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Arts & Letters Daily - ideas, criticism, debate VERITAS ODIT MORAS Sunday February 28, 2021 Support Arts & Letters Daily × Subscribe to our Weekly 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. » Feb. 27, 2021 Articles of Note Parul Sehgal read 125 years of writing in The New York Times Book Review . She found mostly a dearth of style and a failure of criticism ... more » New Books At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon ... more » Essays & Opinions Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress ... more » Feb. 26, 2021 Articles of Note The book blurb requires too much work and induces too much guilt. As Viet Thanh Nguyen says, “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave.”... more » New Books René Girard’s one-liners : Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more » Essays & Opinions Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors ... more » Feb. 25, 2021 Articles of Note What happens when race, class, and power collide at an elite liberal-arts college? No one emerges unscathed ... more » New Books More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie ... more » Essays & Opinions Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice . But are readers getting anything from all the edification? ... more » Feb. 24, 2021 Articles of Note No human invention has destroyed the civilization that invented it. We haven't been careful or wise — just lucky ... more » New Books Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew ... more » Essays & Opinions “The right advice to an ‘ Unhappily Married Woman ’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman” ... more » Feb. 23, 2021 Articles of Note Two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, exemplify two radically different ideas about politics and design ... more » New Books Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more » Essays & Opinions Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray ... more » Feb. 22, 2021 Articles of Note Unearthing Caligula's pleasure garden . Was he assassinated because he was a monster, or was he made into a monster because he was assassinated? ... more » New Books When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes ... more » Essays & Opinions In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount ... more » Feb. 20, 2021 Articles of Note How to write, according to Martin Amis : No fancy syntax; use line breaks liberally; be original; see things with a poet’s eye... more » New Books A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more » Essays & Opinions In literary studies , melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust ... more » Feb. 19, 2021 Articles of Note Psychosis and dissociation were key mechanisms for Surrealist artists . Down with Western logic ! they cried. Long live paranoia! ... more » New Books Alan Greenspan wished he’d never spoken of “irrational exuberance”; Thomas Kuhn rued introducing “paradigm shift” — coiner’s remorse is real ... more » Essays & Opinions Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more » Feb. 18, 2021 Articles of Note What is the cultural sway of magazines when there are 20-year-old TikTok influencers with many more subscribers than Time ? ... more » New Books A mammoth new biography of Philip Roth is imminent. Who better to review it than, well, Philip Roth? ... more » Essays & Opinions "At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career ... more » Feb. 17, 2021 Articles of Note In Victorian times, one sat erect in polite society. Enter the scandalous American rocking chair — a “lazy and ungraceful indulgence”... more » New Books The legacy of British imperialism is everywhere: Even the word “loot” is appropriated — from the Hindi “lut,” the spoils of war... more » Essays & Opinions Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more » Feb. 16, 2021 Articles of Note Classics is beholden to a traditional, triumphalist, “Western civ” model. If the field doesn’t change, it doesn’t deserve to survive ... more » New Books When it comes to Patricia Highsmith , the question of mental illness, of course, arises. Her personality was interwoven with those of her characters ... more » Essays & Opinions Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system ... more » Feb. 15, 2021 Articles of Note Computers can’t understand a haiku or conjure a fairytale. They can't grasp literature at all. And they never will. Here's proof ... more » New Books Joan Didion's potency and influence stems for her ability to repurpose an ingrained sense of futility into a tool of critical analysis... more » Essays & Opinions Every generation of artists has its problems with museums . Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist” ... more » Feb. 13, 2021 Articles of Note Seth Abramson's books promise "proof" of Trumpian misdeeds. In reality, they are incoherent summaries of other people's reporting ... more » New Books To separate science from pseudoscience, it helps to consider the rationales of UFOlogists , Yeti enthusiasts, and yes, anti-vaxxers ... more » Essays & Opinions Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances ... more » Feb. 12, 2021 Articles of Note There is “a new kind of marginalized literature : literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course” ... more » New Books After residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, along with a Guggenheim and a MacArthur, Bette Howland never wrote another book ... more » Essays & Opinions Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind ... more » Feb. 11, 2021 Articles of Note Reading Heidegger in Beijing . He's a rock star in academic circles there. But kindly ignore the corruptive impact of a bad regime on a great thinker ... more » New Books Golden age of the cigarette. The war over smoking is too easily cast as one of heroes and villains - in truth things were much messier ... more » Essays & Opinions Criticism is often a cycle of destruction , a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own ... more » Feb. 10, 2021 Articles of Note Do "woke" American ideas on race, gender, and post-colonialism really pose an existential threat to France?... more » New Books Acid humor, a flair for pith, a feel for the uncanny — Joan Didion’s talents have been celebrated for decades. Let’s not stop now... more » Essays & Opinions In the 1950s, writers began to formulate a critique of technology . Since then we've rushed into an uncritical embrace....