Arts & Letters Daily · Scour

Malcolm Cowley’s time at the helm of American literature was full of ambition and glamour. Our period, in comparison, is impoverished

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A Socrates gone mad. Diogenes, who wrote nothing that survives, was part hobo, part insult comic, part performance artist

Inside the Jane Austen theme park

unherd.com·21w·unherd.com

Terry Eagleton · Pregnant with Monsters: Schopenhauer makes a stir

The Man Who Wanted to Believe in Life on Mars

newrepublic.com·24w·Hacker News, r/longform

J.R.R. Tolkien was at his funniest when he was filled with rage, and nothing set him off like the automobile

lareviewofbooks.org·21w·Hacker News

Anthony Appiah: “I don’t think encouraging people to resent everything they think is a moral mistake made by everybody else is a good way to prepare yourself fo...

chronicle.com·21w

Edward Gorey’s macabre art is enigmatic, allusive, silly, somber, and haunted by the miseries of childhood

“Schadenfreude” is easy; but “as,” ‘like,” and “but” are hard. Every lexicographer knows it's the short words that are hardest to define

commentary.org·21w·Hacker News

The AI era might spur political revolt, but it will certainly spur a battle over who owns the infrastructure of intelligent thought

commonplace.org·22w

Tolkien’s reading of Beowulf, and his ability to blend the epic with the novel, fiction and scholarship, shaped his sense of story

When Camus died in a car crash, he was carrying a return train ticket. "The greatest proponent of absurdism suffered an absurd death"

literaryreview.co.uk·22w

What explains the success of Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan, and Kazuo Ishiguro? Publishers want literary fiction that looks like genre fiction

lareviewofbooks.org·22w·Hacker News

“What if the identity politics undergirding “left ‘cancel culture’” was always pretty much the same as the identity politics of offended Christians?”

chronicle.com·22w

The world’s first AI actress. With British sass and messy hair, “Tilly Norwood” is landing film deals in the $10-50 million range

Francis Crick was no reclusive genius. He was loud and charismatic, a philandering poetry lover with an affinity for risque parties

theguardian.com·22w

What was love in the 12th century? What was anger in ancient Egypt? We take emotions as universal and immutable — but what if they aren’t?

theatlantic.com

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Want an antidote to both anti-science propaganda and to reductive slogans in science’s defense? Read philosophy of science

chronicle.com·23w

What’s investors’ hope for humanoid robots? They become a $65 trillion market and replace all human labor

harpers.org·23w

Elias Canetti saw death as a cosmic offense, an intolerable humiliation. As he reframed Descartes, “I hate death, therefore I am”

commonwealmagazine.org·23w

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