The finished task drops into oblivion. The unfinished clings to the mind. | Continue reading
What if plants are smarter than we think — a lot smarter? | Continue reading
Frankie Thomas demystifies poetic meter. | Continue reading
Relax. Predictions of the impending obsolescence of books have been proven wrong time and again. | Continue reading
Advice from music scholars on how to select and listen to music more intentionally. | Continue reading
In the last century, UFO sightings have spiked—Rich Cohen explores why. | Continue reading
Don DeLillo, ca. 2011. Photograph by Thousandrobots A man who’s been called “the chief shaman of the paranoid school of American fiction” can be expected to act a little nervous.I met Don DeLillo for the first time in an Irish restaurant in Manhattan, for a … | Continue reading
In the thirties, both Jean-Paul Sartre and Walter Benjamin experimented with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. | Continue reading
Arthur Miller. Arthur Miller’s white farmhouse is set high on the border of the roller-coaster hills of Roxbury and Woodbury, in Connecticut’s Litchfield County. The author, brought up in Brooklyn and Harlem, is now a county man. His house is surrounded by t … | Continue reading
While she was a patient at Les Rives de Prangins, Zelda Fitzgerald wrote letters to F. Scott Fitzgerald detailing the nonevents of her days. | Continue reading
A poet manqué’s decades-long correspondence with DFW, and why she sold the letters. | Continue reading
Controlling a sentence—controlling this sentence, as I type—is for me the best, most pleasurable work there is. | Continue reading
The semicolon has long been a source of both enthusiasm and disdain. But how did this peculiar punctuation mark come about? | Continue reading
The semicolon has long been a source of both enthusiasm and disdain. But how did this peculiar punctuation mark come about? | Continue reading
Ten days after calling off her engagement, CJ Hauser travels to the Gulf Coast to live among scientists and whooping cranes. | Continue reading
You’ve already seen Berthe Morisot even if you’ve never heard of her. A new exhibit finally gives her her due as a painter. | Continue reading
The best mathematics, like the best literature, will continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years. | Continue reading
Simone de Beauvoir had introduced me to Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had interviewed. But she hesitated about being interviewed herself: “Why should we talk about me? Don’t you think I’ve done enough in my three books of memoirs?” It took … | Continue reading
“The moon is a desert. I have seen deserts,” Auden was fond of quipping. | Continue reading
Photo by Matthew Septimus, courtesy of Harper's Magazine.It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has … | Continue reading
Barett Swanson on the sheer insanity of a Noah’s Ark–themed water park in the age of the Anthropecene. | Continue reading
Once celebrated on the level of Poe and Twain, Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan. | Continue reading
There was no stone, there was no corpse. It was like things now: there was a poet and there was a piece of paper. Unlike now, people understood meter. | Continue reading
In 1960, Ernest Hemingway came to find himself caught in the rift between his country of birth and the island nation that had become his home. | Continue reading
Paul Auster on Philippe Petit, whose high-wire act is not an art of death but an art of life—and life lived to the very extreme of life. | Continue reading
To doodle is human, as these drawings from Stephen King, Queen Victoria, and more prove. | Continue reading
John Waters, self-described garbage guru, wonders how he stumbled into what every young artist fears: acceptance. | Continue reading
That Harper Lee was always writing was obvious to anyone who knew her, if only because they were reminded whenever they opened their mail. | Continue reading
Any Italian literary person would know the name “Sannazaro” in the same way people in my village would know the name “Sir Philip Sidney.” | Continue reading
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919 and grew up in London. She was educated at Badminton School in Bristol and studied classics at Somerville College, Oxford from 1938 until 1942, receiving first-class honors. She was assistant principal in the treasury from 19 … | Continue reading
Sketch by Ivy Nicholson, 1956. Françoise Sagan now lives in a small and modern ground-floor apartment of her own on the Rue de Grenelle, where she is busily writing a film script and some song lyrics as well as a new novel. But when she was interviewed early last spri … | Continue reading
Spoiler alert: they love science fiction. | Continue reading
Where is the line between genius and madness? The Belgian artist, poet, and art thief Stéphane Mandelbaum’s attempt to create a lasting mythology of himself led to a macabre, untimely death. | Continue reading
Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who is the motherest mother of them all? | Continue reading
Classic party fiction is often, if not always, a kind of wealth porn. | Continue reading
Ricky was an artist and scholar with a fearsome intellect and a biting wit. He was also a surprisingly sweet and gentle soul. | Continue reading
Random House’s copy chief confronts three persistent, unnecessary rules about good writing. | Continue reading
Science lifted us out of nature. It tamed the wilderness and it shot us to the moon. Now it has produced a hamburger made entirely of vegetables that bleeds like real beef. | Continue reading
Late in their lives, the two philisophes finally met. Each discovered grating traits of the other that had been absent in correspondence. | Continue reading
Michael Chabon on the front matter, back matter, intros, outros, forewords, afterwords, and prefaces he treasures most. | Continue reading
Perhaps all creativity is, in some way, created in the crucible of family tension. Perhaps it comes from the desire to define oneself in opposition to one’s family while also living up to its expectations. Perhaps what we try to escape is invariably what defines us. | Continue reading
I, for instance, elect to walk on certain streets, not others. The elevator doors slide open, and there’s one man inside: I evaluate his size against mine, calculating how well, if I had to, I could fight him off. I check the backseat of my car before getting in, just to make sur … | Continue reading
Puns point to the essence of all true wit—the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. | Continue reading