Imagination

Story Stream

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things October 11, 2023

I’m lying down in a white cylinder barely wider than my body, surrounded on all sides by a mass of sophisticated machinery the size of a small camper van. It’s an fMRI machine, one of the technological marvels of modern neuroscience. Two small inflat...

Veni, Verdi, Vici October 06, 2023

A dear old friend suggested this spring that maybe we all should go to the opera, as in the New York Metropolitan Opera. Yours Truly and the Far Better Half said, yes, let’s, so it came to pass that we planned to see Giuseppi Verdi’s Requiem, which i...

Marriage Has Been Divorced From Love October 05, 2023

Because there is nothing Americans will not politicise, marriage is now at the heart of a culture war.On the traditionalist side, a loose assortment of classical conservatives, terminally online reactionary trad types, and the odd dissident feminist ...

Why Do Heroes Always Have Theme Songs October 05, 2023

I have a lot of extreme ideas about music.You can probably tell just by looking at the title of my new book: Music to Raise the Dead—which is currently available only on The Honest Broker.In my worldview, conductors take charge of things much larger ...

‘Self-Made’ Review: The Path to Perfection October 04, 2023

‘What a piece of work is a man!” said Hamlet. “In apprehension how like a god!”—yet also the “quintessence of dust.” Hamlet is both full of himself and a “king of infinite space,” lost in his own imagining. No wonder Shakespeare’s melancholy prince f...

American Homer October 02, 2023

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech to the American Historical Association. The former president—himself a historian of no small talent—was dismayed by the specialization and dry scientism even then overtaking the discipline and addressed his r...

The True Mystery in James Comey’s Crime Novel June 02, 2023

A novel should be more than just an artifact of imagination; it should be an act of revelation. That’s no less true of workaday genre books than it is of the most deliberately literary works: What distinguishes a good Michael Crichton or John Grisham...

Imagine Susan Sontag on Twitter June 02, 2023

If you are sitting around wondering what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment, a new collection of her writing and interviews from the ’70s about feminism, On Women, offers tantalizing glimmers and hints. Imagining Sontag, with her...

A Campus Satire for Our Time June 01, 2023

As far back as the 1960s, novelist Philip Roth declared that reality in the United States was outpacing the creative capacities of the writer of fiction. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” he wrote back then, “and the culture tosses...

Consider the Birds June 01, 2023

Imagine yourself as a star-nosed mole. You are about the size of a hamster, and you live most of your life underground in darkness. For this reason, you depend upon the eleven pairs of pink sensors that jut out from the front of your face. You depend...

High Art at the National Gallery March 29, 2023

In the January 1931 issue of The Criterion—T. S. Eliot’s magazine and The New Criterion’s namesake—the British biochemist and scholar Joseph Needham argued that human complexity is only truly understood when religious and scientific minds transcend t...

The Problem With Othering March 28, 2023

Poor Stacia Datskovska. The student at New York University recently wrote a piece about why she hated studying in Florence for her semester abroad. Before arriving, Datskovska imagined “summer flings with people who called me ‘bella’”. What she exper...

The Foxed and the Furbished March 23, 2023

To many of us—regardless of our age in reading years—a book will always be a mysteriously charged presence. Even unopened, it rekindles a sense of anticipation we first experienced in childhood and thankfully never outgrew. And once activated, it can...

The Imagination of Joseph Bottum March 21, 2023

Joseph Bottum has long been known for his elegant prose style, omnivorous literary allusiveness, and cultural critic’s eye for what we know, what we think we know, and the sometimes embarrassing gap between those things. His decades of editorial work...

Grünewald’s Towering Biblical Tableaux March 21, 2023

The Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, near the German border in northeastern France, sits at the end of many an art pilgrimage to a spectacular work: the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16) by Matthias Grünewald. This intense, imaginative polyptych—lauded by in...

Can GPT-4 Replace Me Yet? March 20, 2023

Like a lot of people, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the power of ChatGPT with GPT-4. So far, I’ve used it as a research assistant—it’s been helpful in surveying scientific literature, planning a home gym, and picking a movie to watch. But I wonde...

The Ghost at the Feast March 17, 2023

In the early 1950s, the internationally wandering rabbi, sociologist, and philosopher Jacob Taubes was pranked by his colleagues at Harvard. Taubes was known for playing with the limits of law and revolution, secular redemption and religious heresy, ...

The Afterimage of Joan Didion March 17, 2023

“My mind veers inflexibly toward the particular,” Joan Didion writes in her 1965 essay “On Morality.” When it comes to the concrete and specific, you might say there’s a continuum among her cohort (now mostly gone) of great American essayists. At one...

Orwell, Camus and Truth March 13, 2023

One afternoon in April 1945, a dishevelled Englishman walked into one such café. He was a war correspondent for the Observer — fond of shag-tobacco and Indian tea. His pen-name was George Orwell. Orwell was meeting Albert Camus – the distinguished wr...

The Passion of Scott Adams March 07, 2023

How do you imagine the woke beast? It is rough, surely, and slouches towards some unprofitable venue, so not Bethlehem. I think of it as something ravenous but episodic in its appetites, a sort of Polyphemus for hire. It gorges in a destructive frenz...

On the Suicide of Liberal Education March 03, 2023

The dust jacket of John Agresto’s new book, The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do about It, depicts Gore Hall at Harvard in the 1870s. Perhaps this is a subtle indication of what lies within: Gore Hall, ...