Humanities
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What Shapes Our Desires? July 19, 2024
I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure Luke Burgisis the only person to have graduated from both NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.I first encountered him through his book Wanting: The Power of Mime...
The Paradoxical Paradise of the Garden July 19, 2024
The reader of “Paradise Lost” encounters the Garden of Eden at the same time that Satan does. Having leapt over the garden wall, Milton’s athletic antihero flies up into a tree to survey his new surroundings. “Beneath him with new wonder now he views...
Meet One of the Most Prolific People on Yelp July 19, 2024
People have extraordinarily strong opinions on just about everything, and since 2004, Yelp — the site that aggregates user-written reviews — has provided a platform to exercise our first amendment right to criticize, exalt, and qualify. Yelp’s court ...
I Represent Science July 18, 2024
At the 1996 meeting of the International AIDS Society in Vancouver, a group of researchers presented the results of a much-anticipated study. The scientists had tested AZT, the first drug approved to fight human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), in combi...
Thoughts and Prayers for “Literally Hitler” July 17, 2024
What to do about a dictator. I was in New Jersey with my family when I got the first text. My sister sent her kids to the other room to play, out of earshot of the television, and we watched the mainstream channels with my mom and dad while I scrolle...
Preserving the Human in 'Planet of the Apes' July 15, 2024
Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. – Sophocles“Ican’t help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” So ponders astronaut George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) in the 1968 original Pla...
The Inside Out Message of 'Inside Out 2' July 12, 2024
There’s little doubt that, cinematically speaking, Inside Out 2 is a good movie. Like its predecessor, it’s entertaining, hilarious, poignant, and beautifully made. The writing is sharp, and the voice actors mostly do a wonderful job—new additions Ma...
Kevin Barry on Reimagining the Novel July 10, 2024
Kevin Barry has, for almost two decades now, been heralded as one of Ireland’s most dazzlingly gifted fiction writers. Whether he’s conjuring a dystopian city on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, imagining John Lennon’s post-Beatles island pilgrimage, or fol...
Creation Myths July 10, 2024
In Marilynne Robinson’s latest book, Reading Genesis, she carries the theology implicit in her fiction back to its scriptural source. “So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once, that word...
The Limits of Liberation July 09, 2024
“Fantasy love,” claimed Andy Warhol, “is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting…Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway.” He lamented that social and scientific progress led to b...
Liberalism and the West’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’ July 05, 2024
In a recent essay for the New York Times, David Brooks lamented what he sees as the deficiencies of liberalism. Unlike religion, which Brooks believes has long satisfied the need for meaning and purpose in human life, liberalism has proven incapable ...
The Best Books of 2024 (So Far) July 04, 2024
We’re only halfway through 2024, but we’re already having trouble keeping up with the pace of exciting new releases. It’s been a particularly strong year for sophomore novels, with several emerging writers using the buzz around their debuts to launch...
Klay Thompson Made the Warriors Human July 03, 2024
Late one evening in January 2021, on the corner of 13th Street and MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, James Pullum saw a surprising face in the passenger window of a Mercedes G-Wagon that was preparing to stop in front of him.Pullum, an Oakland rap...
Sabrina Carpenter Is America’s Newest Pop Superstar July 01, 2024
In the summer of 1982, a rocker from Indiana was finally breaking on the charts after years of trying anything for a hit. Born John Mellencamp, he marketed himself, reluctantly, under his manager’s preferred sobriquet, John Cougar. After about three ...
The Real Crisis in Humanities March 29, 2024
When I launched The Honest Broker, I had no intention of writing about tech.My main vocation is in the world of music and culture. My mission in life is championing the arts as a source of enchantment and empowerment in human life.So why should I car...
Hanif Abdurraqib Knows What Makes Basketball Great March 28, 2024
For a sport so full of stories, basketball is scarcely represented in literature, or at least literature for adults. When we do get a basketball book, it’s usually full of statistics or reportage. Acclaimed author Hanif Abdurraqib’s latest, There’s A...
Dune, Belief, and the Entrepreneur Messiah March 27, 2024
Dune: Part Two—the second installment of Denis Villeneuve’s planned trilogy based on the Frank Herbert science-fiction saga—raises a problem for believers. That problem is the historicity of faith: the fact that intense, sincere religious belief has ...
The Battle for Hope March 26, 2024
Michel Houellebecq’s infamous novel Submission features Francois, a middle-aged literary scholar who functions as a postmodern rendering of Durtal, the main character of J.K. Huysmans’s turn-of-the-century decadent novels. Francois’s academic and per...
Human Dignity and the Politics of Dune March 25, 2024
Dune: Part Two is a blockbuster worthy of the name. Earning over $200 million dollars so far at the box office, it is the highest-grossing film of 2024, and proof that, in the era of superhero film fatigue—as well as the failure of storytelling that ...
VICTIM March 22, 2024
Mr. Martin pulled back the curtain. But my real transformation began at Donlon. It makes perfect sense now. Donlon was a whole new ecosystem where I could hone my new superpower. In fact, it was in one of my very first classes as a college stu...
The Age of Cultural Stagnation March 22, 2024
It is the age of signing open letters, then issuing apologies for signing them a few days later; of fretting about the effect of AI on human creativity, then boring anyone who will listen with “hilarious” responses generated from ChatGPT prompts; of ...
Kids’ Phone-Based Existence Is ‘Inhuman’ March 22, 2024
“Suppose that when your first child turned ten, a visionary billionaire whom you’ve never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars … Would you let her go?”“Of course not,” writes Jonathan Haidt.But the social psychologist ar...
Anti-Human Intelligence March 21, 2024
Human beings have been racing toward the day when their machines can fully augment their daily existence. The rise of generative artificial intelligence, in the form of applications, such as ChatGPT, is viewed by many computer experts as a massively ...
Criticism in the Internet Age March 21, 2024
I have had an encounter by proxy with novelist and critic Lauren Oyler. My wife once tweeted, innocently, “nothing in the world is better than a husband who is good with children.” It’s true: I am good with children. Oyler quote-tweeted, “Why am I se...
The Pope of Gender March 19, 2024
More than any other living academic, Judith Butler has seen her ideas seep out into the real world—in particular, a version of one of them. Butler’s big idea was that gender is a series of culturally meaningful performances ungrounded in any underlyi...
