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Intellectual life

Apocalypse Always

by Walter Kirn,

As a teenager in the Mormon Church, I was led to believe I might live to see the world end — the fallen world of sin and imperfection, that is, which…

Bee-Brained

by Vauhini Vara,

Inside the competitive Indian-American spelling community

Le Mot Injuste

by Abdelfattah Kilito,

By Abdelfattah Kilito, from The Tongue of Adam, which was published this month by New Directions. Kilito was born in Morocco in 1945. Translated from the French by Robyn Creswell.

The Watchmen

by Alan Jacobs,

What became of the Christian intellectuals?

Atlas Aggregated

by Walter Kirn,

No social encounter delights me more than meeting a doctor at a cocktail party. In clinical settings, doctors tend to be guarded and aloof. Catch one with a whiskey in…

Save Our Public Universities

by Marilynne Robinson,

In defense of America’s best idea

Rule, Britannica

by John Crowley,

They look like a segment of Borges’s Library of Babel: twenty-four volumes almost uniform in bulk (a thousand pages each, give or take a few), identically bound in a reddish-brown…

The Mother of All Questions

by Rebecca Solnit,

I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of people was…

The Genealogy of Orals

by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche,

By Friedrich Nietzsche, from Anti-Education, which will be published in November by New York Review Books. The volume gathers five lectures on “the future of our educational institutions” that the…

The Neoliberal Arts

by William Deresiewicz,

How college sold its soul to the market

The Act of Art

by Charles Bukowski,

From a March 1961 letter sent by Charles Bukowski to Jon Webb, the editor of The Outsider and an early champion of Bukowski’s work. Bukowski (1920–94) was the author of…