Curated essays on ideas, philosophy, literature, and the arts.
“I’m not a provocateur,” insists Alex Byrne, the MIT philosopher who helped author a report for the Trump administration on youth gender medicine
Trenchant but sententious, John Berger could sound like Platonov one moment, the next like Alain de Botton
Increasingly “ancient history” is not just Greco-Roman, but leads through such locales as Kerala, Tillya Tepe, and Guangzhou
Durkheim called it "collective effervescence." The rest of us call it getting gussied up to drink, dance, and have fun
No, we are not post-literate. The reading panic is merely the result of histrionic op-eds that misdiagnose the erosion of literary culture
Nose hairs tweezed just so, and set with Krazy Glue. Gently dappled liver spots. Their art is increasingly rare, but a few morticians are hanging on
For some conservatives, the Great Books are simply an anti-woke bulwark. But the case for them is much grander and more provocative
"Anonymity is what the aesthete fears above all," says Mark Lilla. One task of poetry is to assert the individual against the masses
In 1994, Stanley Fish described deconstruction as dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead: "It is everywhere.” He had a point
The Canadian poet Margaret Avison lived with such intense inwardness that Northrop Frye called her “a conscientious objector to life”
At its American debut, half the audience walked out of Waiting for Godot. Now the whole world waits with it
AI distills “the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression.” That's why its output is, put simply, slop
What separates American architecture from European is a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle
For Marco Roth, the cardinal sin of elegy writing “is to make it about oneself more than the deceased”
“Joyce stands out among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress, and the preciousness of the everyday”
Fueled by peyote, the anthropologist and cult leader Carlos Castaneda was one of the world’s most read authors in 1970. Today he’s an artifact
Vienna's coffeehouses bred inward-looking modernists. Belgrade's kafanas bred regicide and revolution
"Treat me as though I were dead," Muriel Spark told her biographer. Then she tried to bury the book
Scholarship requires bracketing your own convictions long enough to inhabit a possibly repugnant argument. Too few now attempt it
AI may sharpen what we do. But what manner of people will we become? K. Anthony Appiah on LLMs and morality
For Gen Z, periods at the ends of sentences are passive aggressive and “correct punctuation itself is a signal of irony”
Wondering why "everything feels divided and why it sucks constantly"? Blame the uni-context. Agnes Callard explains
Ketamine, public cuddling, and prediction markets on just about everything pervade Manifest, a gathering of self-described “rationalists”
With their mad methods and aesthetic gimmicks, William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin were, together, a brand: The Cut-Up Boys of the Interzone
A poet and a theologian grope towards meaning by mail, trading letters about faith and friendship for two years
“The smartphone erodes freedom not because it invades our private space, but because it gives us the feel of a private world”
Saul Bellow peeked under Allan Bloom's kimono and called it a tribute. Was the betrayal worth it?
“I do support you—difficult job. But Barbara and I are bothered about the raunchy stuff—urine ... fist up rectum”
Ten thousand books in 600 square feet: For a young member of the literati, it was a temple of the mind; for his landlord, it was a fire hazard
Carolyn Rouse did an interview to rebut the charge that anthropology has too much politics and too little rigor. It didn't go well