard to pin down. And hard to refute
The last Shakespearean. The professional literary specialist is an increasingly endangered species
In defense of the dilettante. Unfairly dismissed as a dabbler, he is in fact a tonic for our overspecialized world