Seventy-five years ago, in February 1945, some of the last battles of World War II were still being fought but the Allies—US President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill a… | Continue reading
Fiction has always represented the criminal world sympathetically, sometimes sycophantically. Deceived by cheap and tawdry ideas, it has given the world of thieves a romantic aura. Fiction writers … | Continue reading
Imagine arriving at the airport just in time to catch a plane. Everything in your behavior betrays the heightened concentration of your attention. Your mind on alert, you look for the departures si… | Continue reading
Until recently, analysts, policymakers, and many of the rest of us thought the pronounced difficulties poor children face were the result of factors like single-parent families, bad prenatal health… | Continue reading
Umberto Eco has examined our ongoing fascination with the Middle Ages and listed ten different versions including the “shaggy medievalism” of works like Beowulf. Much of J.R.R. Tolkien’… | Continue reading
If and when the machines take over, it won’t be as we dreamt it. It won’t be a cold, homicidal smart speaker, or an albino android, or living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, shaped like an Austr… | Continue reading
There are no colors out there in the world, Galileo tells us. They only exist in our heads. In the first of our dialogues about the mind, Riccardo Manzotti and I established that by “consciousness”… | Continue reading
The US film industry may have generated revenues somewhere in the region of $40 billion last year, but it seems Hollywood still has plenty of work to do if it wants to compete with that most hallow… | Continue reading
A billionaire pays me to offset his carbon. He jets around the world while I do very little. Breach of contract includes: • Watching TV • Looking at the internet • Driving a car • Using a phone So … | Continue reading
Like most people, I’m afraid of death. I take calculated steps to talk about death without actually using the word. I sometimes skip songs like Buddy Holly’s That’ll be the Day or avoid driving dow… | Continue reading
In 1995 Pepsi ran a promotion where people could collect Pepsi Points and then trade them in for Pepsi Stuff. A T‑shirt was 75 points, sunglasses were 175 points, and there was even a leather jacke… | Continue reading
At the British Museum in London, down a long string of galleries filled with Greek antiquities, there is a glass case that contains a glossy black-and-ocher amphora, resembling a jug or vase. The o… | Continue reading
Bad listeners are not necessarily bad people. You likely have a dear friend, family member, or maybe a romantic partner who is a terrible listener. Perhaps you, yourself, are not the best listener.… | Continue reading
A specter is haunting the United States—the specter of decline. Discussion of decline leapt in 2016 from academic treatises to the forefront of public debate as the winning presidential candidate m… | Continue reading
Goya. A small word, but one that contains multitudes. It is one of those mythic beasts, the “untranslatables,” the foreign words that supposedly lack any equivalent in English. Lists of them spread… | Continue reading
Perhaps like me you occasionally find yourself scanning the professional autobiographies of other people. Opening the CVs of strangers with whom you have only faintly tangential relationships and s… | Continue reading
I recently went to the gynecologist for my annual vagina exam. I would truly rather do anything than go to the doctor for so many reasons, not the least of which is the “oh shit, here comes a nervo… | Continue reading
I was 40,000 words deep when I realized that my book was not working. Titled Poet’s Calculus, it was a tour of the concepts of calculus, connecting each to a topic in the humanities. Interested in … | Continue reading
You spend your whole life being told some place is home, only to get there and realize you don’t really belong. For me, it happened the summer after I turned eight. My mom and I boarded a plane fro… | Continue reading
Edward Garnett’s daily job of ploughing through all the manuscripts submitted to Unwin by authors considerably less accomplished than Ford Madox Ford was generally a pretty thankless task, but just… | Continue reading
In about 1500 BCE, small bands of pastoralists left the Caucasian steppes and began to travel southwards through Afghanistan, settling finally in the Punjab in what is now Pakistan. This migration … | Continue reading
While it would have been completely unthinkable for Mike and Carol Brady to light up a joint or get rip-roaring drunk on screen, the very first episode of the first season of The Brady Bunch (1969)… | Continue reading
Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take… | Continue reading
Archaeology has traditionally had a fundamental bias against fabric. Fabrics are after all highly perishable, withering away within months or years, and only rarely leaving traces behind for those … | Continue reading
By the time his son Danny was born, Ludwig Spandau had lived three lives. He was 53 years old, with a young new wife, Sali, and a year-old daughter named Ruthie. He rented a walk-up apartment in Fl… | Continue reading
For many people, Latin is useless. I won’t enter into a discussion on the meaning of “utility,” a concept with variations and stratifications that are centuries in the making, and which itself meri… | Continue reading
Picture the world through the eyes of the jerk. The line of people in the post office is a mass of unimportant fools; it’s a felt injustice that you must wait while they bumble with their requests.… | Continue reading
In a military courtroom at Ft. Benning, Georgia, on March 15th, 1971, prosecutors made their closing arguments against Lt. William L. Calley for the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War. Thre… | Continue reading
My name is Greta Thunberg, I am 16 years old and I’m from Sweden. I am grateful for being with you here in the USA. A nation that, to many people, is the country of dreams. I also have a dream. Tha… | Continue reading
Adapted from the essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Essays One. * The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won’t be the same as someone else’s, and they may … | Continue reading
For longer than I’ve been climbing, for longer than I’ve been alive, the most talked-about piece of writing in the sprawling literature of mountaineering has been a mysterious tome known as the Lit… | Continue reading
In 1685, years before his translation of The Thousand and One Nights would win him enduring fame, the French scholar Antoine Galland was living in Istanbul. Trained in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish,… | Continue reading
At around 4 am on Wednesday, November 6, 2013, I was sleeping in a Manhattan hotel when I was awakened by one of my phones for the Wall Street Journal. The night before, I had been covering the ann… | Continue reading
For millennia, humanity’s wish to predict the future manifested itself as innumerable methods for divination, oracular pronouncements, elaborate ceremonies to propitiate the gods, and a great deal … | Continue reading
No one knows why we walk. Out of some 250 species of primates, we are the only ones that have elected to get up and move around exclusively on two legs. Some authorities think bipedalism is at leas… | Continue reading
Ever since the discovery that light—and particularly blue light—can suppress melatonin and alter the timing of our circadian clocks, evidence has been building that exposure to even low levels of l… | Continue reading
What if they make a mistake and bury me when I’m just in a coma? Okay, so to be clear, you don’t want to be buried alive, is that correct? Got it. Lucky for you, you don’t live in… | Continue reading
I once met Ingvar Kamprad, the Ikea founder. It was in August 2010 at Ikea’s head office, in the small town of Almhult, Sweden. (The address is 1 Ikea Street.) I was writing a book about his closes… | Continue reading
When I learned “show, don’t tell,” I thought I’d discovered a guide that would never fail me. And sure, it was good for me, in the way training wheels help in learning to ride a bike. The directive… | Continue reading
Bushbucks are small, handsome antelopes: a deep orange-brown broken up with white dots and dashes. They’re about the size of large dogs. They’re browsers (as opposed to grazers, eating… | Continue reading
In the course of a long life, each of us will occasionally encounter a difficult decision we must make. Stay single or get married? Go for a run or have another doughnut? Go to grad school or enter… | Continue reading
Storytelling gives us meaning and common values, and it’s how we understand ourselves and the world around us. We can feel it in our bones when we have been told a great story. It also cultivates e… | Continue reading
Self-replicating, bacterial life first appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago. For most of Earth’s history, life remained at the single-celled level, and nothing like a nervous system existed … | Continue reading
I keep trying to write a measured and sensible introduction to this book, and I keep failing. I keep failing because in order to find out what I think I pick up the proofs and start to read—or rath… | Continue reading
I. More important than learning to speak Japanese when you come to Japan is learning to speak silence. My neighbors seem most at home with nonverbal cues, with pauses and the exchange of formulae. … | Continue reading
The full gravity of our ecological crisis didn’t hit me until the birth of my second child, which wasn’t the best timing. I can’t point to any single event that pushed me from accepting climate cha… | Continue reading
When George Orwell returned to Barcelona for the third time, on June 20th, 1937, he discovered that the Spanish secret police were after him. He had been forced to return to the front in order to h… | Continue reading
In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens—acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten—published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. The book centers on one Professor Lisse, who has c… | Continue reading