- Sometime between the late Middle Ages and the 18th century, people came to believe that love should play a role in the selection of a spouse [10hr]
- "All writers will be buried, but try to bury their books, and somebody will always dig them up again" [10hr]
- Robert Wilson created spectacles that defied interpretation. So his critics wrote about their own ideas instead [10hr]
- Edward Hopper bristled at the “lonely” label: “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint” [34hr]
- Annie Ernaux: “Alfred Nobel’s intentions were noble. But everything that follows — the mountains of mail, the endless requests — is a burden” [34hr]
- Sylvia Plath’s verbal calisthenics. Nothing was off limits, including sonnets, villanelles, poems in terza rima, and even Audenesque quatrains [34hr]
- The last Shakespearean. The professional literary specialist is increasingly an endangered species [57hr]
- The philosopher Bernard Williams refused every ism. That made him hard to pin down. And hard to refute [57hr]
- Curiosity is a cure for certainty. It’s also the enemy of humility, modesty, and self-doubt. Adam Phillips explains [132hr]
- How did the journal Telos, champion of Marcuse and Gramsci, produce two editors who would serve in Trump’s State Department? [132hr]
- Disgust and desire. In the 16th century, a woman might carry a peeled apple in her armpit until it absorbed her scent, then give it to her lover [132hr]
- The Guide for the Perplexed is a perplexing work — its difficulty is, in part, the point. Can fluent English do it justice? [153hr]
- The femininization of the deathcare industry. Advances in cosmetics, among other things, are pushing women into the mortuary arts [153hr]
- The life of a Capitol Hill intern involves bamboozling policyspeak, hellacious heat, free food at AEI, and a parade of utterly charmless Tattes [153hr]
- Fields of lilies, fractal landscapes, idioms, DNA, Renoir’s orange, human anatomy: Why is the world full of so much beauty? [180hr]
- The Souls of Animals [12hr]
- No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on Loss and the Meaning of Life [22hr]
- The Founding Father of Neuroscience on Solitude, the Search for Truth, and the Ideal Environment for Breakthroughs [38hr]
- I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio the Consciousness of the Body [42hr]
- Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity [50hr]
- The Art of Advancing with Age: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life [50hr]
- Love in the Time of Dinosaurs [59hr]
- Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Moving Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a Lifetime of Sorrow in the Making [64hr]
- The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude [93hr]
- Meteor of Joy: The Young People’s Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations [113hr]
- Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life [118hr]
- Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song [119hr]
- Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends [138hr]
- Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World [138hr]
- When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive [153hr]