Dwight Macdonald was famous for writing with a sneer. His savagery reads less like erudition than compulsive, gleeful bullying

Prophets of literary doom keep writing books about the death of reading. The genre refutes the thesis 

Jay Maisel (1931 – 2026) Photographer

When Words Are No Longer for Us

Once upon a screen: explosive paradox

The bombarding of childhood

Who Needs Regulation When Trump Is President?

25 winners of math’s ‘Nobel Prize’ decry the AI invasion of their discipline

The Promise and Peril of Toad Smoking, the Everest of Psychedelics

Keep Race Out of Student Discipline

Trump’s Kennedy Center Shakedown

Need <em>Help!</em> writing a paper title? All you need is the Beatles

“In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” says Jill Lepore. “Instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions”

Helen Vendler spent a lifetime writing about lyric poetry, yet her criticism always started from frustration, not certainty

The Atomphilosoph. In technologically-driven catastrophes Günther Anders saw cosmic arrogance — but also the need for a new moral code

Will It Matter That ABA Council Repealed The DEI Standard?

This New “Devil Flower” Species Doesn’t Photosynthesize

What 9/11 Did to Us

Why is there controversy around OpenAI’s Millennium Prize maths breakthrough?

Thursday Poem

What Bush Understood That Trump Doesn’t