![]() more »Īt tens of thousands of pages, Claude Fredericks's diary is engrossing, tedious, and quite possibly a masterpiece. But what if your inner voice is a bickering Italian couple?. Most of us have an inner voice that sounds like us. Torture devices, evil eyes, tufts of hair: Edgar Allan Poe created a lasting aesthetic of disgust. What about the plain-looking female protagonist?. ![]() more »įemale protagonists in great books are usually great beauties. "There are so many self-delusions that are involved in being an artist," says David Salle, "most of which are necessary". Wittgenstein wrote like a "poet trapped inside a philosopher.” Philosophy can describe the world, but only fiction can create it. more »ĭo you blame Plato for philosophy’s obsession with metaphysical abstraction? Not so fast. more »ĭavid Graeber, disheveled and politically radical, was always ill-suited to the academy. Is that because the field’s tenured professors are trapped in jobs they no longer want?. The humanities have a chronic morale problem. In an age of ambient unwellness, how should we think about the chronically ill?. We know the poet Phillis Wheatley for her suffering and resistance to enslavement. But Chet Baker was the epitome of West Coast cool. He wasn't the most gifted trumpeter or the most impressive vocalist. How does the esteemed literary scholar Mark McGurl go from Henry James to Space Raptor Butt Invasion?. more »Ī political obstacle separates boomers from Gen Xers from millennials: lazy generational thinking. Historically, the classics have been most popular not among the elite, but among the rising middle class. In the “woke” wars, combatants hurl intellectual insults from their ideological battle stations. more »Īccording to Timothy Morton, black holes, oil spills, and tectonic plates are hyperobjects, and their totality should fill us with dread. Albrecht Dürer, though, wrote home, and kept a journal. Many people traveled during the 15th and 16th centuries, but we know little of their experiences. The pigeon puzzle: How do animals with little detectable ability to navigate travel long distances so precisely?. “The time is long overdue for the world of bodybuilding to acknowledge the queerness of its historical foundations” . The olfactory realm is subjective and mysterious. In her fiction, it serves more elusive ends. George Sand’s cross-dressing served a pragmatic purpose in her everyday life. Human interest in intelligent machines and AI dates back more than 3,000 years . But it is pallid and fretful, like a shut-in staring all day long at nothing but a screen, mistaking a mirror for a window". more »įor two decades, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shunned visitors as he wrote thousands of pages warning of the perils of illusion and disorder . But the rationale has not been adequately examined . The virtue of translating works of literature stands unquestioned. Did a sexual liaison lead to his ouster from Poland and help shape his thinking about power?. ![]() Buckley's God and Man at Yale might have failed as a philosophy of education, but it succeeded as a genre . Was Augustine a fraud? So contended a leading 17th-century philologist who became a conspiracy theorist. more »įrom a young age, Robert Gottlieb knew he was a “freak, an obsessed, crazed reader.” As an editor, he’s never doubted his taste . In the 19th century, steam’s power to remake the world appeared to be boundless. What do Herbert Marcuse, a Scientology-linked cult, and a steel tycoon have to do with contemporary theories of oppression? Quite a lot, it turns out. Why have personal narratives - essays, memoirs - displaced fiction? Vivian Gornick offers two explanations: the Holocaust and the demise of modernism . With fury-fueled focus, one woman worked to expose the filmmaker's complicity in Nazi crimes . Why are we enamored of great artists who went unappreciated in their own time? Posthumous fame promises to correct the injustices of history. Wonder how composers manage to negotiate opera’s immense challenges? Matthew Aucoin on the “impossible art” . Why is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist suddenly at war with a crowd of musicians? . Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays.
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