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In a recent TLS, Richard Beard reviewed The Lascaux Notebooks, a collection of verse attributed to Jean-Luc Champerret. It’s described by the publisher as “the oldest poetry yet discovered,” based on 17,000-year-old markings in the Lascaux caves. According to the jacket copy…
Adam Kirsch’s recent book, The Revolt Against Humanity, is not what you’d expect. Despite the title, it’s an oddly unpolemical account of tendencies in “post-humanism” that embrace our extinction, written in a flat but fluent style, in the series “Columbia Global Reports”—as if…
I’ve been having trouble writing. I don’t usually find it so hard. Doing philosophy: that’s hard. Having good ideas, if and when I do, a miracle. But writing these short essays should be simple. I don’t need to have much to say, only to sluice the stream of consciousness into…
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Leaving London for LA: two fascinating essays that are not—despite the venue—about books. In one, Jorge Cotte dissects the second series of Mike White’s acerbic tragicomedy, The White Lotus: Like other satires of wealth and luxury, The White Lotus articulates the very promises it…

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As if on cue: a novel whose unnamed protagonist perseverates on her own artistic freedom. The narrator of Emily Hall’s The Longcut begins as she means…
From New York to London: topical news in a recent LRB. First, Andrew O’Hagan on the book of the moment: Harry Mountbatten-Windsor’s Spare: Harry’s truth…
Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts is, among other things, a 140-page subtweet. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central…
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Last week I caught up on the New York Review of Books. In January, Colin Thubron wrote about ruins. One of his subjects was a volume by Matthew Green…
In Life is Hard, I distinguished “a meaningful life”—in which one engages, more or less successfully, with things that matter—from “the meaning of…
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Last weekend, I visited the new Cy Twombly exhibition at the MFA—Making Past Present—in the company of a 9-year-old child. I should have anticipated her…
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Over the break, I read books and essays. Some were essays about books, like this one by Jonathan Drummond, reviewing Jody Rosen on bicycles in the TLS…
One thing I love about standup comedy—which is perhaps my favourite form of contemporary art—is that it is at once unmediated and reflexive. Standups…
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Under the Net

Philosophy as a Guide to Life

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