Emotion
Story Stream
In Praise of Irritation April 27, 2023
he everyday experience of irritation conceals a paradox. When one is suitably attuned, virtually anything is liable to provoke it: a telephone left to ring or a phone call taken, people who walk too slowly or drive too quickly. Running late is irrita...
Be Honest About What You Care About April 26, 2023
I really wasn’t built for this era, where the highest honor you can bestow on someone is to say that they don’t care and the most devastating rejoinder “you mad, bro?” I’ve been asked that question dozens of times, online, and have usually not bother...
AI Is a False Prophet April 17, 2023
I’m referring to advanced Artificial Intelligence, which excites emotions from dread to exultation. Last month, an AI model called GPT-4 placed in the 90th percentile on the Uniform Bar Examination, causing lawyers to fear for their jobs. Medical pro...
Is Therapy-Speak Making Us Selfish? April 11, 2023
Last summer, Anna, 24, was dumped by a longtime friend over text. While making plans to meet up, the friend pivoted and told Anna she wanted to end their five-year friendship. When Anna asked if it was something she did, her friend told her she wasn’...
Nick Cave on Christ and the Devil April 10, 2023
Nick Cave’s music is synonymous with emotional intensity and artistic restlessness. But in recent years, in both his blog The Red Hand Files and new book Faith, Hope and Carnage, he has become more outspoken on faith, spirituality, censorship and pol...
The Emotional Genius of Ryuichi Sakamoto April 06, 2023
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer, producer, and actor who died last Tuesday, was a musician of sophisticated talent. For many, the way he intermingled cacophony with dense synth, and his interest in both silence and sound, made Sakamoto timele...
On Mary Wollstonecraft April 05, 2023
Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindic...
The Most Enigmatic Works in Art History April 03, 2023
In the last years of his life, German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt created a series of busts depicting a wide range of emotions, from petulance (see The Vexed Man) to amusement (An Intentional Wag) to shame (A Hypocrite and a Slanderer). Cast i...
The Attunement of Abstract Art and Music February 27, 2023
How does the abstract art of Kandinsky and Klee imitate the meaning and emotion in the music of Shostakovich and Bach?...
Wine and Astonishment February 22, 2023
This piece is excerpted from "Drinking with the Valkyries: Writings on Wine". Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Académie du Vin Library. This piece originally appeared in The World of Fine Wine.Wine is quietly unique: ‘A pure biological...
The Dangers of a Sentimental Education February 20, 2023
But what exactly is social-emotional learning? Proponents claim that it is a pedagogical method that fosters social and emotional skills, but finding a real answer requires a Dante-esque descent into an inferno of impenetrable jargon. A leading SEL o...
Sandra Oh’s Sense of Purpose February 16, 2023
Sandra Oh wanted to talk to me, first, about the Monterey Park shooting. The attack had taken place a week earlier, not far from her home in Los Angeles. She was still working through her feelings about it. Seeing her face fill my laptop screen over ...
It's Fine to Be a Snob February 13, 2023
Taste and standards do matter.What is it about grievance? It is, among emotional states, the one we profess to want the least, a gorge-drop into outright failure. Once you’re aggrieved, you’re wronged, and the battle back to a state of rightness is o...
Book Captures Rebellious Spirit of Gulf War Veterans February 13, 2023
I’ve been excited to read Brian O'Hare's Surrender (Syracuse, 2022) ever since it was announced as Syracuse University’s 2021 Veterans Writing Award winner and it did not disappoint. This is a collection of short stories loosely tying together the pr...
Hopper, Katz and O'Halloran January 31, 2023
I’ve been to the Edward Hopper exhibit at the Whitney several times now, both because it’s excellent, as a career summary and an argument about Hopper’s work, and also because I find myself asking so many questions I can’t answer while I’m there. Naï...
Ineffective Altruism January 25, 2023
The following is a condensed version of "Ineffective Altruism" by Rebecca Richards, published at Law & Liberty. The desire to make a difference is embedded in the human psyche. The effective altruism movement recently made famous by the exploits of S...
Jorie Graham Takes the Long View January 02, 2023
The poet Jorie Graham is one of our great literary mappers of everything, everywhere all at once. As James Longenbach put it, she engages “the whole human contraption . . . rather than the narrow emotional slice of it most often reserved for poems.” ...
