Intellectuals
Story Stream
How Intellectuals Found God December 31, 2024
In the beginning, Matthew Crawford believed in nothing.“The question of God wasn’t even on the radar,” the best-selling author told me.He was 8 when his parents split, and he followed his mother to a Hindu ashram in Oakland, California. There were tr...
TV’s Year of Big Disappointments December 31, 2024
It’s the end of the year, and disappointment is in the air. It has been for a while now. Given the current state of liberal politics in the United States, it’s easy to imagine why it might feel that way. 2024 has been a cascade of disappointments, a ...
“The Civilized World Seems Tired of Its Civilization” December 09, 2024
“Israel is pressed, it is a suffering country,” a sympathetic visitor says with a sigh. International organizations, the intellectual Left, and much of Europe are arrayed against it. American support is shaky. The Israelis are fighting for their exis...
The Novels That Made Us December 06, 2024
If there is any cultural and intellectual institution today that has the sanctity of the old New Yorker, it’s the New York Review Books Classics series, conceived of and edited by Edwin Frank. NYRB Classics rescues out-of-print masterpieces, especial...
What’s Wrong With the Intellectuals? February 13, 2024
Nietzsche’s meaning here is open-ended regarding the intellectual as human being. To make things simpler is a good, even necessary, activity in human life. In this sense, we are all thinkers. In our daily lives, we turn the endlessly varied and nearl...
Permission to Speak February 06, 2024
We live in a world of mutually assured cancellation. Piled-on abuse and career destruction are now standard when dealing with political or intellectual opponents.I wrote about this on my personal Substack last month. There, I drew on the escalating—a...
On Anne Carson’s 'Wrong Norma' February 01, 2024
It’s almost a punchline at this point: every writer is a little in love with and a little afraid of Anne Carson. Perhaps less with Carson herself (who is famously private, and allergic to the spotlight) and more with what she gets away with: living a...
Ben Lerner, Personal Poet February 01, 2024
Who is Ben Lerner? Readers of his fiction will be able to supply some answers: an intellectual and a museumgoer, a Midwesterner turned Brooklyn-dwelling dad, someone deeply interested in the world around him but ambivalent about his commitments towar...
