We live in the age of technological magic, not supernatural grace and miracle. Not so fast, says Alexander Theroux.

Jeffrey Wald reviews Alexander Theroux’s Early Stories and finds a little grace

Dorothea Veit-Schlegel shared some commitments with male Romantics, but she critiqued many of their central ideas, especially in relation to gender, education, and personal development.

Anna Ezekiel recovers an essential Romantic thinker and writer

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in October on our modern life.

This sense of repetition—of just how persistent the titular state of “crisis” in the humanities has been—gives one pause. It is in the space of this pause that their criticisms may land with force.

Jonathan Heaps reviews Permanent Crisis

Truman’s decision was an inevitably flawed human attempt to come to grips with a wicked problem, in the absence of perfect knowledge and in the full knowledge that the stakes were world-historical in significance.

Andrew Latham on counterfactuals and the atom bomb

Counterfactual history allows us to sharpen our judgment by juxtaposing what did happen with what could have happened.

Andrew Latham on thinking through counterfactuals and the bombing of Hiroshima

The protagonists of “Beautiful World” are no longer confessional, but resigned. Their attitudes towards politics and religion alike are structured by ambivalence.

Kathy Chow reviews Sally Rooney’s latest meditation on modern life

Gatsby believes in the future. He trusts in that future where the past will be present again. It is the present that escapes him, and so he falls from the glory he has gathered to himself.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on having all the money and none of the time

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in September on our modern life.

Bypassing the quadrille of courtship, Joukovsky repurposes the marriage plot as a witty, unsparing dissection of human vanity and a quasi-sociological look at the mores of America’s de facto aristocracy.

Trevor Merrill reviews A. Natasha Joukovsky’s sparkling, multifaceted debut novel, The Portrait of a Mirror

There are many roads to modern liberty, but some focus not on the triumphant will but on the richness of the person and our commitments to one another.

Fred Bauer on an off-liberalism marked by care, duty, and solidarity rather than autonomy

Despite their imperfections, mystical texts are worth keeping alive in modernity—particularly in periods of authoritarianisms and violence—because they offer glimpses of other possibilities.

Brenna Moore on the life and work of a great figure of the Ressourcement

The word “artifice” means handiwork, work of skill. Artificial intelligence is a wondrous work. And yet, if we allow that artifice to define our reality… we may become artifices ourselves, handiwork of our handiworks.

John Dolan and Jordan Wales on AI and us

Rather than being merely anti-liberal or anti-postliberal, the off-liberal reveals (and perhaps revels in) the heterogeneity of sources for the so-called “liberal” order.

Fred Bauer on developing an off-liberal approach to modern political predicaments

In remaining unknown, in speaking from the eccentric radicality of their own linguistic-ontological complexes, Caliban and Anthony become the voices of aesthetic criticism within their worlds.

Daniel Fitzpatrick on critique from margins

Each month we keep track of the different paths modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we found in August on our modern life.

The meaning of our personhood becomes a necessary object of examination wherever some technology is deeply entwined with our lives, particularly when that technology purports to replicate what we are.

Jordan Wales and John Dolan on AI and us

Presentism is an obsession with the present that forgets its relationship with the past, that covers history and humanity with a blanket of generic sameness that muffles difference and dulls memory.

Donato Loia reviews Charles Saumarez Smith’s The Art Museum in Modern Times

The notion that the people suffering from mass incarceration could testify truthfully about the system’s horrors was, and still often is, contentious. . . . Even more controversial: the idea that incarcerated people can critically analyze their position.

Luke Fidler on complaint and justice in prison

The crisis of deep history is a crisis for our modern self-understanding, and a short chronology of human civilization is no longer adequate for explaining our place in the world.

Evan Kuehn on the need for a longer view of history