The paradoxical pleasures of reading literature April 21, 2021 Reading literature is a deeply dialectical experience, one that offers a variety of paradoxical pleasures. One of the most salient of these is that in reading well we both submit to the text and resist it. Read More
Crossing Medieval borders: Chaucer and Europe April 20, 2021 At the moment, almost no one is crossing borders. We aren’t allowed to travel, and many of us are separated from family, missing our international colleagues, and wishing we could go on holiday. Read More
After Callimachus Readings by Stephanie Burt April 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Can we fix social media? April 16, 2021 We use social media as a mirror to decipher our place in society but, as Chris Bail explains, it functions more like a prism that distorts our identities, empowers status-seeking extremists, and renders moderates all but invisible. Read More
Listen in: Why We Are Restless April 16, 2021 We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change—even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. Read More
Chris Bail on Breaking the Social Media Prism April 14, 2021 In an era of increasing social isolation, platforms like Facebook and Twitter are among the most important tools we have to understand each other. Read More
Minds wide open April 14, 2021 How to Keep an Open Mind is a selection of writings from the ancient Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus. The title is mine, not his. Sextus’ skepticism is all about suspension of judgment concerning the true nature of things. Read More
To discover that which was believed lost April 13, 2021 I thought it was gone. I thought it had left me or I had left it somewhere in the street, in a cabinet, inside the grocery store, at the gas station. The arguments were depleting, had become idiotic, fantasy. Read More
A cordial invitation to explore the science and history of flavor April 13, 2021 Nature, it has been said, invites us to eat by appetite and rewards by flavor. But what exactly are flavors? Why are some so pleasing while others are not? Read More
Book Club Pick: Timefulness April 12, 2021 This month’s Book Club Pick is Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud, a terrific selection as we approach Earth Day. Few of us have any conception of the enormous timescales of our planet’s long history, and this narrow perspective underlies many of the environmental problems we are creating. Read More
The water crisis on the High Plains April 12, 2021 The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. Read More
Breaking the Social Media Prism April 01, 2021 Breaking the Social Media Prism is a revealing look at how user behavior is powering deep social divisions online—and how we might yet defeat political tribalism on social media. Read More
Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro on Minds Wide Shut March 31, 2021 Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call “fundamentalist.” Read More
The dark neuron problem, or mind reading at 90% accuracy March 30, 2021 I’m going to read your mind. Right now. Ready? Don’t get freaked out. Deep breath. Here we go… Read More
Marci Kwon on Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism March 29, 2021 Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is best known for his exquisite and alluring box constructions, which transform found objects into enchanted worlds that blur the boundaries between fantasy and the commonplace. Read More