The exasperated tone with which evolutionary scientists, philosophers of science, and others on the side of science and philosophy received Nagel’s book was struck early.
Venues now available for many more competing voices, together with the multiplying perspectives of our times—hailed as liberating diversity—serve as dispensation to believe in anything, everything, or nothing.
With the rise of humanism and modern critical scholarly practices in subsequent centuries, texts began to be treated as material objects to be fixed and plumbed for meaning.
To the arguments of Huxley and Tyndall against traditional religion, Yeats had no answer until literature and the other arts came to the rescue.
Majoring in English, the sales pitch now goes, will help you craft your soul.
For some friends of the library, no defense of the stacks is necessary.
The devil was understood to be present and industrious, and America’s earliest forebears were quick to suss him out by his evil works.
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
Death is experienced as the total absence of meaning and, consequently, as something not to be understood but merely to be managed by drawing on medical ingenuity, pharmaceutical resources, and the (increasingly limited) forbearance of insurance companies.
Why do dreams, aside from those that prove uncannily prophetic, not befit our biography?
The Great American Novel? Why are we still banging on about that old thing?
A neglected hard-boiled novelist wrote on the greatest conspiracy of all.
To feel and give voice to the “more” of our humanity was Saul Bellow’s vocation.
Vampire and zombie stories are stories of a new mass folklore. But they have dreamt themselves into us for specific reasons.
Today’s witches are no longer experts in the “occult.” Instead, they rush to aid the downtrodden—and to publish their potion recipes in best-selling how-to guides.
At their core, cryptids represent the triumph of the particular over the generic.
We might do a better job of living together if we believed that we are meant to do so.
True crime is not quite about watching people die, but it does require an interest in the subject.
Writing a book about Thomas Jefferson means entering a very crowded field.
At the beginning of a plague, everyone is implicated.
Péguy’s critical stance toward both broad coalitions made him neither a modernist nor an antimodernist, but something quite distinctive and instructive.
For Faulkner, all of time existed as a moment, during which all could be changed: past, present, and future.
As the crisis wears on, I find myself wondering about the code of hospitality.
The humanities may have suddenly mattered more than ever, but their support was also as fragile as it had been for decades.
Given the gorgeousness of George Eliot’s own prose, her translation’s eloquence comes as no surprise.
If John Brown failed at anything, he failed at saving us from ourselves.
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.
When you bring children into being, you give them the gift of life, but you also impose on them these terrible costs.
All modern forms of government presume an objectification of their citizens.
On locating the sublimity of art within the world and within history.
Hunting after the “hidden life of learning,” Zena Hitz defends learning for its own sake.
On the surface, “normal” might seem harmless, charmingly self-deprecating, maybe even endearing.
The disagreement between modernism and the contemporary discourse of “self-help” is not about whether literature has “therapeutic” capacities.
On the face of it, Simone Weil is a remarkably poor candidate for domestication.
As a history of art and thought in the Cold War era, The Free World is enthralling but unsatisfying, inevitably so.
What is worse, the meaning of performative in contemporary parlance, while not very precise, is almost exactly the opposite of the word’s original meaning.
Consider embracing utopia at once as indeterminate speculation about a qualitatively better future and as a hypothesis, by assuming it to be possible.
That Edvard Munch never met Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the great missed encounters of the modern age.
Summer reads from THR staff and friends.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; even smaller minds complain about the rest of these people.
After situating themselves in a “wild” context, both women do what the entire history of nature writing has implicitly instructed them not to do: they bring their emotional backpacks into the landscape.
A translation of English to English presumes that ambiguity of language is always a flaw—but it’s not.
Cormac McCarthy gives us 500 pages of idiosyncratic wordplay without even cheap narrative excitement. Who does he think he is? Joyce? Faulkner? Melville? Well, yes.
The question for Silence is not whether another world exists but how such a recognition should affect our lives here.
Why should anyone focus on the life of the mind when individual and societal survival is threatened?
It is precisely at such moments of technological dependency that one might consider interrogating one’s relationship with technology more broadly.
To make promises, to stand by one words, to be answerable for them, is to open oneself to blame.
The solitude of sickness is not a waste of time but rather a compression of it, a bundle the size of a pill bottle.
Faulkner’s treatment of the past means much for the nature of our future.
My quarrel with M.F.K. Fisher was part of a larger quarrel I’ve been having with myself ever since we went to ground in March.
Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?
Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.
Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…
We need to preserve a distinction between recognizing our transgressions and resolving to change, on one hand, and imagining that we can forgive ourselves, on the other.
What haunted Edmund was a fear of being second best.
Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.
Well known free speech advocates may not always be free speech absolutists.
To measure the Wealth of Nations, you had to inspect the shirts on people’s backs and the shoes on their feet.
Reading and interpreting poetry offers a unique way to cultivate ethical knowledge and therefore bears on collective, and not just individual, life.
What if the more successful political commentators on Substack, or music teachers on YouTube, or masters of the podcast interview, began to teach their craft to others?
Henry James’s fiction shows how aesthetic misjudgments can be connected to moral vice.
When I give myself over to the self-writers I love most, I am transformed.
The question I want to ask is simply this: Is the writing of a Life a game that, in our current moment, can be played?
Self-knowledge and pleasure, the Idiosyncratics teach us, go hand in hand through the library.