Diet Fads, Einstein, and More
How a spelling quirk and a typesetter's blunder conspired to give us the word "weird"...
Arts & Letters Daily
The best literary and arts writing on the internet
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Beckett’s Faith in Art, Philosophizing, and More
The Amazonian river dolphin is 10 million years old and has pink skin.
Whither Literary Men?, Loving Theory, and More
Chock-full of highly original description and impressive sentences, recent literary fiction is boring and utterly devoid of fun...
Affect Theory, Black Holes, and More
A forgotten 1992 theory predicted black holes would appear early in our universe's history.
Tutankhamun’s Tomb, Dangerous Art, and More
In 1939, a 3,000-year-old trumpet blared across BBC airwaves, briefly bridging Tutankhamun's tomb to 150 million living rooms...
AI Scandals, Washington Irving, and More
Book publishing is awash in AI scandals.
AI Slop, Howard Zinn, and More
Book publishing is awash in AI scandals.
The Ars Notoria, Weird-Girl Literature, and More
The ultimate scholarly shortcut, the Ars Notoria was said to instantly grant the full range of medieval learning — but at the risk of poisoning one’s soul...
Theosophy, Smorgasbords, and More
What caused a particularly lurid sex scandal in Prussian Königsberg?
When Ennui Becomes Excitement, and More
Most novels bore before they thrill.
Tyler Austin Harper, Auden’s Early Poetry, and More
Tyler Austin Harper found his “dream job” at Bates College.
Sober at High Table, ‘Great and Unfortunate Things,’ and More
Terry Eagleton: “Few acts of self-sacrifice can compare with sitting through Oxford High Table stone-cold sober for more than three decades”...
Confessions of a Token Black Scholar, and More
Editing was largely absent from British publishing until midcentury, emerging only as firms grew too big to take risks on new writers...
Anti-Psychiatry, Anglophilia, and More
Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry have quietly borrowed each other's language for decades...
Decadence, AI, and More
“We have inherited the surfaces of decadence — luxury, excess, artifice, bodily display — but have surrendered the fin de siècle’s commitment to pleasure”...
The End of the Internet, Old Age, and More
As AI eats the internet, we’re witnessing the end of the messy, effortful, contestable business of finding things out...
The Anti-Noise League, Combat Universities, and More
Welcome to Combat U, the campy, inspiring, dismaying, downright confusing place where higher education meets organized fighting....
Paglia, Freudianism, and More
M.F.A.
How Ottessa Moshfegh Got a Professor Fired, and More
Medieval parents — they're just like us!
In Praise of Video-Store Clerks, Sonny Rollins, and More
What we lost when we lost the video-store clerk: The quirky sensibility of the movie geek has been replaced by the algorithm...
Mario Vargas Llosa and the Seductions of Ideology, and More
Two kinds of truth, two kinds of beauty, two kinds of art. One reproduces the world; the other creates it... more »
Young Chekhov, Medieval Vegetables, and More
Cabbage brought nightmares, turnips brought lust, beans brought confusion.
Chickenshit Jobs, Existential Nausea, and More
Are you unable to earn a living as an artist but want to make art seriously and are willing to live modestly?
Shakespeare's Debt, House Brain, and More
Xanadu, the "Home of Tomorrow" that promised automation as liberation, was run on a "house brain," another word for mother...
John Berger and Philosophical Third Rails
Increasingly “ancient history” is not just Greco-Roman, but leads through such locales as Kerala, Tillya Tepe, and Guangzhou...
The Last of the Morticians, Post-Literacy, and More
Nose hairs tweezed just so, and set with Krazy Glue.
The Task of Poetry, Stanley Fish, and More
In 1994, Stanley Fish described deconstruction as dead in the same way that Freudianism is dead: "It is everywhere.” He had a point...
AI Slop, Margaret Avison, and More
AI distills “the most pedestrian, noncontroversial conventions of human expression.”
American Architecture, Joyce, and More
What separates American architecture from European is a matter of scale, speed, and spectacle...