As Francis Bacon put it in 1597: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”

Marc Andreessen says introspection is a Viennese import from the 1920s. Montaigne, Bacon, and Descartes beg to differ 

Those books lying all over your house unfinished? They’re not signs not of readerly fickleness, but of a robust indifference to societal norms

What Oliver Sacks Jotted Down In His Books

Court Rejects Women Inmates' Objections to California Law Related to Housing of "Transgender, Nonbinary, or Intersex" Inmates

$14K Sanction for Local Counsel's Not Meaningfully Supervising Out-of-Jurisdiction Counsel

Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety Won’t Change Much

The Fictions of Homelessness

"There should be a simple rule for being a thinker," says Cal Newport. "Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health"

Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair

How do zippers work?

Penny, a Doberman pinscher, wins the Westminster dog show

AI-produced books have begun to flood Amazon, whether coloring books or derivative novels. What they’re missing, of course, is an artistic ego

Books and screens

The Other Significant Others: Living and Loving Outside the Confines of Conventional Friendship and Compulsory Coupledom

The Ultimate Best Books of 2025 List

A Room For Books

Review of “Nonesuch” by Francis Spufford

Why do so many authors and critics remain attached to “literary fiction” in our commercialized landscape of books?

The Oracle of Bacon: Thirty Years Later

Two Recent Books On Idi Amin’s Uganda

Bolster civil discourse and the Great Books, or purge “commies”? The right is at war with itself over how to reform the university