- The strange afterlife of Hannah Arendt. When she died, no one mistook her for a major thinker. Why the post-mortem canonization? [<1hr]
- When Camus died in a car crash, he was carrying a train ticket. "The greatest proponent of absurdism suffered an absurd death" [<1hr]
- John Updike produced upward of 25,000 letters in his lifetime, an almost exhaustive account of one man’s pleasures [24hr]
- The world’s first AI actress. With British sass and messy hair, “Tilly Norwood” is landing film deals in the $10-50 million range [24hr]
- “What if the identity politics undergirding “left ‘cancel culture’” was always pretty much the same as the identity politics of offended Christians?” [24hr]
- Francis Crick was no reclusive genius. He was loud and charismatic, a philandering poetry lover with an affinity for risque parties [48hr]
- With warm, gentle stories populated by cats, tea, and rain, “cozy lit” has arrived with a waft of hypnotic passivity [48hr]
- What was love in the 12th century? What was anger in ancient Egypt? We take emotions as universal and immutable — but what if they aren’t? [48hr]
- What’s investors’ hope for humanoid robots? They become a $65 trillion market and replace all human labor [120hr]
- Want an antidote to both anti-science propaganda and to reductive slogans in science’s defense? Read philosophy of science [120hr]
- Maybe you’ve mulled activism v. performative activism or masculinity v. performative masculinity. But what about performative reading? [120hr]
- Elias Canetti saw death as a cosmic offense, an intolerable humiliation. As he reframed Descartes, “I hate death, therefore I am” [144hr]
- Suffering from severe apathy? Your laziness may have a neurological cause [144hr]
- We live in a state of epistemic anarchy. A return to elite gatekeeping won't work. Is the only hope to persuade the misinformed? [144hr]
- To read Czeslaw Milosz's World War II-era poems is to engage a man thinking about hope — what sustains it, and what happens when it's lost [168hr]