Articles of Note

If someone changes drastically, does he or she become a different person? The answer to this old philosophical riddle may be in the nature of the change... more »

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan was unknown. By 1967, he was a star. How did an obscure professor from Canada transform himself from pious agrarian to media mystagogue?... more »

Fake news is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, fake news is older than real news. As facts recede, the power of concocted stories will only grow... more »

Next year, Russians will observe the centenary of the Russian Revolution. And their government will make sure they know almost nothing about it... more »

Best-selling books, it’s said, provide “a snapshot of an age.” Yet in every age, while characters and settings may have changed, the narratives are familiar... more »

Geriatric wisdom goes beyond nostalgia and mortality. It’s the humor of Beckett after slipping in the bathtub, the flair of Bellow getting out of the ICU... more »

Lügenpresse, umvolkung, völkisch, volksverräter, überfremdung: The language of Nazism is resurgent, an old lexicon for a new nationalism... more »

In 1914, Yeats and Pound held a dinner to celebrate the poet Wilfrid Blunt. Featured were roast peacock and insults galore. Passing the generational baton has never been easy... more »

Literary scholars read with vigilance, wariness, suspicion, distrust. Their criticism has a political aim. Which is to say pleasure plays no part... more »

Liszt drank a bottle of cognac a day; Brahms was boozy; Schubert was a drunk. A lot of great composers were fond of the bottle... more »

Freeman Dyson, who knew Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Feynman, thinks three qualities help make a successful scientist: ignorance, craziness, subversiveness ... more »

Combining Norse legend, Greek myth, dope fiends, Neolithic hunter-gatherers, and kimchi, Jack London tried his hand at writing science fiction... more »

P.G. Wodehouse never escaped the stain of his wartime broadcasts on German radio. Could it be that he was guilty only of stupidity?... more »

The accidental propagandist. One Hundred Years of Solitude made Gabriel García Márquez famous. It also made him an unwitting operative of the CIA... more »

Amy Cuddy's TED talk on power poses — feet apart, hands on hips, head thrown back -- has been viewed 37 million times. How did such a flimsy idea become a sensation?... more »

Literary culture won't disappear, but it will continue to shrink. "It will go back to what it was when I started out," says Martin Amis, "which is a minority interest sphere"... more »

For Schlegel, Tzara, and Schiller, art was by definition incomprehensible. Case in point: the Voynich Manuscript, which is quite possibly nonsense... more »

Boredom gets a bad rap. We need it in order to live and think well. Its defenders include Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, Sontag... more »

The miserable academic job market and the re-emergence of little magazines are catalyzing  a cultural renaissance. Meet the new intellectuals... more »

The Job-like trials of Hugh Gordon Porteus. A disciple of Wyndham Lewis, he tried his hand at sinology, map designing, and dirty limericks. Success was elusive... more »

Emily Dickinson’s thoughts piled up on envelopes, chocolate wrappers, and bits of newspaper. Never in a rush, she was a scholar of passing time... more »

“How much do you need to forget in order to continue your everyday life? How much can you remember without dying from it?" The Israeli writer David Grossman finds answers... more »

Step aside, Picasso. Time to celebrate Francis Picabia, a modernist promiscuous both in style and his personal life... more »

As a young man, Jack London thrived among the delinquents on the Oakland waterfront. His stint in the cellar of society shaped his worldview... more »

Being Cornel West. He delivers righteousness and fiery passion. His rhetoric is more than a little ridiculous. But his politics are genuine... more »

How we think about who we are -- our feelings, our experiences -- shapes not only how we relate to the world but also our definition of consciousness ... more »

The ideal translator is a person "on whom nothing is lost,” said Henry James. Or maybe it's a machine. But a machine won't stop you from swearing at nuns... more »

Photography was still a young technology in 1863, when the image of a whip-scarred slave made clear that a photograph can change minds in a way that words cannot ... more »

"The way that male critics write about women is always a little funny," says Zadie Smith. "It’s part romantic, part corrective, part 'now listen, young lady'"... more »

Progress is an unalloyed good thing — the premise might seem self-evident. But the belief is a fairly recent one, and it's always had opponents... more »

New Books

How to think about rock. Before the biographies, blogs, and building of brands, it was the music that blew our minds. Behold the manic brilliance of David Bowie... more »

What’s new in poetry? Ashbery imitations, Johnny Cash’s scraps, and data-driven drivel. In short: word soup, with a dash of originality... more »

Everything old is new again. Preservationists, as well as Ph.D.s, love recapturing neglected aesthetic styles. The latest beneficiary: Brutalism... more »

Kafka liked swimming, hiking, zooming around on a motorbike, illustrating erotic fiction, and frequenting brothels. Did any of that inform his writing?... more »

What is a longtime marriage like for the French theorists Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers? It’s an intellectual exercise, an elegant performance... more »

Shakespeare, economic theorist. His work was shaped by the market. And that work, in turn, influenced the development of economic thought... more »

The work of the dead falls on the living, especially undertakers. We can live with broken hearts and shaken faith. But we can't live with a corpse on the floor... more »

Among the reasons to admire Robert Hughes: the iconoclasm of his art criticism, the pugnacity of his prose, his unabashed elitism... more »

What accounts for the rise of the West? Not technological breakthroughs, like the steam engine, but a respect for facts and a culture of discovery... more »

In 1964, Edmund Wilson published a 6,600-word assault on Nabokov's translation of Eugene Onegin. Why did Wilson savage his friend?... more »

Early in life, Stéphane Mallarmé lost his parents. Late in life, he lost a son. So he built an intellectual defense against the agony of mourning... more »

Young Bram Stoker worshiped the actor Henry Irving. The feeling was not mutual. Irving’s take on Stoker’s years-in-the-making novel: “dreadful”... more »

Before there were zoos, exotic animals were kept according to aristocratic whim. Ann Boleyn had a monkey; George IV, a giraffe. What did this mean?... more »

Romain Gary had an incorrigible thirst for narrative. His carefully constructed life veered from the "dubious to the patently false and from the slapstick to the macabre"... more »

Does the “micro texture” of Shakespeare’s sonnets hold the key to a longtime literary mystery? Elaine Scarry thinks so. She might be the only one... more »

Ezra Pound called Jean Cocteau -- poet, playwright, theatre director, jeweler -- the best writer in Europe. But his life story was riches-to-rags... more »

Marx's disciples praise his conviction and his bold proclamations. In reality, however, he was a doubter, a rethinker, a worrier — the first post-Marxist... more »

The poet Delmore Schwartz bounced between the academy and his East Village haunts. Posthumously, he hovers between canonization and obscurity... more »

After being tried for dissent, William Blake rededicated himself to esoteric engravings. He suffered among acid fumes and copper dust, which might have been what killed him... more »

The cinematic prohibitions of Robert Bresson. “No psychology,” wrote the director, no ostentatious camera movements, and “no music at all.” He believed in adding by subtraction... more »

John Berger is a painter, writer, critic, former soldier, and “the kind of Marxist who would be instantly dismissed from any Marxist organization he joined”... more »

Poets like John Clare and William Blake found meaning in trees. Now we know more about their secret lives -- they communicated via the mysterious “wood wide web”... more »

Norman Mailer, who vowed to make a revolution "in the consciousness of our time," lives on less as a novelist than an all-purpose gadfly... more »

Alexander Pushkin: Talented misfit, ladies' man, hothead, he died in a duel at 31. He's known as Russia's supreme poet. Was he also its greatest writer of prose?... more »

Jane Jacobs -- patron saint of walkability, uber-theorist of contemporary urban living -- never adequately thought through the implications of gentrification... more »

Awe, terror, and tech. Technological progress promises to solve our problems and turn the world into an Edenic garden. To some of us, that is a creepy notion... more »

To grow up in the Soviet Union was to celebrate suffering. It “justifies our hard and bitter life. For us, pain is an art”... more »

How to reconcile our stubbornly held view of Kafka as an unworldly neurotic, an "uncanny man bringing forth uncanny things," with his knack for slapstick and punch lines... more »

In 1969, a 13-part documentary made Kenneth Clark high culture’s classiest superstar. In his own mind he was just an aesthete, a mere popularizer... more »

Essays & Opinions

Patrick Modiano: novelist, Nobel laureate, compulsive fabricator. Consider the sinister prank calls, swindling of booksellers, and lies about his age. Are these aesthetic deceptions?... more »

The world’s great minds have argued about the essence of time and the feeling of inhabiting it. To consider time, Augustine argued, is to glimpse the soul... more »

“Modern poetry is supposed to be difficult," said T.S. Eliot. It’s an influential view, with disastrous consequences. Christian Wiman is an antidote... more »

You are not necessarily a more intelligent reader at 65 than 25, but you are more subtle. Rereading -- a pleasure and necessity of age -- sometimes means changing your mind... more »

Evelyn Waugh was cruel and ornery through a misunderstanding. He thought his vocation was to instruct a godless world. But his true calling was as a humorist... more »

Twilight of the English major. Enrollment is down, career prospects dim, the financial outlook grim. But marginalization has its advantages... more »

What does it mean to “know” the future? The question has perplexed Aristotle, Newton, Laplace, Thomas Nagel, and quantum theorists alike. Is an answer possible?... more »

In 1990, Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru. His novel about the experience, a tale of political ambition and moral decay, is art imitating life imitating art... more »

In terms of sex, we've become more permissive. But in terms of infidelity, we've become more intolerant. Esther Perel is out to change that... more »

John D'Agata is a self-appointed expert on the essay. But he doesn't know what an essay is or what it does. And he's no essayist. He's a liar... more »

Our search for rational explanations for our current political disorder is futile. To understand what's going on, we must turn to the ideas of an earlier era of volatility ... more »

The Rasputin problem. Hypnotist, rapist, cultist, charlatan, seer: What was the mad monk's actual role in the downfall of the the Romanovs? ... more »

The left's war on research. By denying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, it has done real harm to the reputation of science... more »

Artificial intelligence meets Balzac. Computers can now detect sentiment, irony, and character type. How much longer until they're producing literature?... more »

Besides furniture (Shaker) and flatware (Oneida), what have American utopian communities passed down through history? Prescient ideas, for one thing... more »

The museum of the past was one of objects, focused on its permanent collection. The museum of the future is a cafe with "art on the side"... more »

Thoreau comes down to us as an earnest man committed to worthy causes. We do him a disservice when we fail to get his jokes... more »

Concern about "cultural appropriation" used to be confined to college campuses: Sushi is "disrespectful," yoga complicit in oppression. Now it's spread into the general culture... more »

The time for rococo poetry of ruffles and dessert — of champions of liberalism like Marianne Moore — has waned. What we need now is Yeats... more »

Dangerous lunatic or charming if irresponsible young man? The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran was, at his core, a connoisseur of failure... more »

Lithographs, stereoscopes, and paintings populated Baudelaire’s Paris. But he revolted against optics, threw off the tyranny of visual omniscience, and embraced shadow... more »

The biggest boon to lexical research in the past decade has been newspaper databases. Among the revelations: Slang is a lot older than previously thought... more »

Is the human mind truly unique? To find out, gather a bunch of dogs in a laboratory. Animal cognition informs human cognition in weird ways... more »

Losing your mind is a strange kind of fetishization. Woolf, Plath, Hemingway, Wallace. How should we think about the relationship between creativity and illness?... more »

Rauschenberg’s studio cost $10 a month and lacked water and heat. Just the place, perhaps, for radically altering our ideas about art... more »