Interviews

Not Just Pure Reason: Pablo Muchnik on Immanuel Kant's Far-Reaching Influence
Not Just Pure Reason: Pablo Muchnik on Immanuel Kant's Far-Reaching Influence
In 1793, at the age of 69, Immanuel Kant published a book that promptly landed him in trouble with the Prussian government. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone argued... Read more...
Peter Holland
Shakespeare As You Like It: Peter Holland’s View of The Bard’s Life and Works
How does a writer from Elizabethan England still manage to capture the human heart with such uncanny precision? Four centuries after his death, William Shakespeare remains the most performed, most... Read more...
Of Men and Machines: David Leavitt on How Alan Turing Had Computers Down to Science
Of Men and Machines: David Leavitt on How Alan Turing Had Computers Down to Science
In the spring of 1954, a housekeeper arrived at a modest home in Wilmslow, England, and found Alan Turing dead beside a half-eaten apple. He was 41 years old. The... Read more...
James Flannery
James Flannery: W. B. Yeats' Poetry Is A “Dialogue Of Self And Soul”
In the summer of 1889, a twenty-three-year-old William Butler Yeats opened his front door in London and found himself face to face with Maud Gonne. She was twenty-two, strikingly beautiful,... Read more...
Malcolm Macmillan
It's Not All In The Mind: Malcolm Macmillan Analyzes Freudian Slips
In September 1823, a twenty-five-year-old railway construction foreman named Phineas Gage was tamping down blasting powder in a Vermont rock face when the charge detonated prematurely. The explosion drove a... Read more...
Tristram Hunt
The Brave New World: Tristram Hunt On Marx and Engels' Revolutionary Vision
In the autumn of 1842, a twenty-two-year-old Friedrich Engels arrived in Manchester to work at his father's cotton mill and found himself inside the most brutal laboratory of industrial capitalism... Read more...
Playing Along With Mozart: Robert Levin Gives Mozart's Music a High Score
Playing Along With Mozart: Robert Levin Gives Mozart's Music a High Score
In 1787, a letter arrived in Vienna from Leopold Mozart to his daughter Nannerl. It contained news of their family, observations on the weather, and a passing remark that Wolfgang... Read more...
Anne-Sophie Mutter: The Mozart Effect Is Not All In The Brain (It Is Also Soulfood)
Anne-Sophie Mutter: The Mozart Effect Is Not All In The Brain (It Is Also Soulfood)
On the night of December 5, 1791, a 35-year-old man died in his Vienna apartment of a fever whose precise cause has never been definitively established, leaving behind an unfinished... Read more...
A Life by Design: Nicholas Fox Weber on Le Corbusier's Enduring Legacy
A Life by Design: Nicholas Fox Weber on Le Corbusier's Enduring Legacy
On the morning of August 27, 1965, a 77-year-old man ignored his doctor's strict orders, walked down to the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, and went for a swim. Le Corbusier had... Read more...
Allen Esterson
No Pure Seduction: Allen Esterson On Freud's Disputed Theories, Views and Methods
In the winter of 1896, Sigmund Freud presented a paper to the Society for Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna, claiming to have discovered the origin of hysteria. He had found,... Read more...
Gregory Chaitin
It's Not All In The Numbers: Gregory Chaitin Explains Kurt Gödel's Mathematical Complexities
In the autumn of 1930, a twenty-four-year-old Kurt Gödel attended a conference in Königsberg and quietly announced, in a single understated sentence during a roundtable discussion, that he had proved... Read more...
Kant Can: Allen Wood Clears a Path to Immanuel Kant's Complex Philosophies
Kant Can: Allen Wood Clears a Path to Immanuel Kant's Complex Philosophies
In the spring of 1781, after more than a decade of almost complete silence, Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason. He was fifty-seven years old, and his colleagues... Read more...