Arts & Letters Daily | Substack

Forced to sign a document asserting no ill treatment in 1938, Sigmund Freud added, “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone”... more » For Louise Bourgeois, pain was an unavoidable condition of life. No artistic “remedies or excuses” could lessen its intensity...

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Mensa’s Annual Gathering is a reminder that intelligence and test-taking are very different talents.

Aug 18

"On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, … we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how" …

Aug 17

"On the Internet, we endlessly raise awareness, … we signal-boost and call out, and we argue about where our attention should be directed, and how" …

Aug 16

Philip Larkin's penis. Is speculation about the poet's privates a prurient sideshow or a key to understanding his work? ... more » Mark Fisher was…

Aug 15

Elaine Castillo is troubled by the way white readers seek out Black writers as moral arbiters rather than as artists ... more » Human ingenuity has led…

Aug 12

The problem of empathy. For Edith Stein, a Jewish-born nun killed at Auschwitz, it was an innate part of being human ... more » What gets written when…

Aug 11

Turd in your teeth, flim-flam, fiddle-faddle, fible-fable: What counts as an obscenity is always in flux... more » John Locke in the New World. What…

Aug 10

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