Essays

Decline or Oscillation?

Alan Jacobs

What looks like a disastrous collapse in students’ literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.

Tail Pipes and Trail Pipes

Charles Cronin

There is a poignant vulnerability to dereliction pipe organs face in a world saturated with synthetically produced musical sound.

Hatred Alone Is Immortal

Alan Jacobs

What pleasure, what gratification, can we offer to people that exceeds the pleasure of hating?

Famous, But Studiously Ignored, in Baltimore

Vincent Ercolano

I like to think that this kind of deference is a Baltimore thing.

The Arts as Resistance

Arthur Aghajanian

What are the implications for any society that emphasizes monuments to power and domination over imagination and the arts?

Beyond the Exaltation of the Individual Dancer

Alice Courtright

Is it possible to imagine the ballet world without a primary teleology of aesthetic perfectionism and a baseline of low self-worth?

The Afterlife of Character

Richard Hughes Gibson

The greatest characters possess an irrepressible vitality.

Return of the False Messiah

David Stromberg

Understanding the extent of the threat posed by Bibi requires a broad historical perspective.

Artisans of Words

Terence Sweeney

The emptiness of words, and our shared resignation to meaning manipulation, is no small matter.

Taking the Long View

Richard Hughes Gibson

The historical novel strives to recreate not only the material dimensions of a past age but also its mindset.

Presentation and Power

Mark Dunbar

The protests and protest candidates failed because they lacked organizational structures and concrete policies.

Self-Censorship and Don Quixote

Alan Jacobs

The language of self-censorship removes the question from the moral realm in which it properly belongs.

Dostoevsky’s Dangerous Gambit

Ryan Kemp

Dostoevsky is too Christian for a secular age and too secular for Christendom.

Democracy and Dr. Kissinger

John M. Owen IV

Kissinger the scholar studied power. Kissinger the statesman acquired power, guarded it, and wielded it.

Unfinished Business

Richard Hughes Gibson

An unfinished fiction is a memento mori.

You Can’t Fact Check Propaganda

Jonathan D. Teubner and Paul W. Gleason

Could it be otherwise? Probably not, at least at the moment.

Afterword to an Introduction

Barry Schwabsky

The special challenge of presenting a poet whose work is neither new nor widely known.

Whose Terror?

David Stromberg

I remember hearing the news and thinking that this was going to end badly for everyone. I had no idea just how bad things would get.

Art and the Smartphone

Stephen K. White

Could we ban cell phone photography in museums and at performances?

The Courage to Forget

Firmin DeBrabander

Memories are important because—and when—they are selective, and few.

The Tiny, Grammar-Bound Island

Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley

Much of what we know is unspeakable, and language is but one expressive medium.

Why Characters Write

Richard Hughes Gibson

Consider another problem of motivation in the house of fiction: why characters write.

Kundera and the Question of Jewish-Israeli Identity

Yiftach Ofek

Kundera chose to take the long view, reflecting on the relationship between the Jews and Europe, and, more broadly, on the Jews and that European, literary spirit to which he saw himself heir.

A Sentimental Education

Alan Jacobs

The literature classroom is an unusually fit environment in which to pursue “the deepening and sharpening of emotional powers.”

Paging Dr. Bot

Ronald W. Dworkin

Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical.

Means of Ascent

Vincent Ercolano

The president and the humble staircase: a short survey.

Last Tango

James Conaway

A bad potboiler is not made better by stylish writing; it is made worse. 

In a Hotel

Cameron Carr

There is a familiar feeling here: existential dread, impending doom, a light dose of despair.

In Through the Out Door

Richard Hughes Gibson

An abandoned—or abandoning—god might also reappear.

The Elon Effect

Alan Jacobs

Are we both perpetrators and victims of the Elon Effect?

Man Thinks, God Laughs

Jason M. Wirth

Kundera’s novels are expansive and support irreconcilable yet arguably valid points of view. 

Who’s Afraid of Barbara Wawa?

James Conaway

That I have no idea who Barbara Walters is doesn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that this is the Times.

Fourth of July Democracy

Emery Roe

We don’t wait. We start our own constitutional convention.

Cormac McCarthy’s Poetics of Being

Christopher Yates

Cormac McCarthy is provoking us more than we may realize.

The Art of Prediction and the Arc of the Moral Universe

Eric B. Schnurer

Plausible forecasts may help us avert the worst political calamities.

Published!

James Conaway

The official publication day came and went. I felt weirdly out of it, waiting for something I had anticipated for half my life and worked toward unremittingly.

Starting Out

James Conaway

When the going was good for a fledgling writer.

A New Rule of Education for the Age of AI

Richard Hughes Gibson

The answer cannot simply come in the form of another list of dos-and-don’ts.

Well Said

Michael Milburn

Whether or not we find beauty in rhetoric, its eloquence depends on its power to persuade.

Encountering the High Arctic

James Conaway

Nature reveals itself when you are helpless.

Terms and Conditions Apply

Todd C. Ream

Considering the purpose of free speech, from courts to classrooms. 

The Human Reader

Richard Hughes Gibson

Calvino recognized the digital age as an existential condition as well as a technological one.

The Dao of Using Your Smartphone

Alan Levinovitz

We can aim to harmonize with our phones through ritual.

The Leaning Tower of Progress

Travers Nisbet

What might the world look like if we refined our understanding of progress?

David Hume’s Guide to Today’s Politics

Alan Jacobs

The primary social forces disrupting American society today are modern versions of two false religions.

The Beatles and the Glory of Creative Risk

Vincent Ercolano

It took the roiling events of 1963 to open the ears and hearts of the American public to the Beatles.

After the Fall of Silicon Valley Bank

Jonathan D. Teubner

It is time for the tech world to start thinking institutionally.

David Hume’s Guide to Social Media

Alan Jacobs

The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist.

The Almost Unbearable Burden of Belonging

David Stromberg

What to become? Dissident or emigrant? Move abroad?

The Mixed Legacy of James Ellroy

Mark Dunbar

His writing became Ellroyian—telegraphic, fast-paced, and intellectually cynical.

Consumer Confusion

Leann Davis Alspaugh

Does the Meta-Birkin seriously compromise consumers’ ability to separate the NFT from the real Hermès bag? 

A Novelist’s Reflections on Useful Fictions

Alan Jacobs

Hope Mirrlees is interested in what happens if the power of Fairyland cannot be wholly excluded.

Love and Mr. Lincoln

Vincent Ercolano

What if Ann Rutledge had lived, and she and Lincoln had married?

All Ben’s Boys

James Conaway

An institution entering the last of its salad days while still running on the fumes of its preening self-importance.

The Postmodern Pope

Stephen G. Adubato

Benedict shared with skeptics, postmodernists, and existentialists the suspicion of the modern trust in the benevolence of the human will.

The Mechanical Imagination

John Fechtel

In the output of the AI generated image, the technique is there but the techne is not.

The Banality of Psychedelics

Stephen Akey

The central truths revealed to me by psilocybin were all the things my mother tried to teach me.

My Name Is Jim

James Conaway

I have been drinking alcohol since I was 15.

A Funeral for Bruno Latour

Eric Luckey

What makes this so difficult is that time has a way of eroding the power of words.

Autocomplete

Richard Hughes Gibson

We all must adapt to a new textual culture made by GPT-3.

Pretending to Destroy Art to Save the World

Chiraag Shah

What we are seeing, then, is a fictional spectacle—a pseudo-iconoclastic event.

Feathered and Feather-Less Bipeds

Jesse Russell

The genealogical approach has found surprising success in an unlikely genre.

The Uses of Artistic Extravagance

Alan Jacobs

Jean-Luc Godard, like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger, is worth paying attention to even when we think his work is bad

Why American Conservatives Get Viktor Orbán So Wrong

Adam Kovach

Viktor Orbán has become a canvas for the projection of hopes and fears about the future of democracy in the West.

In Praise of Bewilderment

Alan Levinovitz

You can trade false simplicity for complicated truth.

A Fragile Future for Democracy

David Bosworth

It is my belief that rapid technological “progress” will always threaten a culture with social regress, and that mitigating that threat should be a priority.

In the Ruins of Western Civilization

Dan Edelstein

We can learn from the outdated Western Civ model, even as we transcend it.

Past Lives of the Paragraph

Richard Hughes Gibson

Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.

Cognitive Behavioral Soulcraft

William Gonch

Cognitive wellness culture proposes to curate our attention so that we can better spend it.

Mechanization and Monoculture

Alan Jacobs

Any attempt to create a monoculture is necessarily self-defeating.

When a Jeremiad Falls Short

Ethan Schrum

There is no shortage of jeremiads about the American university.

Authenticity’s Imperative

Emily G. Wenneborg

We have here two very different approaches to spiritual authenticity.

How to Destroy a Civilization

Walter C. Clemens, Jr.

Where is culture that gave humanity the symphonies and operas of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov?

The Russo-Ukrainian War and Global Order

John M. Owen IV

The war has ruined any chance of Russo-Western cooperation any time soon; whatever hope the Biden administration has had of peeling Russia away from China lies in tatters.

Ukraine: Against History and Geography

Richard Hughes Gibson

Ukraine has become the geography of vicious truths

How Smart Tech Tried to Solve the Mental Health Crisis and Only Made It Worse

Emma Bedor Hiland

Big data can’t save us from mental distresses and disorders.

The Coming Clarifications

Alan Jacobs

We’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior

The Making of an Everyday Object in a High-Tech World

Richard Hughes Gibson

Just as Mims worries now over the unfulfilling tedium of employment at Amazon, Smith worried over the deleterious effects of monotonous work.

The Unintended Consequences of Christian Politics

Myles Werntz

Mainline Protestant ministries to migrants had unintentionally opened the door to their diminished cultural dominance

On Attentional Norms

Alan Jacobs

Zoom is a medium that offers constant permission to be distracted.

An Unlikely Meditation on Modern Happiness

Ryan Kemp

Well, then, why—on Kierkegaard’s view—would anyone choose a life of faith?

States of Purple

Richard Hughes Gibson

The red vs. blue electoral map has contributed to the toxicity of our politics.

Race, MLK, and the Allure of Made-for-TV Justice

Andrew Lynn

Media executives have honed the craft of attracting national interest to flair-ups and clashes over school board proceedings, controversial small business practices, or more recently, police misconduct.

Why Kerouac’s Anti-Semitism Matters

Christopher Orlet

Can we excuse the bigotry of a writer whose books are so hip and full of life and infectious that you can’t put them down?

An Atheist and a Cardinal Walk into a Bar

Joseph Tulloch

Once you see that even those you disagree with most strongly normally have something important to say, debates become dialogues.

Worth a Second Look

The Editors

Often poignant, sometimes humorous, and always searching explorations of our cultural experiences and predicaments

Galloway in the Shadow of Wendell Berry

John-Paul Heil

Nature knows what is best for itself better than we do.

What Happened to Family Medicine?

Anna Keating

Trust plays an important role in public health.

Where Turing Tests Go Wrong

Alan Jacobs

Perhaps computers are so bad at conversation because it is something like prayer.

Time to Quit

Richard Hughes Gibson

Facebook is free only in the most superficial sense.

Athelstan the Woke

Alan Jacobs

I myself stopped using the term a while back.

It’s the Status, Stupid!

Michael Signer

Because this cannot be ignored. And because it may be prologue to the future.

Where the Humanities Aren’t in Crisis

Scott Samuelson

The benefits of the humanities have danced so gracefully through these tutorials that it’s never occurred to any of us to ask what’s the point.

Talk with the Hand!

Richard Hughes Gibson

I observed that the most effective communicators delivered the most histrionic performances. 

Between Utopia and Disaster

Malloy Owen

The modern state is founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power.

The Kierkegaardian Leap of Climate Activism

Rhoda Feng

Throughout the book, Sherrell eschews the phrase “climate crisis,” substituting a much more nebulous term: “the Problem.”

The Wisdom Hypothesis

Matthew J. Milliner

Even defenders of the idea today such as Bruno Latour admit that Gaia in the original Greek context is “a figure of violence."

The Silencing of the Lambs

Bruce J. Krajewski

We are here to ponder the longue durée of mutton in an age of capitalist wolves. 

Why Carl Schmitt Matters to China

Addis Goldman

It would be prudent to take the Chinese at their word––especially if it is bound up in the mystifying language of Carl Schmitt.

A Vision on a Summer Night

Alan Jacobs

Perhaps the older Auden merely wants to have the humility to accept the terms on which agape offers itself.

G.K. Chesterton and the Art of the First Nations

Matthew J. Milliner

The secrets of Jerusalem are also lodged in Jacksonville, Joplin, and Joliet

Where the Critics of Liberalism Go Wrong

Andrew Lynn

Postliberalism comes to embody a form of cultural criticism that ultimately does not believe in culture itself.

Why Lecture?

Amy Wright

It’s easy to see how lectures got a bad rap. We have all been subjected to someone who abused the privilege of an audience. 

From Pilgrim to Tourist to...?

Richard Hughes Gibson

One thinks of identity whenever one is not sure of where one belongs.

Apart of a Community—Or a Part of It

Scott M. Reznick

Reading and interpreting poetry offers a unique way to cultivate ethical knowledge and therefore bears on collective, and not just individual, life.

Reading Wealth of Nations and Meeting Adam Smith

Richard Hughes Gibson

To measure the Wealth of Nations, you had to inspect the shirts on people’s backs and the shoes on their feet.

The Compatibility Trap

Siobhan Lyons

As the titans of big tech see it, the reticence to upgrade is nothing less than resistance to progress. But a willingness to upgrade does not benefit customers in the long run.

Opinion Fetishism

Alexander Stern

Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas. 

Frederick Douglass and the American Project

Richard Hughes Gibson

It would be hard to blame him if he had lost faith in the republic.

An Appeal for Friction Writing

Richard Hughes Gibson

Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.

The Fantasy of Self-Forgiveness

Gordon Marino

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.

Toward a New Universalism

Shahrzad Sabet

The gap between our concepts of love and justice has served us poorly.

Tortoises and Tigers: The Pleasures of a Long Read

Richard Hughes Gibson

Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…

More Than Their Crimes

Diane Gottlieb

Meeting a murderer and finding a friend.

Story of a Photograph

John Rosenthal

The man who approached me on Chartres Street looked like he’d been tossed away.

Still Searching

Richard Hughes Gibson

The Internet is a technical system that has reshaped social roles and relationships in ways that we are at this point far from fully understanding. We are living out the terms of the new social contract.

Alexander Herzen and the Plural World

Alan Jacobs

Herzen won’t stop striving for social transformation with every ounce of energy he has, but also won’t pick up Chernyshevsky’s axe.

You liberal you!

Mark Edmundson

A human spirit of community and kindness can be learned. But it can also be forgotten.

My Father Was There When I Really Needed Him

Matthew B. Crawford

A  lesson in what it takes to be a father, and why a kid might want to have one.

Faulkner as Futurist

Carl Rollyson

Faulkner’s treatment of the past means much for the nature of our future.

In Self-Isolation with The Plague

John Rosenthal

To the relatives of the dead, the plague is here. 

It’s Complicated

Mark Edmundson

What’s up with us humans, us American humans, that we’re committing ourselves more and more to unbending postures?

Privilege

Matthew B. Crawford

According to current usage, privilege means something like good fortune.

Monumental Woes

B.D. McClay

It’s time to face up to what Confederate monuments mean.

Terror, Photographed

Guest Blogger

Terror trades in images—it needs spectators to feed itself.

The Groot Gang: Superheroes, Politics, and Art

Guest Blogger

Just as the first detective was a thief, the first superheroes were supervillains.

Beyond the Legality of Executive Orders

Guest Blogger

On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Executive Order 9066, John Inazu warns us about acting through fear.

Support Your Local Cat Café

Guest Blogger

The cat café, I suggest with tongue only slightly in cheek, is a spiritual oasis in the hypercompetitive urban landscape.

Pericles in Waveland

Guest Blogger

We need romantic amplitude of experience lest life become nothing more than King Lear and the Yankees winning all the time.

After the Know-Nothings

Guest Blogger

Hope for our troubled times.

The Election Everyone Lost

Guest Blogger

We have to give ourselves—individually and collectively—to the work of re-imagining the meaning of our nation.

What Attica Prisoners Want Harvard Law Students to Know

John J. Lennon

Ignorance is ugly, particularly in prison. It’s loud and obnoxious and violent. It tumbles into my cell right now as I write this. But for some, education can quell that.

A Philosopher Who Matters

Guest Blogger

While professional philosophers earn tenure parsing syllogisms, Charles Taylor is the embodiment of the Romantic, liberal arts, encyclopedic philosopher who wants to make sense of the whole.

Law, Religion, and Confident Pluralism in the University

John D. Inazu

With our colleagues, and with our students, we have the space not only to express disagreement in more than tweets and sound bites, but also to probe the reasons underlying our disagreement.

“Putting the Soul to Work”: Reflections on the New Cognitariat

Talbot Brewer

Why should we expect that the inner self waiting to be born corresponds to some paid job or profession?

Outlaw or Criminal?

Lisa Lorish

We Americans have a soft spot for the outlaw. But what distinguishes an outlaw from a criminal?

Black Oxygen

James McWilliams

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.

Lessons from the Ring—Then and Now

Guest Blogger

In the sweat-and-blood parlor of the boxing ring, young people deal with feelings they seldom get controlled practice with, such as anxiety and anger.

Confronting Climate Change

Stephen Assink

Reimagining our cities provides us an important opportunity to reconsider the various structures of urban life.

Dispatches from Today’s Youth Culture: Romance and Intimacy

Murray Milner, Jr.

“Normal” intimate relationships for teenagers have shifted toward a more explicit instrumentalism.

Collage Envy

Leann Davis Alspaugh

The wonder of Tom Wesselmann's 1962 collage, Still Life No. 1

Dispatches from Today’s Youth Culture: Polarization

Murray Milner, Jr.

The greater the gap students must overcome, the less likely their expressed expectations are likely to be fulfilled.

Dispatches from Today’s Youth Culture: Academic Pressure

Murray Milner, Jr.

Tests lower student morale and make them more cynical about the educational process.

What’s Behind Trump’s Wall?

Johann N. Neem

Do Trump’s supporters represent a new Know-Nothing movement?

Impossible Wonder

Paul Nedelisky

Does understanding really rule out wonder?

Being Right: The Legacy of Henry David Thoreau

Guest Blogger

Thoreau’s ethic of self-governance was a starting point for reconstituting a freshly awakened culture on a moral foundation that refused to accept the sort of compromises—including the Missouri Compromise—that confirmed the moral impotence he so loathed.

Dispatches from Today’s Youth Culture: New Uses and Abuses of Social Invisibility

Murray Milner, Jr.

New digital technologies are creating new forms of social invisibility and changing the nature of postmodern culture.

Sluttery and Shakespeare

B.D. McClay

A translation of English to English presumes that ambiguity of language is always a flaw—but it’s not.

Reclaiming Connections

David Peterson

According to Sherry Turkle's latest book, my peers and I simply can’t stand sitting alone with our thoughts, and it’s hurting our capacity for intimacy.

Wear It Proudly!

Leann Davis Alspaugh

What began as one of the most popular forms of menswear has now morphed into the kindler, gentler uniform. First, there was blue collar. Then white collar. Now there’s soft collar.

The Other Neoliberals

Guest Blogger

While today’s neoliberalism is excoriated for its contribution to inequality (particularly in economic terms), the other neoliberals demonstrated a fondness for compulsory national service and even a return to the military draft as a means to bridge divisions in our society.

Can Evangelicals Agree With Bernie Sanders?

Jeffrey Guhin

Bernie Sanders at Liberty University is more than a momentary truce in the culture war.

College Degrees or College Education?

Johann N. Neem

We do not know how to evaluate what makes up a good college education.

Who Is the Smart City for?

Stephen Assink

In India's rush to transform, build, and even engineer entire new cities, critics are right to raise concerns about citizenship and access.

Tipping Points

B.D. McClay

Why can’t we let go of tipping?

The Troubled Stranger

In a 2011 Pew Research Center survey of the general public, more than 90 percent of the respondents expressed pride in the post-9/11 troops, and some three-quarters said they had thanked a service member. At the same time, most have no link to recent or active-duty service members, have never heard their stories, and report little understanding of their challenges.

The Triumph of the Farmers’ Market

Stephen Assink

The "sidewalk ballet" of the farmers' market

Putin, Ukraine, and the Question of Realism

Putin, Ukraine, and the question of realism

The Law That Changed Modern America

Guest Blogger

It was an event that transformed America and affected the lives of many around the world: the signing of the most significant immigration law in US history, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965

Status Elites

Murray Milner, Jr.

Within the literature on elites, status tends to be relatively ignored or neglected in favor of economic and political power.

The Prestige

Can we break the spell of mesmeric technologies?

Why the New Flows of Capital Matter for Cities

Stephen Assink

Cities are increasingly being eyed by tech companies for their social dynamism and ability to generate innovation. This will have tremendous consequences for the future of society.

From the Archives: "Public Health, Public Enemy?"

Guest Blogger

If anything has reached epidemic proportions, it is the distrust of government vaccine programs.

Recognizing Art

Leann Davis Alspaugh

When El Greco heard the insultingly low valuation for his work, he launched a long and bitter court battle that quietly changed the perception of artists and art in Spain.

Miss Manners and Mr. Manspreader

B.D. McClay

“To some,” said Richard Duffy in 1922, “the very word etiquette is an irritant.” It still is. Exhibit A: “manspreading.”

Back to the City! Back to the Country!

Stephen Assink

One of the most salient features of the post–World War II suburb was its localization of the American middle class and its propagation of practices of mass consumption.

An Abd al-Qadir Christmas

Guest Blogger

Let's recall Emir Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri: a peacemaker, a reconciler, a holy man, and a warrior.

What is Truth in Ferguson and New York City?

Guest Blogger

What do we know about the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, and the larger issues to which they point?

Thinking About Homelessness

Stephen Hitchcock

Thinking about homeless requires separating it from the larger discourse on poverty.

Self-Immolation, In Theory and In Practice

B.D. McClay

The self-immolator does not seek merely to die, but to die horribly, in such a way that others will be compelled to take notice.

Catholic Responses to Poverty

Guest Blogger

Shuttling between economics and political philosophy, public policy and theology, literature and ethics—the conference paraded the unique strength of the intellectual Catholicism today—no discipline out of bounds, no perspective non grata.

Honoring a Vet

Leann Davis Alspaugh

Returning to base, Davis and the other pilots heard their orders for the next day: Attack Kiska Harbor with everything they had regardless of the weather.

Ecce Homo

Leann Davis Alspaugh

That Edvard Munch never met Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the great missed encounters of the modern age.

Cowardice and Ebola

Jay Tolson

Consider the current debate over the appropriate response to the Ebola virus as it spreads beyond its epicenter in West Africa. Does the discourse of cowardice, and its antonyms bravery and courage, play any role in this debate? Should it?

Recognizing the Adult in the Mirror

B.D. McClay

In art as in life, the real adults are often hard to recognize.

Looking Beyond the New Numbers on Poverty

Jay Tolson

The new U.S. Census report on poverty and income offers a glimmer of light in an otherwise somber landscape.

Do We Really Take Science Too Seriously?

Guest Blogger

A better understanding of the meaning and limits science will surely help correct the distorted and reductionist views that many today seem to believe scientific knowledge supports.

The Right of Assembly Violently Wrested

Guest Blogger

The right of peaceable assembly has been at the heart of the struggle of African American equality throughout our nation’s history. When honored, it has yielded important protections. When breached, it has facilitated widespread and systematic oppression.

A New Approach to Poverty

Guest Blogger

As the poet Philip Larkin said, "sun destroys the interest of what’s going on in the shade." And what’s going on in the shade is that Paul Ryan has proposed a plan to tackle poverty that isn’t just about cutting the welfare bill.

Brother Rat?

Paul Nedelisky

What happens if we become willing to trade in an understanding of a rich and meaning-laden feature of our nature for, well, something we can share with a rat.

Portrait of America's Young Adults: Wary but Optimistic

Jay Tolson

Generational snapshots sometimes confound us in the ways actual photographs do.

Is Nothing Truly Alive?

Paul Nedelisky

What's the real-world significance of arguing in a New York Times op-ed that life doesn't exist? More than we might initially think.

The Culture War and America's Image Abroad

Jay Tolson

America did not always think that its image should be entrusted solely to its popular culture machine. For a time, and quite successfully, it devoted considerable resources to advancing its values and principles through public diplomacy.

What Public Universities Owe the Public

Guest Blogger

Ask a graduate, a faculty member, an administrator, or a board member of a prestigious public university what a public university is for in a modern liberal democracy and you will too often get little more than a string of clichés. Public universities lack any substantial sense of what their functions are as democratic institutions.

Human Freedom and the Art of Nudging

Guest Blogger

Richard Williams, director of policy research at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, recently argued that the Obama administration's growing interest in using behavioral economics signifies a renewed and creeping enthusiasm for massive government oversight and coercion of its citizens. Like many libertarians before him, he traces this critique back to an overall anxiety that a "nanny state" will interfere with our lives, and take away our natural freedom.

Christmas and the New Cult of Images

Anna Marazuela Kim

Images continue to matter in a culture thoroughly saturated by them.

Brand Loyalty After Virtue

It was a letter from my life insurance company that got me thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. I had applied for some additional insurance. After providing the company with the requested medical information, I received a machine-signed letter from an underwriter indicating that she “had hoped to approve the increase” but was “sorry” that she would be “unable to approve this change.”

Humanities, Heal Thyself!

Jay Tolson

News that humanities enrollments and majors are declining in American universities is not quite news, but the New York Times recently devoted first-page attention to the trend, complete with some numbers that might be scary to at least part of the professoriate.