Two millennia ago, in his Records of the Grand Historian, the Chinese scholar Sima Qian concluded that no empire could be ruled from horseback, and later | Continue reading
Many of us who grew up in the USSR, as my husband and I did, were inevitably shaped by the worship of knowledge among the Soviet intelligentsia. It was a | Continue reading
In the summer of 1932 Eric Williams arrived in England from the British colony of Trinidad. Like most of the island’s population, his family was so poor | Continue reading
One morning a few years ago, as I entered the York Street subway station in Brooklyn, a friendly young woman handed me a promotional T-shirt from the | Continue reading
In periods of collapse, we’re compelled to do things differently as old ways become untenable. We’ve entered the planetary-tantrum phase of climate | Continue reading
Poetry is nothing unless it is the breaking up of routine attitudes toward living. There is therefore something sad about reviewing it. For the assumption | Continue reading
After almost thirty-eight years as a technical assistant at a Detroit public library and six years of retirement, Barbara Yokom found herself, in 2018, | Continue reading
How should one narrate the life of a great writer? Joseph Frank’s five-volume biography of Dostoevsky, now supplemented by his Lectures on Dostoevsky, | Continue reading
Elizabeth David's first cookbooks burst upon a Britain newly delivered from wartime rationing. To that shell-shocked and hungry country her words must | Continue reading
The Faerie Queene is one of the longest, and by many accounts slowest, poems in the English language but it gets off to a vigorous start, with a clatter | Continue reading
“‘It is finished’ can never be said of us,” Emily Dickinson once wrote, and certainly there is nothing finished about Emily Dickinson. Since her death in | Continue reading
1. Macbeth's soliloquy on his intended murder of King Duncan provides our canonical quotation for the vital theme that deeds spawn unintended consequences | Continue reading
There are those, said Plato, who go to the Olympics to compete; there are those who go to watch; and there are those who go to buy and sell things. Of the three, he characteristically adds, the noblest are those who go to watch, for their activity is closest to pure contemplation … | Continue reading
1. It was in a mood of irritable skepticism that the Scottish surgeon James Braid attended a public demonstration of Animal Magnetism—in which people were | Continue reading
Is it fair for a judge to increase a defendant’s prison time on the basis of an algorithmic score that predicts the likelihood that he will commit future | Continue reading
In the early thirteenth century a column of light blazed from the top of a shaykh’s head when he walked home at night. It lit up his surroundings as if it | Continue reading
The Guardian has never been much of a business. Its owners never got rich; in fact, they gave the newspaper away. Its history is peppered with financial | Continue reading
“Journalism” is a name for the job of reporting on politics, questioning candidates and office-holders, and alerting Americans to what is actually | Continue reading
For years we made jokes about the day I would write about him. In the early years, I would say, "Tell me more about the girl in San Francisco. The silly | Continue reading
The collaboration between Germany’s industrial magnates and the Third Reich was a story of mutual exploitation and moral abdication. The electrical parts | Continue reading
In the fall of 1853 Salvador de Castro Jr., a leading Cuban slave trader, traveled to Manhattan to arrange an expedition to West Central Africa to buy | Continue reading
The appearance of a new English translation of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms marks the culmination of an unlikely intellectual | Continue reading
My friend Suketu likes to talk about his Gujarati parents’ surprise when they moved here in the seventies from India. They marveled then at how people who | Continue reading
Let’s begin with the body, the corpus to which this six-foot-two lefty was bound. Start with his back. In 1955 he pulled a shift of KP on his last day of | Continue reading
A few weeks before the publication in early February of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Nicole Perlroth’s disquieting account of the global trade | Continue reading
Jonathan Rée introduces his unconventional history of philosophy in the English-speaking world from 1601 to 1950 with a declaration: Today’s philosophers | Continue reading
The four members of the American band Talking Heads came from intact, midcentury American families, with kind and presentable parents who turned up at | Continue reading
In 1815 William Smith published the first detailed geological map of an entire country. Its scope was ambitious, as his long, practical-poetic title | Continue reading
Let’s say you’re under siege in your castle, surrounded by an unseen enemy just outside the walls, unable to leave home for weeks or months, your strength | Continue reading
“Birdbrain,” “silly goose,” “dumb as a dodo”—epithets like these reflect a widespread popular opinion that birds (except perhaps owls) aren’t very bright. | Continue reading
In 476 lines of dactylic hexameter, one of the great Roman poets tells us, if not how he wrote his songs, at any rate how we should go about writing ours. The advice is not all his own; an ancient commentator notes that the poet drew some of it from a third-century BC Greek criti … | Continue reading
We are all Veblenians now. Our understanding of the way people’s acquisitions and activities advertise their superiority—not least in an era of Facebook | Continue reading
The minority repeatedly thwarting the will of the majority is intolerable and untenable. | Continue reading
We are living in an age in which the behavioral sciences have become inescapable. The findings of social psychology and behavioral economics are being employed to determine the news we read, the products we buy, the cultural and intellectual spheres we inhabit, and the human netw … | Continue reading
When Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, the idea that drove him beyond all others was that the nature of language had been misunderstood by philosophers. They were better conceived of as a part of the activity of life. As such, they were more like tools. It is the utility of ha … | Continue reading
A peculiar aspect of Joan Didion’s nonfiction is that a significant portion of it reads like fiction. Or, more specifically, it has the metaphorical power | Continue reading
During a visit to the eighty-five-year-old Claude Monet in the summer of 1926, Florence Gimpel, the wife of the Parisian art dealer René Gimpel, asked her | Continue reading
Criminal law and its enforcement are notoriously hypocritical. It is bad enough that, as Anatole France wrote in 1894, “the law, in its majestic equality, | Continue reading
Translations of Beowulf are often judged by their first word. “Hwæt,” that enigmatic monosyllable, became a stately “behold” or “lo” in older versions of | Continue reading
I am a senior physician with over six decades of experience who has observed his share of critical illness—but only from the doctor’s perspective. That changed suddenly and disastrously on the morning of June 27, 2013, ten days after my ninetieth birthday, when I fell down the st … | Continue reading
It is an infallible law that if Seamus Heaney is the Irish poet of choice, things are looking up, but if W.B. Yeats is in the air, they look ominous. Joe | Continue reading
In 1966 the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective devoted to Dorothea Lange—its first-ever solo exhibition of work by a female photographer. Lange’s | Continue reading
If, like me, you’re a baby boomer who pleaded as a child to stay up with the big kids to watch The Twilight Zone, you might remember daring yourself to | Continue reading
In 1969, the Year of the Pig, participants in what is known as (descriptively) youth culture or (smugly) hip culture or (incompletely) pop culture or | Continue reading
In the parilka, the wooden steam room at the heart of every Russian banya, a stove heats a pile of stones. When the stones are red-hot, water is thrown | Continue reading
In June 2014 the Houghton Library at Harvard University announced that its copy of Des destinées de l’âme, a meditation on the soul by the French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye dating from the mid-1880s, had been subjected to mass spectrometry testing and was “without a doubt … | Continue reading
On January 31 I received a knock at the door of my Beijing apartment. It was the manager of lease renewals clutching a stack of flyers. “Mr. Zhang, you’re feeling well?” she asked, using my Chinese surname. “No fever yet.” She laughed—foreigners and their comments. “I know you do … | Continue reading