A medication prescribed for Parkinson’s and other diseases can transform a patient’s personality, unleashing heroic bouts of creativity or a torrent of shocking, even criminal behavior | Continue reading
Remembering the plight of Dreyfus and the effect it had on a young Marcel Proust | Continue reading
On the complexities of lumping psychiatric patients into categories | Continue reading
Where did it all go wrong for so much music of the 20th century? | Continue reading
Why Ulysses is as vital as ever— compelling, complex, and direct | Continue reading
Cinema’s most seductive prop | Continue reading
How one very young man changed the course of publishing and intellectual life in America | Continue reading
He led readers to bohemian rhapsodies, then Buddhism | Continue reading
Poems read aloud, beautifully | Continue reading
Darwin’s great theory was years in the making | Continue reading
How a German university town helped usher in the modern age | Continue reading
Not and its many permutations | Continue reading
How the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau differs from today’s libertarianism | Continue reading
Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation | Continue reading
Total information awareness may make us feel safe, but will we regret living in a surveillance state? | Continue reading
A noted novelist considers the life of an American master | Continue reading
Poetry and philhellenism at the Greek bicentennial | Continue reading
The strange life of Europe’s most overlooked modernist | Continue reading
A crash course on our boundlessly bizarre universe | Continue reading
How an army of homosexual men became one of the most elite fighting forces of the ancient world | Continue reading
So much depends on the way a work is formatted | Continue reading
A writer’s one-sided conversation with a ghost | Continue reading
How photography rose from the margins of the art world to occupy its vital center | Continue reading
What happens when scientists write haiku? | Continue reading
What did a distinguished historian, and possibly a great man, see in an unkempt young would-be writer? | Continue reading
You take time to write only when you care | Continue reading
A poet-scientist considers the imponderables of existence | Continue reading
A talk to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, August 11, 2009 Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some ex … | Continue reading
Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers | Continue reading
The war behind a writer’s words | Continue reading
From the Winter 1954-55 issue of The Scholar | Continue reading
How painters through the ages have responded to contagion, pestilence, and deadly epidemics | Continue reading
Before I could accept mortality, I had to stop running from it | Continue reading
The story of America’s first culinary celebrity | Continue reading
Harriet Washington is a science writer, editor, and ethicist whose book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Her latest book is A Terrib … | Continue reading
Remembering Joseph Brodsky | Continue reading
Total information awareness may make us feel safe, but will we regret living in a surveillance state? | Continue reading
Remembering Joseph Brodsky | Continue reading
A new biography of the founder of population genetics | Continue reading
Hint: It isn’t meat vendors at the Wuhan Seafood Market | Continue reading
How to think about the coronavirus | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence isn’t as intelligent as you think | Continue reading
Writing On Writing Well and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years | Continue reading
Now all but vanished, a once-popular system of reading Greek and Latin classics could revitalize modern teaching methods | Continue reading
Remembering a time when composers mattered more | Continue reading
Sometimes teachers need to reach beyond the canon | Continue reading
Exploring the psychology of an iconoclastic architect | Continue reading
Exploring the psychology of an iconoclastic architect | Continue reading