Economics, for all its pretensions, envies the hard sciences, while the humanities is just plain embarrassed. In reality, they need each other… more »
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19/12
About 95 million images are uploaded to Instagram every day. This behavior seems new. But it was prefigured by an earlier aesthetic movement: the picturesque… more »
18/12
Who was the audience for Mein Kampf? Scribblers and middlemen. Indeed, the disregard of academic readers was essential to Nazism from its inception… more »
17/12
Freud’s theories don’t mesh well with modern science. Yet he represents something important for neuroscientists: the possibility that laws govern mental life… more »
16/12
Writers are told to fan out across genres, to expose themselves to everything. Bad advice. Don’t read widely. Most work is middling and should be ignored… more »
15/12
“I am almost sickened by my basic honesty,” wrote Clarice Lispector, who broke with superficial truths to expose deeper ones. She had a complex relationship with veracity… more »
14/12
Even friends of Mary McCarthy could muster only backhanded praise for her work. What put them off? Her perverse honesty, for one thing… more »
13/12
“I had no idea that ____ was so interesting!” Canoes, oranges, the Merchant Marine – how does John McPhee get us to care about such subjects?… more »
12/12
Biographers describe Oscar Wilde after prison as a broken man, a spent force. Nonsense. Until his final illness, he “carried himself with a threadbare majesty”… more »
11/12
Hoaxes succeed by promising us what we wish for. P.T. Barnum called it “humbug,” a form of fakery that doesn’t deceive so much as fill its beholder with wonder… more »