Curated essays on ideas, philosophy, literature, and the arts.
To teach students how to think, shut down the Wi-Fi, scramble the cell signal, and send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods
Jonathan Swift envisioned a large wooden contraption that would allow anyone to write brilliantly, sans “genius or study.” Sound familiar?
Stephen Hawking, brilliant and extraordinary, was spoken of with reverence and affection. Those who knew him have a dimmer view
Dwight Macdonald was famous for writing with a sneer. His criticism now reads less like erudition than compulsive, gleeful bullying
Watched vertically on a phone, the Chinese “micro-drama” — under two minutes — may be the defining art form of our era
Prophets of literary doom keep writing books about the death of reading. The genre refutes the thesis
Would an influential jeremiad against American literature’s devotion to emotional immaturity change writerly habits? Alas, no
Is all the hate for Rachel Cusk’s latest novel merely a misunderstanding of its genre, and the terms the book sets out for itself?
Nature rightly insists that we must learn from the tragedy of Jason Arday. Unfortunately the journal has learned the wrong lessons
The Atomphilosoph. In technologically driven catastrophes, Günther Anders saw cosmic arrogance — and also the need for a new moral code
In the winter of 1988, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay while visiting his in-laws in Las Vegas. He's been fending off critics ever since
“In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” says Jill Lepore. “Instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions”
At 83, Terry Eagleton is fixated on death, which he unnervingly describes as “the erotic bliss of yielding to an impregnable power"
In an 8th-century Chinese text, Buddha warns of 50 “demonic states” in which meditators can be trapped. Now science is exposing those dangers
Time speeds up and slows down; days blend together to the point of indistinguishability — time disorientation is real
Helen Vendler spent a lifetime writing about lyric poetry, yet her criticism always started from frustration, not certainty
The extraordinary achievement of Moby-Dick is to unroll the blank sheet on which modernity will write itself
The nonfiction collapse. We’re nearing the point at which one fiction blockbuster could outsell the entire nonfiction bestseller list
Literature without lust? For Leslie Fiedler, the American canon comprised adventure books, sea tales, and other prepubescent diet fare
He burned with no causes, claimed Tom Stoppard. That detachment let him dramatize ideas his committed peers couldn't touch
Once again this year, Vinita Prabhakar assigned her college students a short story she'd taught for a decade. This time, she lost her job
During the golden age of Oxbridge dons, intellectual elites were treated as a national treasure. Then came Margaret Thatcher
The political right often acts in bad faith in its attacks on academia; in response, academics lapse into tendentious moralism
Pauline Kael was useless as a guide to movies. She was indispensable as an autobiographer of the Age of Cinema
Gooey, disgusting AI slop is everywhere these days, including the pages of The Wall Street Journal. Here comes the AI police
Americans are indifferent to art but obsess over art heists. "It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars
Rachel Cusk’s new novel was billed as “literary scandal of the year.” Strip away the controversy and it’s instantly forgettable
Babitz bubbles, Renata revivals, Hardwick hurricanes: How NYRB Classics built its name by resurrecting old and overlooked novelists
Broke and in search of a sinecure, Edgar Allan Poe went to Washington in 1843 to try to meet the president’s son. A fiasco ensued
Sumerian tablets, Soviet cybernetics, Google server banks — human history can be seen via our ever more elaborate data apparatuses