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Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate VERITAS ODIT MORAS Tuesday May 14, 2024 Support Arts & Letters Daily × Subscribe to our Newsletter Do not show this again Alternate view Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. » May 14, 2024 Articles of Note Melancholia , ennui: Call it what you want, but it’s a feeling with a long history and a surprising political power... more » New Books England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more » Essays & Opinions What can we learn from filler words ? Wilfred M. McClay makes the case that like” is different from uh” and um”... more » May 13, 2024 Articles of Note We tend to think of wilderness as a physical thing. It is in fact an idea that stems from a particular culture and has a particular history... more » New Books Surrealism : What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more » Essays & Opinions Economics is just fancy equations and — in Thomas Piketty’s words — a childish passion for mathematics.” Are such critiques fair?... more » May 10, 2024 Articles of Note Ice-age artists: Were they shamans high on mind-altering drugs? Or sober-minded chroniclers of the changing seasons?... more » New Books Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements ... more » Essays & Opinions Is the field of postcolonial studies inauthentic, a prisoner of Western mentalities? Amitava Kumar reflects on fierce debates in India... more » May 9, 2024 Articles of Note Why have children stopped reading for fun? Blame screens, but not only screens... more » New Books The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more » Essays & Opinions How did Richard Owen , a pioneering Victorian paleontologist, inspire such intense hatred among his contemporaries?... more » May 8, 2024 Articles of Note In the 1920s, young Cecilia Payne answered a vexing scientific question: What are stars made of ? The scientific establishment was not pleased... more » New Books In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more » Essays & Opinions Diversity is a master concept of our time, but what happens when diversity of identity and diversity of ideology conflict?... more » May 7, 2024 Articles of Note Paul Auster’s career is a reminder that writers’ lesser efforts can go unnoticed in the presence of their masterworks... more » New Books I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more » Essays & Opinions There is no end to war and no end, it would seem, to the uses Shakespeare can be put to in war”... more » May 6, 2024 Articles of Note Walter Kirn , the conspiratorially minded counter-elite journalist, tries a new way of sticking it to the ruling classes: founding a literary magazine... more » New Books It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more » Essays & Opinions A paradox of modern political life : The more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels... more » May 3, 2024 Articles of Note The dictionary people . These tweedy, eccentric amateur lexicographers made the Oxford English Dictionary possible... more » New Books Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more » Essays & Opinions The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly dying for years... more » May 2, 2024 Articles of Note Since 1739, 130 Roman dodecahedrons have been discovered by archaeologists. But a mystery endures: What were they used for?... more » New Books Saskia Hamilton’s parting gift . The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more » Essays & Opinions We think we remember works of art rather well, says Julian Barnes. But we often don’t, and that’s not a bad thing ... more » May 1, 2024 Articles of Note The Argentine writer and perennial Nobel candidate César Aira writes for hours before revising. The result is an obscene number of books... more » New Books The end of the pub ? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more » Essays & Opinions If a computer can write like a person , what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more » April 30, 2024 Articles of Note Derek Parfit set out to that prove progress in moral philosophy is possible. He failed, but in so doing salvaged the study of ethics... more » New Books Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. The message is the message”... more » Essays & Opinions The Order of the Third Bird is a somewhat secret society of artists and avant-gardists who congregate suddenly at museums, then vanish... more » April 29, 2024 Articles of Note People in psychiatric institutions are often missing from the historical record. But what if we look through their suitcases ?... more » New Books I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more » Essays & Opinions "Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth ... more » April 26, 2024 Articles of Note Thanks to a recent antitrust trial, we have a clear look at the business of books . What it reveals isn’t pretty... more » New Books Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings ... more » Essays & Opinions If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler ... more » April 25, 2024 Articles of Note Penelope Fitzgerald , long expected to produce works of genius, only began writing serious fiction at the age of 62. How come?... more » New Books Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world : machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more » Essays & Opinions As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist ... more » April 24, 2024 Articles of Note A death by bureaucracy.” Why is the University of Oxford shuttering its Future of Humanity Institute ?... more » New Books Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein : His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more » Essays & Opinions In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more » April 23, 2024 Articles of Note When did it become embarrassing to like classical music ? When it became thought of as an elite art... more » New Books A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more » Essays & Opinions Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more » April 22, 2024 Articles of Note Leonard Cohen was in a dark place: He hated poetry, and folk music, the hippie scene. Then the Yom Kippur War broke out... more » New BooksNostalgia ” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more » Essays & Opinions Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim I think, therefore...