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Oct 30, 2026
The Guide for the Perplexed is a perplexing work — its difficulty is, in part, the point. Can fluent English do it justice?
Oct 30, 2026
The femininization of the deathcare industry. Advances in cosmetics, among other things, are pushing women into the mortuary arts
Oct 30, 2026
The life of a Capitol Hill intern involves bamboozling policyspeak, hellacious heat, free food at AEI, and a parade of utterly charmless Tattes
Oct 29, 2026
Fields of lilies, fractal landscapes, idioms, DNA, Renoir’s orange, human anatomy: Why is the world full of so much beauty?
Oct 29, 2026
The hottest class at Harvard? Humanities 10, where phones are banned, attendance is mandatory, and the readings are dense
Oct 29, 2026
Drunk or sober, but especially drunk, Edgar Allan Poe acted against his own interests. He turned the mystery of why into art 
Oct 28, 2026
James Fessenden was indolent, wrote little, and inspired two of the most charismatic intellectuals of his time
Oct 28, 2026
Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality were not his “kind of history.” Nor were they Karl Marx’s
Oct 28, 2026
Is the book business distressed? Anxious? Optimistic? All of the above
Oct 27, 2026
Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old epic, is violent and sexually explicit. Why have translators mostly made it sound lofty?
Oct 27, 2026
We may daydream about a frictionless world, but consider tribology — the science of interacting surfaces — and you’ll realize that’s nonsense
Oct 27, 2026
"You can fight the premise that AI is a better writer than the best human, but you’ll be whistling past the graveyard of dead writers and metaphors"
Oct 24, 2026
What happened to Scientific American? The political pendulum has swung back and forth, leaving a once hallowed magazine in shambles
Oct 24, 2026
“What does it feel like to commune with AI spirits? It is a shot of caffeine. It is a dizzy spell. It is a download from the universe.”
Oct 24, 2026
The most interesting way to look at Edward Said is to see the political and the literary as having always been conjoined
Oct 23, 2026
We’re in the midst of an attention crisis. All is disruption and distraction. John Berger saw it coming – and foresaw its consequences
Oct 23, 2026
Historians have often created heroes, but few have themselves become one. Marc Bloch is the rare exception 
Oct 23, 2026
What made Cormac McCarthy a great writer? The sound of his prose, in its full excess and strangeness
Oct 22, 2026
Artists can be intellectuals, but no real artist is pure intellect. That was Marcel Duchamp’s problem
Oct 22, 2026
Howl at 70: “The last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song”
Oct 22, 2026
“Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Judith Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil”
Oct 21, 2026
“God knows most novels are shit, but nobody is out here suggesting we all just stop writing them”
Oct 21, 2026
“Lobster and duck at the Johnson White House.” The success of Ralph Ellison’s individualist crusade resulted in an extreme version of public life
Oct 21, 2026
A wild sprite haunting the West Yorkshire moors? Not quite. Emily Brontë’s legend distracts from what we know about her life
Oct 20, 2026
Somewhere in the 1980s, education became “learning,” and reading became a skill for completing tasks. We're living with the consequence
Oct 20, 2026
Panpsychism holds that everything is conscious to some degree. To make sense of this elusive theory, consider the principle of sufficient reason
Oct 20, 2026
“There was a generation of liberal arts majors for whom Foucault’s The Order of Things was more exhilarating than any contemporary novel, and I was one of them”
Oct 17, 2026
White paint — initially made from lead soaked in vinegar and then mixed with a binder — has a rich history. And unhinged critics 
Oct 17, 2026
The canonization of Peter Hujar. Known for his photographs of the oversexed New York art scene, his work is finally receiving its due
Oct 17, 2026
Most authors have little cash. Scammers target them anyway. Why? Their egos make them good marks