People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases?... more »
I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity
... more »“Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth
... more »Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »
Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »
Penelope Fitzgerald, long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more »
Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »
As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »
“A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute?... more »
Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »
In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »
When did it become embarrassing to like classical music? When it became thought of as an elite art... more »
A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »
Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »
Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more »
“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »
Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »
A homogeneous Harlem Renaissance? The period’s art depicts pool halls, jazz clubs, formal dinners, and social groups at odds with one another... more »
A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »
“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »
We read the classics but ignore much of what readers once enjoyed: forgeries, pseudotranslations, and other ephemera from the dustbin of literary history... more »
For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »
“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »
“The Recluse of Amherst.” Emily Dickinson’s life, it turns out, was full of baking, corresponding, and humor... more »
Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »
How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »
Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »
AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »
In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »
Is Glenn Loury’s new memoir a brave act of self-reckoning or a reckless act of self-sabotage?... more »
Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »
“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »
“That is right,” Joseph Priestley said when he completed editing the manuscript. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was dead... more »
A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »
“I will dedicate all my work to her, forever.” The novelist Carson McCullers had a habit of overdoing her romantic pronouncements... more »
Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »
Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »
George Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and 1984 a weirder novel, than we’ve appreciated... more »
“[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »
The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »
How do artists think? Where do they begin? How do they know when they’re done? Adam Moss looks for answers... more »
Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »
What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »
In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton audited a course given by Robert Lowell. They were forever changed as poets... more »
Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »
Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »
“It was easy for people to just remember and regurgitate ‘r > g.’” Thomas Piketty reflects on his best seller a decade after its publication... more »
Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »
Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »
John Barth, who believed the old conventions of literary expression were “used up,” is dead. He was 93... more »
Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »
What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »
Contemporary writing on liberalism consists of two types: autopsies and demonologies... more »
The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »
We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »
Long a widely shared ideal, “equality” is now seen as promoting a specious universalism. A new virtue has replaced it: “equity”... more »
Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »
Jamaicans are ready to embrace Tacky’s Revolt, an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island in 1760. For a pioneering historian, that’s complicated... more »
Classics in crisis. What the field needs is a sweeping history of Roman emperors and their influence beyond Europe... more »
"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »
People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases?... more »
Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books. What it reveals isn’t pretty... more »
Penelope Fitzgerald, long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more »
“A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute?... more »
When did it become embarrassing to like classical music? When it became thought of as an elite art... more »
Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more »
A homogeneous Harlem Renaissance? The period’s art depicts pool halls, jazz clubs, formal dinners, and social groups at odds with one another... more »
We read the classics but ignore much of what readers once enjoyed: forgeries, pseudotranslations, and other ephemera from the dustbin of literary history... more »
“The Recluse of Amherst.” Emily Dickinson’s life, it turns out, was full of baking, corresponding, and humor... more »
Making art in the streaming era: Wall Street cash buoyed the era of “prestige TV,” but then that money dried up... more »
Is Glenn Loury’s new memoir a brave act of self-reckoning or a reckless act of self-sabotage?... more »
“That is right,” Joseph Priestley said when he completed editing the manuscript. “I have now done.” Minutes later, he was dead... more »
“I will dedicate all my work to her, forever.” The novelist Carson McCullers had a habit of overdoing her romantic pronouncements... more »
George Orwell was an altogether weirder person, and 1984 a weirder novel, than we’ve appreciated... more »
How do artists think? Where do they begin? How do they know when they’re done? Adam Moss looks for answers... more »
In the winter of 1959, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton audited a course given by Robert Lowell. They were forever changed as poets... more »
“It was easy for people to just remember and regurgitate ‘r > g.’” Thomas Piketty reflects on his best seller a decade after its publication... more »
John Barth, who believed the old conventions of literary expression were “used up,” is dead. He was 93... more »
Contemporary writing on liberalism consists of two types: autopsies and demonologies... more »
Long a widely shared ideal, “equality” is now seen as promoting a specious universalism. A new virtue has replaced it: “equity”... more »
Jamaicans are ready to embrace Tacky’s Revolt, an uprising of enslaved Africans on the island in 1760. For a pioneering historian, that’s complicated... more »
H.P. Lovecraft, philosopher. His fiction blended materialism, determinism, and atheism into a new school of thought: “cosmic indifferentism”... more »
Daniel Kahneman, who marveled at “endlessly complicated” human psychology, is dead. He was 90... NYT... Daniel Engber... more »
Caravaggio’s final crimes: carrying a sword without a permit, smearing excrement on a house, smashing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter... more »
Joseph Epstein, with scores to settle, wrote a memoir. Why was he fired as editor of The American Scholar?... more »
The physical world is full of inefficiencies. Cue the “digital twin,” where they can be ironed out virtually then reflected back into reality... more »
Marilynne Robinson: “I consider the Bible to be the most complex document on the planet”... more »
Does “coming out of the closet” turn gay men into oppressors of the more marginalized? Queer theory seems to think so... more »
The publishing industry is notoriously sleepy. But here come the Silicon-Valley inflected CEOs spouting MBAisms... more »
Whither the “litblog”? Blogs were once at the center of the online cultural ecosystem. The appetite for such work has diminished... more »
Wicked baronets and disastrous marriages — the “sensation novels” of the 1860s updated Gothic elements for Victorian sensibilities... more »
In 2020, a star physicist claimed an incredible advance: a room temperature superconductor. Retractions followed... more »
Wonders emerge in the ocean’s deepest trenches: corals, crustaceans, a multitude of bizarre fish. Also: nuclear waste and tins of Spam... more »
What can a generation of deeply religious thinkers in a moment of disenchantment teach modern humanists? Everything... more »
Nietzsche’s misogyny. Yes, he railed against intelligent women, said Helene Stöcker, but anyone could see he meant it ironically... more »
For decades, rumors circulated about Charles Bukowski’s pro-Nazi letters. Now discovered, they reveal a surprise: Bukowski was joking... more »
In 1819, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a philologist and theologian, was jailed. His crime: teaching gymnastics and calisthenics... more »
Gabriel García Márquez wanted his final novel destroyed. Now, a decade after his death, it will be published... more »
Unesco has tasked itself with safeguarding “intangible cultural heritage.” Does Belgian horseback shrimp fishing need protection?... more »
When philosophers had sharp elbows, idiocy was mercilessly mocked. Now the field is kindler, gentler, and awash in silliness... more »
I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity
... more »Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »
Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »
Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »
A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »
“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »
A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »
For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »
Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »
AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »
Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »
A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »
Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »
“[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »
Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »
Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »
Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »
Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »
The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »
Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »
Classics in crisis. What the field needs is a sweeping history of Roman emperors and their influence beyond Europe... more »
Contemporary Stoicism is all aphorism and motivational cliche. It is toothless — practically to the point of meaninglessness... more »
By the 19th century, educated elites had little time for ghosts, demons, and other apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research, on the other hand... more »
For women among the New York Intellectuals, men wanted to sleep with you or write like you. Or both... more »
“Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Paradoxes sound absurd, but they can be logically sustained... more »
Jesus, and other magi. Early variants of Christianity championed Pontius Pilate, Apollonius, and a holy snake... more »
Cities have become frictionless, optimized sites of consumerism and productivity. In other words, they have lost their humanity... more »
In 1959, Sonny Rollins vanished. No performing and no recording for two years. Turns out he kept a diary... more »
Shakespeare’s “sisters.” Women writers in the Renaissance were constrained by disinheritance, marital disputes, legal troubles, and humiliation... more »
Lauren Oyler’s essays “contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality”... more »
The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »
Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »
Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »
If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »
“It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »
“There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »
Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »
Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »
Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »
“Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth
... more »“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »
As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »
In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »
Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »
Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »
“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »
“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »
How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »
In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »
“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »
Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »
The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »
What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »
Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »
Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »
What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »
We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »
“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »
"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »
Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... more »
As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »
Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »
Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »
“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »
The Monster of Ravenna, the Monk Calf, and, of course, the Pope Ass. Why were 16th-century luminaries printing pamphlets on monsters?... more »
“Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”... more »
Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. It took Min Jin Lee 28 years to write Pachinko. But slow writing has its virtues... more »
"The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape" ... more »
Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »
Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »
The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »
“Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »
Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »
Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »
We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »
Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »
Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »
Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »
Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »
The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »
Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »
“The people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies”... more »
What if writing history were less about archives and ideas and more about forensics and genomes?... more »
Do our lives consist of the stories we tell about our ourselves? Galen Strawson on a view that’s ascendant and plainly wrong... more »
The editor and memoirist Diana Athill’s philosophy was that fidelity is a faulty mechanism on which to base a relationship... more »
“The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food”... more »
Self-help is often glib, politically obtuse, and intellectually dishonest. Why, then, are philosophers writing it?... more »
The psychic entanglement of the generations, the tumult between old and the young: What we need Mary Gaitskill for... more »
New material is added to Arts & Letters Daily six days a week.
Our motto, "Veritas odit moras," is found at line 850 of Seneca's version of Oedipus. It means "Truth hates delay."
Founding Editor (1998-2010): Denis Dutton
Editor: Evan Goldstein
Managing Editor: Tran Huu Dung
Assistant Editor: David Wescott
Copy Editor: Mitch Gerber
© 1998 — 2024
Arts & Letters Daily is brought to you by
The Chronicle of Higher Education