“As with people,” Solotaroff writes, “I find that I have more to say about writers than I admire than about those I don’t. This does not preclude registering judgments that spring from a lessening of interest or esteem, for the point of reviewing an author is to deliver the experience of reading him or her, and to be less than candid is to weaken the conviction that has otherwise come to praise.” Sensible words [...]

Benjamin Kunkel’s remarkable essay “Drawn and Quartered on the Internet,” in the current issue of n+1>, carefully parses how four common types of internet usage affect public life. Because it is not now available online, I will seek here simply to outline its argument, present a few quotations from it, and encourage you to seek it out in your local bookstore. [...]

Several weeks ago Leonard Lopate interviewed on his radio program two obituary writers whose stories of the useful pressures of deadlines, necessitating last-minute scrounging in the library or on the phone (in search of evocative details), were quite charming. Now I’ve found an obit worth sharing [...]

The CJR writer Elinore Longobardi favorably compares Labash’s 10,000-word report with other recent analyses of “Detroit”—not the city, but rather the metaphor for the US auto industry. As the executives from the Big Three automakers were paraded in front of Congress, I thought back to my experience in Detroit and crossed my fingers that some enterprising journalist or writer would soon travel there and report back to the rest of us what it is actually like. [...]

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War has received incredible press attention, both because it is a well-written work by a respected historian and because its author was recently named president of Harvard University. Eric Foner praised it in The Nation; Geoffrey C. Ward did as well, in The New [...]

“Writing, depending as it does on those enabling assumptions by which ideas are produced and understood at a particular cultural moment, is also, for the kind of critical intelligence discussed and at work in these pages, an act of resistance to those assumptions.” So suggests Richard Poirier, founding editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review, in [...]

Bruce Robbins, in a review of Stefan Collini’s 2006 book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain published in the journal Modern Intellectual History, provides this fascinating discussion of the tensions inherent in the term “intellectuals”: The intellectual enters the public sphere when she or he makes use of the authority gained in [a] specialization in order to [...]

Yesterday afternoon, during a conference held at Columbia University on Lionel Trilling and his legacy, the eminent historian Fritz Stern recalled one day in 1962, during the Cuban Missile crisis, when he met Trilling on the corner of Broadway and 116th Street. Unsure whether nuclear missiles would rain down on New York, Stern cautiously admitted [...]

In the May issue of Scientific American, which I have begun skimming online since the novelist Marilynne Robinson cited it several times in a lecture I saw her deliver last month and an artist friend in Miami explained to me his recent fascination with theoretical physics, has a fascinating article on the arrow of time. [...]

A week or so ago, The New Republic published Jed Perl’s review of the Nicolas Poussin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Now T.J. Clark has written a review, for the London Review of Books, of that exhibition and the simultaneous Gustave Courbet retrospective. Both are worth reading, and both have rapturous ledes. Here’s [...]

I share a birthday with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on this day in 1896. He happens to be among my favorite writers—I have read The Great Gatsby four times and This Side of Paradise twice (so far), and keep The Crack-Up at hand for regular browsing. Last week The Guardian published an excerpt [...]

Three recent long-format essays have cast retrospective glances at aspects of literary and intellectual life as it was lived twenty to twenty-five years ago. I first came across Joseph Epstein’s “‘The Literary Life’ at 25,” which revisits the article Epstein wrote for the inaugural issue of The New Criterion. Near the beginning of the piece, [...]

The Observer has published another literary list, this time asking fifty notable writers to name “brilliant but underrated novels that deserve a second chance to shine.” Owing perhaps in part to differences in reading habits on either side of the pond, not only are many of the books new to me, but several of the [...]

Last Tuesday I listened to the New Yorker critics Joan Acocella and Alex Ross discuss criticism; last night I listened to the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik discuss Marcel Proust’s letters. This took place at NYU’s Maison Francaise, and marked the republication, earlier this year, of The Letters of Marcel Proust, selected and translated [...]

In the September/October issue of Boston Review, Susie Linfield, a longtime contributor to the magazine and the associate director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at NYU, has published a provocative essay on “why photography critics hate photographs.” If you’re willing to accept her central conceit—that Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and, especially, Bertolt Brecht [...]

William St. Clair, in an essay printed in the May 12 Times Literary Supplement, attempts to reorient our understanding of the relationship between printed matter and its readers’ “mentalities.” The essay, a condensed version of the John Coffin Memorial Lecture in the History of the Book, is not available online in its TLS form, but [...]

Leon Wieseltier has lately commissioned several articles that seem destined to be talked about, among them James Wood’s May 1 New Republic cover story, “What Harold Bloom Can Teach God,” and Rochelle Gurstein’s “Mourning in America,” a review of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Donald Hall’s The Best Day the Worst Day: [...]

A photograph taken last week in Los Angeles I began reading the first article in The Believer‘s April issue, titled “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,” as my plane took off from LAX. The article, to be published in two parts, is taken from Land of Sunshine, an essay collection edited by William Deverell [...]

(Until May 1, most of the content posted to this site will comprise links to other essays, stories, blogs, and news items. I am facing down several deadlines that will likely keep me from posting original content.) The writer Gary Lutz came up in a phone conversation I had with a friend on Friday afternoon. [...]

On Thursday, March 30, I ventured down to Princeton’s campus for the latter half of “Utopia Station,” a two-day seminar devoted to the concept of free speech. As the press release had it: “We meet to examine this question and to move it.” I was interested in how this program of “talks, screenings, messages and [...]

Last week, while idly flipping through the current issue of Open City at the end of a long workday, I came across David Nutt’s short story, titled “Melancholera.” It chronicles, in first-person narration, the pendular swings from sickness to health of a young boy suffering from lupus, Lyme disease, spinal meningitis, and other serious maladies. [...]

&t Left: A detail view of the Peace Tower rising from the Whitney’s below-grade courtyard. Right: A fourth-floor installation view of Rudolf Stingel’s Untitled (After Sam) (2005-06) and Urs Fischer’s Untitled (branches) (2005), looking through Fischer’s The Intelligence of Flowers (2003-06). “Day for Night,” the 2006 Whitney Biennial, opened last week, and, as usual, it [...]