Arts & Letters Daily (original) (raw)

Jan. 10, 2025

Articles of Note

Why did Alice Munro’s biographer keep quiet about the abuse endured by the short-story writer's daughter?... more »

New Books

To explain the workings of the imagination, brain science is necessary but insufficient. A great mystery remains... more »

Essays & Opinions

How good was Martin Amis? His verbal ambition was a crucial force in the revitalization of the novel in English... more »

Jan. 9, 2025

Articles of Note

The humanities refashioned themselves as society’s conscience. A new, conservative movement in literary studies recoils from that role... more »

New Books

Leibniz’s literary remains. An epistolary graphomaniac, he left behind 15,000 letters to some 1,300 people... more »

Essays & Opinions

In 1880, Matthew Arnold foresaw religion's being replaced by poetry. If literature did gain that lofty status, it has lost it. Why?... more »

Jan. 8, 2025

Articles of Note

In South America, capybaras run riot. In Italy, gray wolves interbreed with dogs. So in rushes the wildlife birth control industry... more »

New Books

Before the Brothers Grimm, death, poverty, disfigurement, and hunger had never been so charming... more »

Essays & Opinions

From roughly 1945 to 1990, America fostered a dazzling succession of artistic developments. Since then, says William Deresiewicz, we’ve been trudging in a circle... more »

Jan. 7, 2025

Articles of Note

Is there a radical feminist undercurrent to embroidery and crochet? Or is such crafting merely “she-power frippery”?... more »

New Books

How two lovably eccentric dilettantes rescued Nietzsche's reputation and recast him as a prescient postmodern thinker... more »

Essays & Opinions

Should the 20th-century canon exclude Updike, Baldwin, and Roth in favor of Alfred Kubin, Machado de Assis, and Natsume Soseki?... more »

Jan. 6, 2025

Articles of Note

American men have stopped reading fiction — or so suggests an array of think pieces. But is it true?... more »

New Books

The problem with Christian rock: The music’s stale conformity was the inverse of the ecstatic freedom its lyrics promised... more »

Essays & Opinions

Since the '60s, Marxism has flourished on American campuses. So where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship?... more »

Jan. 3, 2025

Articles of Note

Consider a new volume of Freud’s works, an ethnography of homeless Angelenos, and 10 of the other best scholarly books of 2024... more »

New Books

The extinction obsession. We’ve always indulged fantasies about the end of the world. What’s changed is the mechanism of our destruction... more »

Essays & Opinions

The poetry of stones. In times of stress, Oliver Sacks turned to the physical world, “where there is no life, but also no death”... more »

Jan. 2, 2025

Articles of Note

Obsession with historical authenticity prevails at sites like Colonial Williamsburg — but such re-creations take us only so far... more »

New Books

What’s the point of psychoanalysis? According to Freud, it's to turn “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”... more »

Essays & Opinions

The preposterous productivity of Barry Malzberg. Could you write a publishable 60,000 word novel in 27 hours?... more »

Jan. 1, 2025

Articles of Note

Apoptosis, necroptosis, entosis, NETosis: Cells die in at least 20 different ways, some silent and some showy ... more »

New Books

“Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism”... more »

Essays & Opinions

Are operas more relatable if we regard them not primarily as works of art but as work by artists?... more »

Dec. 31, 2024

Articles of Note

Intellectuals seeking God? “A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything ... are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more”... more »

New Books

How was early Christianity unified? As Augustine put it, “Better a few Donatists burn in their own flames … than their vast majority perish in the flames of hell”... more »

Essays & Opinions

Daniel Defoe’s travelogue on Britain is unsurpassed, despite its fabrications, carelessness, and overuse of superlatives... more »

Dec. 30, 2024

Articles of Note

English is the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Is the world being linguistically brainwashed? Not likely... more »

New Books

Many scholars write histories of the working class without grasping the actual experience of work. David Montgomery was an exception... more »

Essays & Opinions

God doesn’t like Marxists — or so concludes Jordan Peterson in a 500-page book ostensibly about the Old Testament... more »

Dec. 27, 2024

Articles of Note

How does your “self-continuity” stack up? The concept measures the extent to which your past, present, and future selves align... more »

New Books

A new account of the Vietnam War gets it all wrong: “In this search-for-villains approach to history, it is always the Americans who matter most”... more »

Essays & Opinions

“The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty”... more »

Dec. 26, 2024

Articles of Note

What explains the public’s pathetic knowledge of history? Start with bogus cliches and salacious, error-filled bestsellers... more »

New Books

How Tariq Ali, a street-fighting, mustachioed Marxist, became a Trotskyist Zelig, never indulging a second thought... more »

Essays & Opinions

“I used to think of the swelling piles of books in every room as literary stalagmites, but now that they’ve merged, they’re more like a great coral reef of literature”... more »

Dec. 25, 2024

Articles of Note

Stanley Kubrick and the price of perfectionism. He preoccupied himself with every detail, big and small. It came at a cost... more »

New Books

For Thomas Hardy, the death of his first wife prompted him to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life... more »

Essays & Opinions

Does real moral progress begin when we give up on moralism? We’re just not built that way... more »

Dec. 24, 2024

Articles of Note

Who killed literary fiction? It's the big publishing houses, which used to compete for talent but have become sedate, predictable... more »

New Books

Millennials' divorce books are less concerned with social tragedy or triumph. Tthe possibilities they explore instead are thrilling... more »

Essays & Opinions

The case for Trollope. He should be read because he is not of our time. His charitable attitude is anachronistic – and necessary... more »

Dec. 23, 2024

Articles of Note

Sailor, singer, atheist, philosopher, aficionado of ribald limericks: Daniel Dennett contained multitudes. But why was his work important?... more »

New Books

By the time Handel presented Messiah, he was being ridiculed as a fat, stale has-been. Only one of those things was true... more »

Essays & Opinions

DH Lawrence vs. Orwell. “Dreaming up laws of the cosmos from under your scrotum is one thing; cheating on your wife is another”... more »

Dec. 20, 2024

Articles of Note

Does progress in the arts and sciences purify our moral or corrupt them? That question reduced Rousseau to tears... more »

New Books

Saints for supper. In the Middle Ages, consuming holy icons was thought to cure a range of intestinal ailments... more »

Essays & Opinions

When a letter is not just a letter. It’s a confession, a moral credo, a play, a plot, an existential quarrel. Cynthia Ozick explains... more »

Dec. 19, 2024

Articles of Note

"You can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity," says Judith Butler. "If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties" ... more »

New Books

"Every era reinvents the biography form to suit its purposes," writes Laura Kipnis. "Call it the post-truth biography"... more »

Essays & Opinions

For Fredric Jameson, theory, in its turning away from common sense, offered a trip through the looking glass... more »

Dec. 18, 2024

Articles of Note

The Zabihollah Mansouri riddle. Was one of the most popular literary figures of 20th-century Iran an utter charlatan?... more »

New Books

Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”... more »

Essays & Opinions

In 1919, Charles Hoy Fort, the “enfant terrible of science,” wrote Book of the Damned: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”... more »

Dec. 17, 2024

Articles of Note

“Picture a desert with old servers rusting into the sand beneath the sun like the state of Ozymandias.” Ryan Ruby on language, poetry, and civilizational collapse... more »

New Books

Piet Mondrian failed as a prophet. Today he's regarded as something more significant: an influencer... more »

Essays & Opinions

A weekend at the ventriloquist convention holds flirtation, aggression, corny jokes, and above all, faith in the art form... more »

Dec. 16, 2024

Articles of Note

Harold Bloom claimed to be able to read 1,000 pages an hour. At that pace, it would still take 280 years to get through GPT-4’s training data... more »

New Books

Dicey, piece of cake, scrounge, and bonkers are all NOOB's — "not one-off Britishisms." Why have such words conquered America?... more »

Essays & Opinions

Literary criticism has become almost entirely cultural criticism. Was this shift an inevitable product of the academy?... more »

Dec. 13, 2024

Articles of Note

Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »

New Books

The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »

Essays & Opinions

Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »


Subscribe to our Newsletter

Articles of Note

Why did Alice Munro’s biographer keep quiet about the abuse endured by the short-story writer's daughter?... more »


The humanities refashioned themselves as society’s conscience. A new, conservative movement in literary studies recoils from that role... more »


In South America, capybaras run riot. In Italy, gray wolves interbreed with dogs. So in rushes the wildlife birth control industry... more »


Is there a radical feminist undercurrent to embroidery and crochet? Or is such crafting merely “she-power frippery”?... more »


American men have stopped reading fiction — or so suggests an array of think pieces. But is it true?... more »


Consider a new volume of Freud’s works, an ethnography of homeless Angelenos, and 10 of the other best scholarly books of 2024... more »


Obsession with historical authenticity prevails at sites like Colonial Williamsburg — but such re-creations take us only so far... more »


Apoptosis, necroptosis, entosis, NETosis: Cells die in at least 20 different ways, some silent and some showy ... more »


Intellectuals seeking God? “A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything ... are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more”... more »


English is the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Is the world being linguistically brainwashed? Not likely... more »


How does your “self-continuity” stack up? The concept measures the extent to which your past, present, and future selves align... more »


What explains the public’s pathetic knowledge of history? Start with bogus cliches and salacious, error-filled bestsellers... more »


Stanley Kubrick and the price of perfectionism. He preoccupied himself with every detail, big and small. It came at a cost... more »


Who killed literary fiction? It's the big publishing houses, which used to compete for talent but have become sedate, predictable... more »


Sailor, singer, atheist, philosopher, aficionado of ribald limericks: Daniel Dennett contained multitudes. But why was his work important?... more »


Does progress in the arts and sciences purify our moral or corrupt them? That question reduced Rousseau to tears... more »


"You can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity," says Judith Butler. "If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties" ... more »


The Zabihollah Mansouri riddle. Was one of the most popular literary figures of 20th-century Iran an utter charlatan?... more »


“Picture a desert with old servers rusting into the sand beneath the sun like the state of Ozymandias.” Ryan Ruby on language, poetry, and civilizational collapse... more »


Harold Bloom claimed to be able to read 1,000 pages an hour. At that pace, it would still take 280 years to get through GPT-4’s training data... more »


Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »


Kafka's dark humor is apparent in his weirdest, longest, and most underappreciated short story ... more »


Beatrix Potter wasn’t just a children’s book writer — she was a framer, sheep breeder, and conservationist... more »


100 pages a day. No exceptions. That’s how much Matthew Walther reads. You're skeptical?... more »


Why read novels? To recognize our preoccupations and escape from them; to be intellectually engaged and emotionally devastated... more »


Roger Scruton became a conservative in Paris, but refined his thinking in the “bohemian blur” of 1970s Britain... more »


Whose Aristotle? Ideologues of all varieties claim him as their own, distorting and even falsifying his views... more »


The Simone Weil resurgence seeks to makes her “relatable” — by stripping away her eccentricity and religiosity... more »


“I’d go to see Las Meninas and it was very eerie to be there alone”: John Banville on the spookiness of the Prado after hours... more »


She rubbed shoulders with celebrities and art-world royalty. Her paintings sold for $200,000. Then, in a flash, Jamian Juliano-Villani was brought low... more »


Derek Parfit was odd. Very odd. Were they charming eccentricities? Psychological limitations? Or something more alarming?... more »


At the first Thanksgiving, turkey was very likely overshadowed by goose, duck, or even swan and passenger pigeon... more »


Nietzsche first landed in American bookstores in the 1890s. He’s maintained a unique hold on the American mind ever since ... more »


“An increasingly competitive spiritual marketplace.” Modernization spawned Mormonism, Caodaism, Rastafari, and other new alternative faiths... more »


To hone his prose style, Haruki Murakami wrote his first novel in Japanese, rewrote it in English, then translated it back to Japanese ... more »


Noel Parmentel Jr., “a man who attracted women by insulting them,” was Joan Didion’s first great love... more »


Jordan Peterson has wrestled with God and himself to confront the specter of nihilism, falling into the same pitfalls as Nietzsche ... more »


A drilling project at the moon's south pole has academics and activists wondering: Does outer space need environmentalism?... more »


For 10 years, academics have fruitlessly bent their expertise toward the goals of left-wing political activism... more »


The marketing of olive oil suggests artisanal traditions from the Mediterranean. The flavor is actually produced by heavy machinery... more »


New Books

To explain the workings of the imagination, brain science is necessary but insufficient. A great mystery remains... more »


Leibniz’s literary remains. An epistolary graphomaniac, he left behind 15,000 letters to some 1,300 people... more »


Before the Brothers Grimm, death, poverty, disfigurement, and hunger had never been so charming... more »


How two lovably eccentric dilettantes rescued Nietzsche's reputation and recast him as a prescient postmodern thinker... more »


The problem with Christian rock: The music’s stale conformity was the inverse of the ecstatic freedom its lyrics promised... more »


The extinction obsession. We’ve always indulged fantasies about the end of the world. What’s changed is the mechanism of our destruction... more »


What’s the point of psychoanalysis? According to Freud, it's to turn “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”... more »


“Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism”... more »


How was early Christianity unified? As Augustine put it, “Better a few Donatists burn in their own flames … than their vast majority perish in the flames of hell”... more »


Many scholars write histories of the working class without grasping the actual experience of work. David Montgomery was an exception... more »


A new account of the Vietnam War gets it all wrong: “In this search-for-villains approach to history, it is always the Americans who matter most”... more »


How Tariq Ali, a street-fighting, mustachioed Marxist, became a Trotskyist Zelig, never indulging a second thought... more »


For Thomas Hardy, the death of his first wife prompted him to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life... more »


Millennials' divorce books are less concerned with social tragedy or triumph. Tthe possibilities they explore instead are thrilling... more »


By the time Handel presented Messiah, he was being ridiculed as a fat, stale has-been. Only one of those things was true... more »


Saints for supper. In the Middle Ages, consuming holy icons was thought to cure a range of intestinal ailments... more »


"Every era reinvents the biography form to suit its purposes," writes Laura Kipnis. "Call it the post-truth biography"... more »


Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”... more »


Piet Mondrian failed as a prophet. Today he's regarded as something more significant: an influencer... more »


Dicey, piece of cake, scrounge, and bonkers are all NOOB's — "not one-off Britishisms." Why have such words conquered America?... more »


The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »


Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »


In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »


“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »


Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »


“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »


Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »


What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »


Jackson Lears is among the most original historians of our time. He chronicles cranks and conjurers... more »


Perry Anderson, pillar of Britain's Marxist left, tackles a thorny question: What really caused World War I?... more »


Many atrocities have been committed in the name of communism. But communism is not an atrocity. It is a tragedy... more »


Nostalgia, greed, and streaming have taken hold of the music industry. Do we even want new music anymore?... more »


The power of ignorance. “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Mark Lilla explains... more »


Walter Benjamin in Capri. An extended holiday helped shape one of the most influential diagnoses of modernity... more »


Nostalgia began not as an emotion but as a disease. Now it afflicts us all, with great political consequence... more »


Richard Dawkins has long been the doyen of grandiloquent science writing. His new book feels like the end of an era... more »


America’s “Bone Wars”: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns... more »


In the absurd guise of Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire took devastating aim at his real foil: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz... more »


Milton, dismembered. In 1790 his coffin was pillaged. Several thousand people bought what they believed to be one of his teeth... more »


Essays & Opinions

How good was Martin Amis? His verbal ambition was a crucial force in the revitalization of the novel in English... more »


In 1880, Matthew Arnold foresaw religion's being replaced by poetry. If literature did gain that lofty status, it has lost it. Why?... more »


From roughly 1945 to 1990, America fostered a dazzling succession of artistic developments. Since then, says William Deresiewicz, we’ve been trudging in a circle... more »


Should the 20th-century canon exclude Updike, Baldwin, and Roth in favor of Alfred Kubin, Machado de Assis, and Natsume Soseki?... more »


Since the '60s, Marxism has flourished on American campuses. So where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship?... more »


The poetry of stones. In times of stress, Oliver Sacks turned to the physical world, “where there is no life, but also no death”... more »


The preposterous productivity of Barry Malzberg. Could you write a publishable 60,000 word novel in 27 hours?... more »


Are operas more relatable if we regard them not primarily as works of art but as work by artists?... more »


Daniel Defoe’s travelogue on Britain is unsurpassed, despite its fabrications, carelessness, and overuse of superlatives... more »


God doesn’t like Marxists — or so concludes Jordan Peterson in a 500-page book ostensibly about the Old Testament... more »


“The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty”... more »


“I used to think of the swelling piles of books in every room as literary stalagmites, but now that they’ve merged, they’re more like a great coral reef of literature”... more »


Does real moral progress begin when we give up on moralism? We’re just not built that way... more »


The case for Trollope. He should be read because he is not of our time. His charitable attitude is anachronistic – and necessary... more »


DH Lawrence vs. Orwell. “Dreaming up laws of the cosmos from under your scrotum is one thing; cheating on your wife is another”... more »


When a letter is not just a letter. It’s a confession, a moral credo, a play, a plot, an existential quarrel. Cynthia Ozick explains... more »


For Fredric Jameson, theory, in its turning away from common sense, offered a trip through the looking glass... more »


In 1919, Charles Hoy Fort, the “enfant terrible of science,” wrote Book of the Damned: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”... more »


A weekend at the ventriloquist convention holds flirtation, aggression, corny jokes, and above all, faith in the art form... more »


Literary criticism has become almost entirely cultural criticism. Was this shift an inevitable product of the academy?... more »


Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »


Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »


The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »


We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »


Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »


When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »


AI and democracy. Had early technologists paid attention to John Dewey, we’d be in a much better place. Evgeny Morozov explains... more »


Literature professors gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to traditionalists and provocateurs... more »


“In search of solid ground, any number of artists have opted to return to first principles: technique, color, and, above all else, visual pleasure”... more »


Thirty years ago, Sven Birkerts derided digital reading. He was dismissed as a curmudgeonly Luddite, but he was right... more »


An array of contradictory modern movements claims the mantle of decolonization, seeking moral authority from the now-distant 20th century ... more »


Appreciationgiving” doesn’t have the same ring to it but might be a more philosophically accurate approach to the holiday... more »


Whether cancel culture is a moral panic or a genuine scourge, are the words and deeds of American colleges students really so consequential?... more »


In place of the the monastic cell of the Middle Ages, Renaissance-era scholars had the studiolo — a place to converse with the dead... more »


The Duolingo delusion: It’s fun — but absurd — to think that five minutes of language-learning a day will make us fluent... more »


Barre, Pilates, the Alexander technique: Is our quest for straighter spines a moral panic or a legitimate concern over back pain?... more »


The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas, yes, but also a fairy-tale of illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy... more »


Art is about selection and omission. Melville goes on and on about whales; another writer would sum it up with “etcetera”... more »


“When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?”... more »


Democracy dies in darkness? Journalists’ aspiration to save democracy is counterproductive, argues Yascha Mounk... more »


Modern museums are designed to focus attention. But now our attention is fractured, and our art is changing... more »


The hard problem of dark comedy. “When I laugh with Céline, is my open mouth a gate to the Holocaust?” Michael Clune explains... more »


We live in the age of the internet novel, with its dispassionate, deadening style and lack of formal innovation... more »


To calm the identity wars, don’t underestimate the power of thinking in the third person. Kwame Anthony Appiah explains... more »


Margaret Fuller had “a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory”... more »


At the age of 10, Henri Bergson was left alone in Paris — amid violence, destruction, and the fall of the Second French Empire... more »


A family of fascists. The Mitfords were downwardly mobile aristocrats living in great ignorance and fear... more »


How did the world’s most famous swear word earn its status? Early evidence points to the role of a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele... more »


The Emily Oster riddle: Would you rather take pregnancy advice from a pediatric epidemiologist or an economist?... more »


In 1939, W.H. Auden left England. He rarely returned, but his self-conception as a poet remained bound up in his Englishness... more »


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