Curated essays on ideas, philosophy, literature, and the arts.
Disgust and desire. In the 16th century, a woman might carry a peeled apple in her armpit until it absorbed her scent, then give it to her lover
How did the journal Telos, champion of Marcuse and Gramsci, produce two editors who would serve in Trump’s State Department?
Curiosity is a cure for certainty. It’s also the enemy of humility, modesty, and self-doubt. Adam Phillips explains
The life of a Capitol Hill intern involves bamboozling policyspeak, hellacious heat, free food at AEI, and a parade of utterly charmless Tattes
The femininization of the deathcare industry. Advances in cosmetics, among other things, are pushing women into the mortuary arts
The Guide for the Perplexed is a perplexing work — its difficulty is, in part, the point. Can fluent English do it justice?
Drunk or sober, but especially drunk, Edgar Allan Poe acted against his own interests. He turned the mystery of why into art
The hottest class at Harvard? Humanities 10, where phones are banned, attendance is mandatory, and the readings are dense
Fields of lilies, fractal landscapes, idioms, DNA, Renoir’s orange, human anatomy: Why is the world full of so much beauty?
Is the book business distressed? Anxious? Optimistic? All of the above
Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality was not his “kind of history.” Nor was it Karl Marx’s
James Fessenden was indolent, wrote little, and inspired two of the most charismatic intellectuals of his time
"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"
We may daydream about a frictionless world, but consider tribology — the science of interacting surfaces — and you’ll realize that’s nonsense
Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old epic, is violent and sexually explicit. Why have translators mostly made it sound lofty?
The most interesting way to look at Edward Said is to see the political and the literary as having always been conjoined
“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.”
What happened to Scientific American? The political pendulum has swung back and forth, leaving a once hallowed magazine in shambles
What made Cormac McCarthy a great writer? The sound of his prose, in its full excess and strangeness
Historians have often created heroes, but few have themselves become one. Marc Bloch is the rare exception
We’re in the midst of an attention crisis. All is disruption and distraction. John Berger saw it coming – and foresaw its consequences
“Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Judith Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil”
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”
Artists can be intellectuals, but no real artist is pure intellect. That was Marcel Duchamp’s problem
A wild sprite haunting the West Yorkshire moors? Not quite. Emily Brontë’s legend distracts from what we know about her life
“Lobster and duck at the Johnson White House.” The success of Ralph Ellison’s individualist crusade resulted in an extreme version of public life
“God knows most novels are shit, but nobody is out here suggesting we all just stop writing them”
“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”
Panpsychism holds that everything is conscious to some degree. To make sense of this elusive theory, consider the principle of sufficient reason
Somewhere in the 1980s, education became “learning,” and reading became a skill for completing tasks. We're living with the consequence