By: Matthew Battles

A COLLEGE WHERE I do a bit of teaching just sent me an email announcing the formation of a “social media working group” whose job it is to “research, suggest, and implement strategies and best […]

By: Peggy Nelson

HILARY PUTNAM (born 1926) is the most important philosopher you’ve never heard of. In an era when most theorists build their careers by limning the edges of history, Putnam is one of the hands-on few […]

By: Joshua Glenn

“The institution of a leisure class is found in its best development at the higher stages of the barbarian culture….” That first phrase from his 1899 book Theory of the Leisure Class summed up the […]

By: Matthew Battles

WHAT DO YOU think it means? The New York Times reported yesterday that some psychologists were feeling panicky about physician James Heilman’s decision to upload the canonical Rorschach inkblots to Wikipedia along with their most-frequently […]

By: Mimi Lipson

Novelist, poet, and newspaper man DON MARQUIS (1878-1937) was once a household name. Now he is mostly remembered for his Archy and Mehitabel story-poems. Because they are about creatures (a cockroach and an alley cat, […]

By: Douglas Wolk

The one piece of fine-art-inspired kitsch I’ve been craving ever since I first heard of it is a long-unavailable shower curtain reproducing “The Large Glass” (“The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even”) by MARCEL […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The 1844-53 cohort overreached — and worried about it.

By: Lucy Sante

JOSEPH MITCHELL (1908-96) arrived in New York City from rural North Carolina the day after the stock market crashed in 1929. Following a few years as a newspaper reporter, he went to work for the […]

By: Lucy Sante

THE SUBJECT, a recent immigrant approximately nine years of age, was asked to depict his mother. It was specified that he should present her in a particular context of his choosing: a setting or activity. […]

By: Patrick Cates

If more people realized how steeped many aspects of modern life are in the ideas of CARL JUNG (1875-1961), perhaps they would use the adjective “Jungian” as often as the adjective “Freudian” when conversationally tipping […]

By: HILOBROW

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, this week, to the following high-, low-, no-, and hilobrow heroes. Click here for more HiLo Hero birthdays. JULY 26 If more people realized how steeped many aspects of modern life are in […]

By: Tor Aarestad

In 1927, ELIAS CANETTI (1905-94) threw himself into a Viennese crowd protesting an acquittal in a murder trial. The crowd went on to burn down the Palace of Justice, and Canetti’s feeling of selflessness and […]

By: Joshua Glenn

The most dangerous game?

By: Erik Davis

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the 18th lord of the Irish barony of Dunsany, hunted big game in Africa and played champion chess. As LORD DUNSANY (1878-1957), he also wrote, without revising, a prodigious number […]

By: James Parker

John Mortimer, the barrister who successfully defended Last Exit To Brooklyn, a novel by HUBERT SELBY JR. (1928-2004), against an obscenity charge in a ’60s British courtroom, would do the same ten years later for […]