Arts & Letters Daily aldaily.com

“The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea,” Reviewed

newyorker.com·47w

Authorship for sale: <i>Nature</i> investigates how paper mills work

nature.com·48w·Hacker News

The fact checker's improvised dance. Intuition, calculation, and the seeking of truth

yalereview.org·47w·Hacker News

The impossible genre. Biography incorporates every style and school. We categorize it as nonfiction, “but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation”

nytimes.com·47w

An architect’s eccentric residential design, A manifesto house, is a rare instance when an artist puts polemic into practice

wsj.com·47w

“Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones”

persuasion.community·48w·Hacker News

The Divine Comedy, repeatedly rescued from obscurity, has long perched awkwardly between canonical reverence and cultural neglect

thecritic.co.uk·48w

The Talented Ms. Highsmith

yalereview.org·48w·Hacker News

Between 1770 and 1790, a new view of liberty ascended to a position of ideological dominance. Why?

thenation.com·48w

Analytic philosophy gives the fantasy of free inquiry, but really just leans on “common sense” to justify the status quo — or so charge its critics

lareviewofbooks.org·48w

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins

theguardian.com·50w·Hacker News, Hacker News, r/Longreads

Cents and Sensibility

theparisreview.org·48w

Hollywood Has Left Los Angeles

vulture.com·49w·Hacker News, Hacker News

The epic of James Joyce

newstatesman.com·49w·Hacker News

Yes, much about poetry gets lost in translation. But to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to misrepresent both poetry and translation

poetryfoundation.org·48w·Hacker News

To the ancients, revolution was a perversion. To French philosophes, it marked human progress. How did that change in meaning come about?

wsj.com·48w

The Political Journey of Thomas Mann

hedgehogreview.com·49w·Hacker News

How do we prove something is true? Tools like “statistical significance” can introduce arbitrariness to the establishment of facts

wsj.com·48w

There are 7,000 languages spoken in the world today; they can be divided into 140 families. The languages most of us speak belong to just five

wapo.st·48w

Critics take Shulamith Firestone’s schizophrenia to reveal some truth about feminism, or family tragedy, or psychiatry. That’s nonsense

thepointmag.com·48w

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