May 22, 2024
In Written in Water: The Ephemeral Life of the Classic in Art, intellectual historian and critic Rochelle Gurstein explores the nature of the classic in art from the 18th century… READ MORE
May 21, 2024
Sean H. Vanatta— Big banks charge the highest credit card interest rates, at least according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). In February, the agency reported that some of the largest… READ MORE
May 9, 2024
It needs to be said that, unlike some more recent cultures, the joy-loving and disarmingly honest ancient Greeks did not believe that suffering ennobled, educated, or improved the character of… READ MORE
May 6, 2024
Sophus Helle— Authors in antiquity knew from prolonged experience the labor that is needed to carry a text through time. Books do not move across centuries on their own. They… READ MORE
May 2, 2024
Richard Sieburth— Autobiography and autofiction are all the rage in France, viz. Annie Ernaux’s recent Nobel Prize. Anticipating this trend, ex-surrealist Michel Leiris devoted much of his literary career to… READ MORE
April 30, 2024
Peter Burke— Since the 1990s, a new kind of history has been flourishing: the history of knowledge—or better, the history of different kinds of knowledge, knowledges in the plural. Turning… READ MORE
April 24, 2024
Rachel S. Gross— In the 1970s, outdoor clothing and equipment catalogs were full of products that might have seemed completely unrelated to the outdoors a decade earlier. One old-school REI… READ MORE
April 22, 2024
Gregory M. Thaler— Palm oil is the world’s most traded vegetable oil, popping up in everything from ice cream to packaged bread to lipstick. This global glut of cheap palm-based… READ MORE
April 20, 2024
Mike Jay— The first sustained interaction between the modern West and the hashish eaters of the Arab world occurred during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, which culminated in a… READ MORE
April 19, 2024
Stephen Mitchell, who is known for bringing ancient texts to vibrant new life, has now translated Catullus’s poems for a new generation of readers in Catullus: Selected Poems. Join us as… READ MORE
A Conversation with Trudier Harris on Bigger: A Literary Life