Latest posts
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Banned and Burned: The Classics That Scandalized Their Age
In January 1857, a public prosecutor named Ernest Pinard stood before a Paris court and accused a novel of an offense against public morals and religion.…
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Grimm’s Fairy Tales: The Dark Originals
The stepsisters in the Grimms’ Cinderella do not merely fail to fit the slipper. They take a knife to themselves. The mother hands the first one a blade…
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Kant’s ‘What Is Enlightenment?’: Dare to Know
In December 1783, a Berlin clergyman named Johann Friedrich Zöllner published an essay arguing that couples should be married in church, and dropped into…
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Robinson Crusoe: The First English Novel and the Self-Made Man
In 1719 a sixty-year-old Londoner with a long career as a merchant, a spy, a pamphleteer, and a bankrupt published a book whose full title ran to a…
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The Communist Manifesto: Reading Marx Without the Caricature
Few documents have been more thoroughly read about and less thoroughly read than the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the slim pamphlet Karl Marx and…
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Alice in Wonderland: The Logic of Nonsense
On a golden afternoon in July 1862, a shy Oxford mathematics don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three young daughters of the college dean rowing…
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The Birth of Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Wells
Science fiction has no founding charter and no single birthday, but it has a remarkably tight gestation. In a span of roughly eighty years — from a rainy…
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Thoreau’s Walden: The Case for Living Deliberately
On the Fourth of July, 1845 — Independence Day, and Thoreau chose the date on purpose — a Harvard-educated handyman and sometime schoolteacher moved into…
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Tom Sawyer and the Lost World of American Boyhood
Mark Twain called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer “a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air.” It is a revealing thing to say about a book that…
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Oscar Wilde: The Wit, the Plays, and the Trial That Ruined Him
Oscar Wilde spent his career insisting that the mask tells more truth than the face. “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,” he wrote; the…