- Pauline Kael was useless as a guide to movies. She was indispensable as an autobiographer of the Age of Cinema [55hr]
- The political right often acts in bad faith in its attacks on academia; in response, academics lapse into tendentious moralism [55hr]
- During the golden age of Oxbridge dons, intellectual elites were treated as a national treasure. Then came Margaret Thatcher [55hr]
- Rachel Cusk’s new novel was billed as “literary scandal of the year.” But strip away the controversy and it’s instantly forgettable [79hr]
- Americans are indifferent to art. But they obsess over art heists. "It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars [79hr]
- Gooey, disgusting AI slop is everywhere these days, including the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here comes the AI police [79hr]
- Sumerian tablets, Soviet cybernetics, Google server banks — human history can be seen via our ever more elaborate data apparatuses [100hr]
- Broke and in search of a sinecure, Edgar Allan Poe went to Washington in 1843 to try to meet the president’s son. A fiasco ensued [100hr]
- Babitz bubbles, Renata revivals, Hardwick hurricanes: How NYRB Classics built its name by resurrecting old and overlooked novelists [100hr]
- A tour through Eve Babitz’s letters reveals that this supremely insouciant, glamorous writer was once boring [127hr]
- In 1970, 1 in 13 four-year degrees was in English. Today it's 1 in 60. What happened? “Canon" became a dirty word [127hr]
- A wine so thick you could write with it and pâté made from cat meat. What did boys obsess over in the Renaissance? Food [127hr]
- Soviet censors mangled Vasily Grossman's wartime journalism. The original copy reveals a palimpsest of what propaganda demanded [200hr]
- Siegfried Kracauer believed films could foretell political disaster. What does his approach make of today’s cinema? [200hr]
- “As intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be”: F.R. Leavis’s torching of C.P. Snow brought passion back into cultural life [200hr]