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Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and raised within the liberal Protestant culture of New England. Abraham Joshua Heschel was... Read More

As I made my way past the window displays and Salvation Army Santas on Fifth Avenue, I happened upon a sign that read “This Holiday... Read More

The scene: Wednesday night, Mulberry Street in Soho, New York City. In an event space that Airbnb transformed into an underground ping-pong... Read More

There’s a kind of nausea or vertigo I get when confronted by an extremely large number. Kant called it the mathematical sublime, the... Read More

In November 2025, a user of AI assistant Claude 4,5 Opus discovered something unusual: an internal file describing the model’s... Read More

Twenty years ago, the year of Saul Bellow’s death, I chanced upon an unusually clean copy of Ravelstein in a ramshackle... Read More

You know about the annual meeting in Davos, where anonymous shareholders and genderless bureaucrats mingle at private chalets. Like knowledge... Read More

BRIGHT ORANGE BLIMPS over Los Angeles, branded Nahmias jumpsuits. A belated NYFF premiere via a “secret screening.” Pictures of... Read More

The movies are dying — or at least my desire to see new wide-releases. A myriad of reasons feed into that cynicism, but ultimately,... Read More

Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme, and two of his sons served in WWII. “It is no wonder, then, that some of the most striking... Read More

An essentially illiterate man, someone who’d never read a novel or even a newspaper article all the way through without difficulty,... Read More

As 2025 draws to a close, I’m going to invite Critic readers to join me in one New Year’s Resolution for 2025: I will not... Read More

We get the world we praise and support. If you honor and reward a behavior, you get more of it. If you don’t support what you need... Read More

The Obsolescence of the Human, Günther Anders First published in German in 1956, the philosopher Günther Anders’ The... Read More

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Two lovers who are officially Going Through It decamp to a Cabin in the Woods to work things... Read More

Being the editor of Law & Liberty affords me more time than most to ponder the relationship between freedom and responsibility.... Read More

It is rather more than a century since Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus appeared. Its impact was sensational, and it ran... Read More

American film director John Ford despised intellectual snobbery and affectations in cinema. For him, the story itself represented the center... Read More

Much like Pluribus's Carol after thousands of alien body-snatchers packed up and left town, the life of a TV critic is pretty damn... Read More

At the risk of infuriating diehard doomsayers, has there ever been a better time to be a reader? Some may point to other periods that seem... Read More

“Zen is boring.” Those are the words of Korean Zen master Seung Sahn. The quote appears in the book The Intimate... Read More

MELISSA ANDERSON and I are at Film Forum watching Le Tableau volé (2024), Pascal Bonitzer’s drama about the discovery... Read More

Has all of human history already been digitized? AI and Google have created a real-life Borgesian Library of Babel, scarfing up millennia of... Read More

The annual debate about Christmas movies is now reaching its zenith as the holiday nears. Read More

In 1588, Galileo had not yet looked through a telescope. Microscopes, pendulum clocks, barometers, and steam pumps were decades away. Francis... Read More