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Articles of NoteWhile impoverished Rwandans bear the costs of conservation and saving the gorillas, the national tourism industry reaps millions... more» Mone was bored, so she pulled out her old diaries to write a novel about her life. She curled up in bed and began typing on her mobile phone... more» Simply vilifying the rich, with strikes and class violence, have lost their lustre for Venezuelans. After Hugo Chávez, maybe real democracy... more» The Stilwell Road: more than a thousand U.S. troops died building the road in Burma. For some in China and India today, this neglected route is a lifeline... more» From early on, Samuel Huntington drew vociferous critics, but that is the mark of a scholar with an important message, says Francis Fukuyama... more» Pro-Stalinist books – journalism, fiction, pseudo-history – are found all over the bookstalls of Russia today. Even school history texts... more» Asked where he’d be willing to go to teach philosophy, the young job seeker replied, “Anywhere on the planet, paid or not”... more» Samuel P. Huntington, versatile scholar whose idea of a “clash of civilizations” was vastly influential, is dead at 81... Forbes ... WSJ ... Wash Post ... London Times ... Harvard Did the universe exist before it existed, bouncing back even then from a previous collapse and bounce? Ad infinitum... more» Changes in China that began with Deng Xiaoping were matters of subterfuge as much as new ideas, says Gordon Chang... part 1 ... part 2 ... part 3 ... part 4 Burger King perfume. That conquest may be yours, if only you can make yourself smell like a Whopper hot off the grill... more» Baffled Americans hoping to understand that very European hero, Tintin, should look at him through the prism of post-war France... more» Pay close attention to those Greek riots, says Robert Kaplan. At a time of economic upheaval, they may presage problems elsewhere in the world in 2009... more» Harold Pinter, playwright who could find the ominous in the everyday, is dead at the age of 78... NYT ... Telegraph ... London Times ... Guardian ... Independent ... Wash Post ... London Times ... Guardian ... a negative view. Your ad on Arts & Letters Daily puts you in contact with writers, editors, and opinion makers around the globe. Our traffic stats are impressive... more info Pope Benedict is not infallible, but he’s not omnifallible either. Save the rain forests, he urges. Okay, but save mankind from homosexuality?... more» ... more» In his campaign, Obama declared the U.S. must “lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good.” The Neocons are not dead yet... more» Time for old feminists like Germaine Greer to “step aside,” she says. “It’s like, we’re grateful for what you did, but it’s time for you to hand over”... more» Gilbert Kaplan only conducts Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. Is he a charlatan? Yes, say some New York Philharmonic members... more» ... But not everyone agrees. The economic downturn has been hard for many people, but hard for economists in a special way. There are the smart guys who were supposed to know... more» Conor Cruise O’Brien, Irish politician, diplomat, and man of letters, is dead at the age of 91... Irish Times ... Jewcy ... Open Democracy ... Guardian ... London Times ... NYT ... Open Democracy ... Wash Post Carl Orff, creator of the dramatic cantata Carmina Burana, hid an ugly secret about his betrayal of a friend under the Third Reich... more» “I have great admiration for the American people,” says Chinese banker Gao Xiqing. “But you need someone to tell you the truth”... more» Stalin, violent? Yes, but extreme measures were needed to modernize an agrarian economy. That’s what Russian school kids are taught today... more» John Milton was a champion of liberty, to be sure. But in his language and outlook, he was not a modern “secular liberal”... more» Christian thinkers in the past tried to gain converts by using the categories of Taoism, the Buddha, and Confucius. This time may yet come again... more» In the North Korean prison where Shin Dong-hyuk was born and where he watched his mother hanged, inmates never saw a picture of Kim Jong Il... more» The Max Planck Institute journal is a very sober publication. So why did it run an ad for a hot Chinese strip joint on its front cover?... more» Religious couples have more children. So does belief increase fertility, or does having a big family actually cause people to be more religious?... more» Academic performance of kids in U.S. schools would be enhanced by getting rid of the worst 10% of teachers. How do you know who they are?... more» Chinese art and us: we shipped our vanguard dreams abroad and have brought home a cheaper imitation art, one with the fatal taint of melamine... more» Like a Romper Room for adults or Oprah with a whip, Judge Judy savages litigants for wasting her time. What else would she like to do for $38 million a year?... more» The deployment of Hazara policemen in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan has in the short run worked well for NATO, as it did for the British long ago... more» “What we’ve done in higher education,” said an administrator, “is let our dreams and aspirations dictate our cost structure.” For colleges, the dream is over... more» The bubble in contemporary art is about to pop. It shows all the classic features of the South Sea bubble of 1720 or the tulip madness of the 1630s... more» Baby boomers played by the rules, bought property, diversified. They now look toward less than golden retirement years... more» Naomi Klein never tempers her arguments to make converts from the center. The left does not need the mainstream center, she thinks... more» Is Lehman Bros. CEO Dick Fuld the true villain in the Wall Street collapse, or is he just the scapegoat for the sins of everyone else?... more» Stories are central to how we think about the world: from the individual to the wide sweep of history. To think yourself into the mind of another... more» Marion Cook, “greatest Negro violinist.” Maybe: yet both too far and in ways too close to our times, Cook’s music is not what we want in our iPods... more» What do girls want? A new series of vampire novels throws light onto the complexities of female adolescent desire. Caitlin Flanagan explains... more» British men and women are now the most sexually promiscuous people in any big western industrial nation, a new study shows... more» Jørn Utzon, visionary architect of one of the greatest buildings of the 20th century, the Sydney Opera House, is dead at the age of 90... Sydney Morning Herald ... Telegraph ... Art Daily ... NYT ... Australian ... London Times ... LAT Maybe it’s that mix of warm water and naked flesh. From the baths of Pompeii to Swiss spas, there’s something dirty about getting clean... more» Yiddish, a language once spoken by more than 10 million Jews, had a profound effect on American culture in the first half of the 20th century... more» When it comes to finding patterns of meaning in meaningless noise, human beings are incorrigible. Michael Shermer explains... more» Broccoli trees against a craggy backdrop of sourdough mountains, a lonely boat tossed on a red cabbage sea. Carl Warner’s edible fantasies... more» Manhattan is the capital of people who live alone. Yet are New Yorkers lonelier? Far from it: studies show urban alienation is largely a myth... more» We are immensely fortunate to have a critic of James Wood’s talent, erudition, and judgment. But if criticism follows his lead, it will end up in a desert... more» In web searches, scholars tend to follow one hyperlink to the next, in a journey that resembles a plunge down a rabbit hole. Is this any way to do research?... more» The history of the bagel is not just a history of Jews in America – it is a history of America itself. How else to explain a bagel with Swiss cheese and ham?... more» “Pick me as a mate,” says the peacock. “I must be a fit guy, since I carry this wild, colorful tail around with me and still survive”... more» George W. Bush’s nostrils always ran ahead of his mind, twitching like a bull in a rodeo or a frisking wild horse, hinting at danger to come... more» In meritocracy – or so it seemed fifty years ago – we would look up to the best of us. It turns out now, however, that we look up to celebrities. A big difference... more» John Milton, boring? Paradise Lost has a little bit of something for everybody. Hot sex! Hellfire! Some damned good poetry, too... more» Who’d want to make a movie that looked like a Thomas Kinkade painting? Thomas Kinkade, obviously. But who could possibly sit through it?... more» “I’ve seen too many peoples dismissed as not ready for self-government,” says Condoleezza Rice. Latin Americans, Asians, Africans – even black Americans... more» At a time when Chinese financial power is so strong, the U.S. government is – alas! – in no mood to hear about the murder of Falun Gong members... more» Distorting art market perceptions. The auction houses use one price for their presale estimates then inflate the actual sale results with their own premium... more» Greenland has rich deposits of oil, zinc, and diamonds. But will independence from Denmark do anything about its suicide rate?... more» The N-word is flourishing among young hip-hop Latinos. Should we care? Raquel Cepeda asks the question... more» An early rival to win the prize for a way to find longitude at sea was a chap from Yorkshire named Jeremy Thacker. Now it seems both he and his ideas were a hoax... more» Eat local? Cold storage for that local fruit may produce more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples to your market... more» Malcolm Gladwell, one critic fears, “has come to his own tipping point, or – to be fuddy-duddy – fork in the road. This way, guru. That way, serious writer”... more» Pairing writer with subject is an art, says NYRB editor Robert Silvers. Like the late Barbara Epstein, he feels an “intense admiration for wonderful writers”... more» A spur-of-the-moment decision to buy a wolf cub changed Mark Rowlands’s life. From that moment, human company never quite matched up... more» Avoiding clichés isn’t rocket science. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of just being your own fairly unique self. And not saying things you shouldn’t of... more» John Leonard, critic with a vast range and a wondrous way with metaphors, is dead at the age of 69... AP ... Chronicle Review ... NY Observer ... Wash Post ... Kansas City Star ... NYT ... Slate ... Boston Globe Michael Crichton, who delighted lovers of his fiction and enraged environmentalists, is dead at the age of 66... NYT ... AP ... Reason ... Wash Post ... James Fallows ... LAT ... NY Observer ... London Times ... NYT ... Bloomberg ... USAToday ... Wired ... Info Week ... Weekly Standard ... Crichton on Green religion “Poverty and disadvantage are a better preparation for success than wealth and capitalizing on advantage.” Malcolm Gladwell wonders... more» No matter the money or effort you lavish on your body, regardless of pampering or cholesterol monitoring, it has no future. Your genes know this... more» The human moral sense is neither the one nor the other: it is, Jonathan Haidt can show, both biologically evolved and culturally sensitive... more» “I want to make damn sure there’s a tape recorder running for my last words.” No fake deathbed conversions for Richard Dawkins... more» Studs Terkel, “guerilla journalist” who turned the voices of ordinary Americans into a font of history, is dead at the age of 96... Chic Tribune ... Sun-Times ... LAT ... NYT ... Edward Rothstein A cache of the earliest ever classical music recordings, made in Russia by music lover Julius Block in the 1890s, have now come to light... more» Love and hate: the same brain circuitry is used in both extreme emotions – except that hate retains at least a semblance of rationality... more» Martin Luther sparked the Reformation in Wittenberg 500 years ago. While the city still uses Luther to attract tourists, only 10% of its people are Protestant... more» Do tales of witchcraft and wizardry, Harry Potter novels, for instance, have a negative effect on children? Richard Dawkins wants to know... more» At last, for a mere $100,000, you can clone your dog or cat, and own it – or a genetic Xerox of it – for the rest of your life... more» Ever since he could speak, Brandon, now 8, has insisted that he was meant to be a girl. So his parents decided to go with his wishes. An easy case? Not exactly... more» Pollsters take a lot of abuse, but polls are valid guides to the citizenry: not just in politics, but in life circumstances, priorities, hopes and fears... more» From Amazon.com directly to into your hippocampus. You won’t have to read War and Peace, you’ll just download it into your brain. Something like that... more» Catholic culture wars. As T.S. Eliot well knew, tradition can’t be blindly inherited, but has to be recovered for every age, at the cost of great labor... more» Over 900 died in the most infamous mass suicide in American history. Letters now throw light on one Los Angeles family’s Jonestown story... more» Odd entries hang their wikiexistence on “scholarly” notes to Dr. Who and Star Trek – TV shows Wikipedia folk dignify as the “canon”... more» Darwin might not have loved botox, but he would have understood why women in particular are keen to smoothe those wrinkles... more» Many scholars think media manipulate the masses, turning ordinary people into emotional mobs. They never see themselves in the mob... more» Well, Excuuuuuse Meee! Most murders begin with a trivial insult. Then there are political campaigns. Emily Yoffe explains... more» Trust and responsibility. With their mass readership drifting away, newspapers must focus on the “leadership audience”... more» Life without my noisy boy. “You can’t tell just by looking at us. There isn’t even a name for parents who have lost children”... more» Glenn Loury’s mother first explained to him how someone could be “black,” though they looked “white.” Race identity involved personal choice... more» Beneath the picturesque German landscape lie thousands of unexploded bombs, each more and more unstable with every passing day... more» The Dickinson sisters’ neighbor was quite shocked: “I went in there one day, and in the drawing room I found Emily reclining in the arms of a man”... more» Gordon Gekko no more lived on Wall Street than you live on Main Street. To work through the current mess, we need precise names and precise addresses too... more» Prodigies like Picasso may start with a clear idea of what they want and then execute it. Late bloomers like Cézanne grow into their art as into life... more» David Levine, whose brilliant caricatures have charmed readers of the New York Review of Books for 44 years, is going blind... more» Is the electorate stupid? No, just human, and thus predictably irrational. Of course, that in itself may be bad enough... more» Biodiversity. Life is more varied in the warm climes near the equator. Making sense of that has confounded biologists for 200 years... more» Does religion make people nicer? Only if they think Big Brother in the Sky is watching. Ronald Bailey explains... more» French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has won the Nobel Prize for Literature... more» ... more» ... more» If the Nobel Committee lived in an alternative universe... more» “This is the most important election in American history.” Yeah, they say that for every election that comes along... more» Bernard-Henri Lévy and his friend Michel Houellebecq have had enough: “France has vomited on us for too long”... more» In 1947, a Bedouin herder tossed a stone in a cave on the Dead Sea, and heard the shattering of pottery. This led him to some dark parchment fragments... more» The 9/11 Truthers have found some new friends, as the Russian government warms to their psychotic conspiracy fantasies... more» “Classical music audiences are going gray and will soon die.” Yeah, sure. And when was it not so?... more» ... more» What has long been known to all who pay attention is now official: the Nobel lit prize committee doesn’t have a clue... more» ... more» ... more» The idea of a pristine Amazon jungle, untouched by humans, is a myth, a creation of the Western imagination... more» Why does loneliness feel cold and sin feel dirty? Our inner emotional states touch deep metaphors that stretch across cultures... more» Yes, men are hopeless on dates, and tend to say the most idiotic things. On the other hand, women can be stupid too. Why not try a little humor?... more» We’ve been around for two million years, says Stephen Hawking. To last another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before... more» Nietzsche knew best. Morality comes not from society, not from pure reason. It is innate. To know it, we need experimental philosophy... more» Iliad and Odyssey: Homer’s tales of pride and rage, massacre and homecoming, have insinutated themselves in our minds and culture... more» It’s the office China’s writers and artists dread and hate most: the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. Ha Jin explains... more» When you were a kid, were automobile headlights eyes for you? Was that chrome grill a set of teeth? You were not alone... more» Where do old clothes end up? They may not be worth much at the Salvation Army, but they are big business in Haiti... more» A scorched-earth policy toward museums and monuments of historic and artistic value is the Russian way in the attack on Georgia... more» Rupert Murdoch is utterly without charm. He does not do introspection. He’s right there before you: what you see is what you get... more» Do you hate those wretched, sweet floral perfumes? Try a dab of “Wet pavement” or “In the library” behind the ear... more» Philosophy is not for everyone, says Kelly Jolley. “It’s aristocratic in the sense that any selection based on talent is aristocratic”... more» Group cohesion may be one reason for the global reach of story telling. Another is that fiction is a proving ground for vital social skills... more» Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, with its statistics, anecdotes, and horror stories, still makes a compelling case... more» If there’s anyone unaffected by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it’s the Lehman family. They’ve moved on... more» ... more» Piano recitals in the 19th century often resembled The Ed Sullivan Show more than the serious, hushed concerts of today... more» Democracy on the wane? In country after country, democratic reforms are in retreat. Blame the middle class... more» The book business as we know it will not live happily ever after. Even this era of decline may one day look like the last great golden age... more» Creationism should be taught in science classes as a legitimate point of view, says the Royal Society of Great Britain... more» ... update ... Reiss resigns The more women and men have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their Mars and Venus personalities seem to diverge... more» First move for a con man: tell your victim a story that reveals your similar anxieties, and forge a “mutual understanding”... more» David Foster Wallace, writer of dark, manic irony, has committed suicide... NYT ... NYT appraisal ... WP ... LAT From Casanova’s first orgasm to Bob Hope’s last jokes, history is a series of landmarks, both inspiring and absurd... more» A Tiger’s Tale. In Texas, where you can own a pet tiger, the booming exotic animal trade has grim consequences... more» There’s a 1/1000 chance that you, your family, and the whole human race will die. So where’s the precautionary principle when you really need it?... more» Ben Franklin liked to present himself as a small-town boy bewildered in the big city. This urbane, highly intelligent man was anything but... more» South Bend, Indiana is an unlikely place for a thriving Russian community with a high percentage of piano virtuosos, but history has strange twists... more» Jimmy Slyde was not just a tap dancer: his slides were an expressive idiom for him to tease the beat, to delay and then catch up... more» ... video Beyond boozy comradeship felt toward strangers in bars, and a few moments of euphoria, what’s to be said for being a sports fan?... more» They don’t read Paul Theroux in English departments. “I’m too rude about people,” he says. We do live in a sensitive age... more» Behavioral economics is not just a gizmo added to traditional economics; it is a big departure that will deliver a new way of seeing the world... more» After a full day at the office, Franz Kafka had dinner and got to writing about 11:00 PM. And what if he’d had more time?... more» Why are kids so unimaginative? Yes, that was the question Teresa Belton asked. For an answer look at TV and daydreaming... more» Otto Preminger, hearing a group of fellow émigrés speaking Hungarian, said, “Don’t you people know you’re in Hollywood? Speak German.” He had a point... more» Ossetian hero: Victor Kaloyev murdered the air controller he felt had killed his wife and children. Now out of prison, he finds new fields for revenge... more» International terrorism, for now, is but a puny apocalypse. But at any moment, with the right weapon, it could go from nothing to everything... more» In the 1949 Revolution, a few Americans went to China to help build the Maoist dream. Sixty years later, one of them is still there... more» Is there a performance drug that could actually increase the fairness of sports contests? Yes, there is. Carl Elliott on beta blockers... more» The Cuban judge sat with his feet up on the desk reading a comic book. The sentence for opposing the Revolution: thirty years... more» The mini-cow is the solution to rising food prices. No taller than a German shepherd, it gives 16 pints of milk a day. Plus, it mows the lawn... more» Hans Monderman loved cars. But he wondered if mature automobile societies could, in essence, act like adults. He was the Traffic Guru... more» Save the Males: feminism today has neutered men and deprived them of their noble, protective role in society, says Kathleen Parker... more» “She’s imaginative, clever, educated,” says Karl Lagerfeld, who has used Carla Bruni as a model. “She knows how to behave”... more» Human brains evolved to be belief engines: we want to explain everything, including our deepest mystical experiences... more» |
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New BooksWhen Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, many Britons thought it was the beginning of the end of their empire. Still, it took a while... more» Life’s modest pleasures: walking, cooking, fishing, napping, sitting in silence, and enjoying chocolate. All are legal... more» Kafkaesque: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate... more» How would William Randolph Hearst have reacted to the rise of the Internet? He knew war and politics would still make or break a news company... more» Even with aesthetic tastes, we are like our ancient ancestors in sharing a love of communion with others through art. Our art instinct is theirs... more» Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed was written for those who, like the author, were committed both to faith and reason... more»
Arthur Miller’s answer to Joe McCarthy, The Crucible, compared him to a 17th-century witch hunter. But communists were not witches, they were real... more» Disraeli, with his olive complexion and coal black eyes, was an English Jew at a time when being English and Jewish was inconceivable... more» Charles Ives disparaged “sissy” musicians and bewailed the feminization of American musical life. He was a hard case... more» The Great Books of the Western World were icons of unreadability: 32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type. But oh, did they sell... more» It was a historical cataclysm carried out on an unimaginable scale. Stalin’s regime devoured not just human lives but hopes, dreams, trust... more» Leopold Bloom: son, father, lover, friend, warrior, man at arms – ordinary, yet a “complete human being.” Everyman for Modernism, says Peter Gay... more» Giordano Bruno was a martyr, but to what? He was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man was not the center of a cozy domain... more» Awful modernist art can be easily ignored. But disagreeable architecture – concrete façades on a human-repelling scale – is much harder to avoid... more» Charlie Chaplin loved scenes where a beautiful young mother is torn away from her terrified, weeping child. It was about his life... more» Abd al-Rahman’s Muslim Iberia was much advanced over Western Christendom in 800. If Charles Martel had lost at Poitiers, the world would be better off... more» Victor Gruen, Jewish socialist refugee from Vienna and father of the shopping mall, a man who changed the American way of life... more» We live in a maniacally fast and busy world. Do we wish to continue our detachment from the cycles of the sun and moon and tides and planets?... more» The dark side of the human animal is not wolf-like, as Hobbes suggested, it is ape-like. The wolf is a noble beast... more» Congolese, French, Spanish, Houma, and Haitian peoples make the story of New Orleans a tale that stands for the entire New World... more» Iceland’s epic poems turn an implacably cold gaze on human brutality, nobility, pettiness, glory and misery. Halldór Laxness lived in this tradition... more» “I am alive ... I am beautiful ... what else is there?” Susan Sontag’s journals reveal much about her anxieties and passions... more» Between margin scribbles, the selection itself, and even a hair tucked between pages, Hitler’s personal library brings us creepily closer to the man... more» “The knell of private property sounds,” wrote Karl Marx. ”The expropriators are being expropriated.” Hardly. Look at the Bolsheviks... more» How odd that so many physicians write so well. From Anton Chekhov to Somerset Maugham to William Carlos Williams – to Theodore Dalrymple... more» Rupert Murdoch is an idiot savant who instinctively mines human weakness. He knows people need to justify giving in to their lowest impulses... more» Pixies, sheilas, and dirtbags. If you go on a whizzer and get a tad squiffy (if not starkers) with cougar bait, then expect to be a little rumpty-tumpty the next day... more» She may have been a“half-witted canary” to Lytton Strachey, but Bloomsbury’s most brilliant mind, John Maynard Keynes, fell for her still... more» Is it possible to create art out of horror, the 9/11 disaster, for instance, without being exploitative and tasteless?... more» The Nobel prizes owe their historic place not to any special Scandinavian wisdom, but to the sheer size of the prize purses... more» James Joyce for most of us is black words on a white page, the pure spirit of the English language. But to hear his actual Dubliner’s voice... more» Nothing To Be Frightened Of is, it hardly need be said, an ironic title. Julian Barnes is in fact scared as hell of death... more» Our political order depends on modern science and its blessings, yet science also corrodes the kind of moral judgments democracy also requires... more» We can’t help feeling that we should be improved by reading Lionel Trilling, and this feeling itself is inevitably oppressive... more» Jennifer McLagan cooks with glorious, filthy rich fat, set off in her recipes against bitter greens, bright acids, and sharp-tasting herbs... more» The Soviet mentality is being reborn in Russia. It is a return not to the terror of the 1930s, but to the drab, oppressed life of the 1970s... more» Sarah Caldwell was formidable with a baton. She was also an artist so tragically blind to her own failings that she was never able to master them... more» Question: Why is there any evil at all in God’s creation? Answer: Because this is the best of all possible worlds. Not for you, not for me, but in the longest run... more» Slavoj Žižek: philosopher whose comedy and hyperbole, whose allusions to movies and video games mask a descent into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor... more» Malcolm Gladwell: a walking Reader’s Digest 2.0 whose pop science anecdotes boil down to dumb, flattering, homespun homilies... more» “The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man,” Niall Ferguson says. It has taken us from poverty to the giddy heights of prosperity... more» American museums have their fair share of Rembrandts, Vermeers, Titians, El Grecos, and Raphaels. Yes, but it isn’t about what’s fair... more» Anti-intellectualism in presidential speeches is a serious problem because of the way it allows public discourse to be infected with demagoguery... more» Thirty years since the revolution in Iran, and young Iranians burrow tunnels under the walls the regime uses to isolate them from the West. Consider sex... more» Kingsley Amis lamented the English village pub, where drink and tobacco brought people together in ways that respected and overcame their shyness... more» He has told of the “barbarism” of African societies and has fixated on public defecation when writing about India. V.S. Naipaul wants to wound... more» Who can take sex addiction seriously as a problem? Isn’t it a bit like tennis addiction? Maybe so, but this is one impairment that does sell books... more» Adamantine, hard from the start, John Milton’s English poetry aspires to biblical Hebrew and, for good or ill, succeeds... more» Flying ducks hung on flocked wallpaper: what do the material possessions of working-class people of London tell us about them?... more» Paul Auster’s narrative voice is as hypnotic as that of the Ancient Mariner. Start one of his books and by page two you cannot choose but hear... more» Connoisseurs take serious interest in the high arts of painting, music, and literature. Why is great perfume not seen in the same class?... more» Overparenting. Conservatives fear we’re turning our kids into pampered ninnies (i.e., Democrats); liberals think we’re raising selfish robots (Republicans)... more» Did Proust anticipate the course of 20th-century American literature? Edmund Wilson thought so, and that Thornton Wilder’s novels were proof... more» Franz Kafka was sufferer and victim, the tormented subject of nightmares. But also a master of nightmares, even a connoisseur of them... more» “And move next to some gay people.” Richard Florida argues it is not weather that maketh a city, but arts and culture and good restaurants... more» That Britannica set was to sit in your home merely as a reference tool. Those forbidding Great Books, however, were actually meant to read... more» ... more» China may be ugly and soulless, but Paul Theroux retains a sickened fascination for India, a land that is trapped between hypermodernity and medievalism... more» The weird world of art. How do so many different views and kinds of art jell into a rough consensus about what art is in the first place?... more» Are atheists nastier than religious folk? Some believers seem to think so. But maybe they are the very ones who make atheists nasty... more» Ludwig Wittgenstein was an arresting mix of monk, mystic, and mechanic. His family home in childhood is best described as a madhouse... more» Mortimer Adler and the Great Books. Yes, it was all rather earnest. But with humane studies having fallen to theory and politics, nostalgia is justified... more» V.S. Naipaul has always been a sadist and a smell-smock and a coxcomb, and he’s always enjoyed it. But why does he so want us to know it?... more» Geoff Nicholson likes walking the streets and lanes of London. Sure, but how can he also enjoy to walk the car-glutted streets of Los Angeles?... more» Samuel de Champlain never learned to swim, yet shot American rapids in bark canoes and starting in 1599 crossed the Atlantic 27 times without losing a ship... more» “A monster that must be put back in its place”? Heavens, no. Finance is a mirror that shows mankind its true face, warts and all... more» If there was ever a man who fit Comte de Buffon’s idea of genius as the capacity for taking pains, it’s Charles M. Schulz... more» “Oh dear, oh dear, how I sometimes wish I were respectable and dead,” he wrote. Now Benjamin Britten is both... more» Samuel Adams burned letters the British might use against him. He wasn’t playing for the history books, he was trying to plot a revolution... more» Loneliness: more and more people in the U.S. and across the globe now live alone and say they have no close confidant... more» ... more» Silent muses: three women who suffered immensely because they were tied to three men of artistic genius – Cézanne, Monet, and Rodin... more» Travel writing has often been a form of escape. Not so with V.S. Naipaul, who wants only to transform experience into art... more» Hollywood’s judgments on its movies have been as self-regarding and boneheaded as those of academics have been faddish. Then there is David Thomson... more» “Virginia Woolf’s public sympathy with the lives of poor women was always at odds with private recoil.” Consider her servants... more» ... more» Rimbaud, Hefner, Lennon, Eminem: how fascinating to watch these men, as they age, grow from being rebels to being rather lovable chaps... more» The Florence Nightingale of myth was gentle and gracious. In truth, she was acerbic and uncompromising in her fight for cleaner, better hospitals... more» Mia Farrow’s plan to get Blackwater into Darfur may look like an odd fantasy of a rich eccentric, but war-hungry celebrities are a serious threat... more» The massacre of Gen. Elphinstone’s army of 16,000 soldiers and camp followers in Afghanistan in 1842 prompted revenge attacks. They did not help... more» Charles Schulz’s one regret: he never once let Charlie Brown kick the football held out for him by Lucy. What was it about that unkicked football?... more» It is not just an idea, it can now and again be a real feeling: that English is not really your language; rather, you are merely its speaker... more» Han van Meegeren fecit. The spectre of forgery chills |
