- Fowler dismissed them as the mark of an amateur; Adorno called them soundless cymbal-crashing. How do you feel about exclamation points? [24hr]
- Literary scholars think about words that wound with a mix of conceptual incoherence and primness that has become all too common [24hr]
- We are entering a world of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Others will use AI to think less [24hr]
- Religious rites, rock concerts, and other transcendent moments stem from directing our attention to “something more than human” [48hr]
- We should lower the threshold for when to start treating AI systems as potentially conscious [48hr]
- Hannibal, Missouri is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain. "The perfume of manufactured nostalgia hangs heavy in the air" [48hr]
- Tiny honorariums, endless reading, and a bewildering amount of randomness — book prizes don’t work how you think [144hr]
- Afternoon naps, long walks, and five hours of work a day. The lifestyles of great intellectuals reveal the value of spontaneous thought [144hr]
- Vasily Grossman died believing that his masterpiece had been seized by the KGB and lost forever [144hr]
- “Silly on top of silly.” To some sociologists, the field’s yearslong drift toward left-wing advocacy is self-defeating [168hr]
- Hit by a car, beset by family tragedy, diagnosed with cancer: William T. Vollmann may be dying, but he’s also just finished a 3,000 page opus [168hr]
- Where Kant and Rousseau theorized, George Forster sailed the world to learn what makes humans human [168hr]
- Eric Hobsbawm made the 20th century intelligible. But he never could fully explain his own communism [192hr]
- “We should not start from good old things, but from bad new things.” Brecht’s motto is a guide for intellectuals [192hr]
- Oscar Wilde foresaw machines freeing humanity for beauty and leisure. Greed has other plans [192hr]