Interviews

Allan Janik
The Jewish Philosopher Hitler Loved: Allan Janik Untangles the Otto Weininger Paradox
On the morning of October 4, 1903, a twenty-three-year-old Viennese philosopher named Otto Weininger rented a room in the house in Vienna's Schwarzspanierstrasse where Ludwig van Beethoven had died, and... Read more...
Calculated Risks: Cheryl Misak on the Life and Mind of Frank Ramsey
Calculated Risks: Cheryl Misak on the Life and Mind of Frank Ramsey
In January 1930, a 26-year-old Cambridge don was admitted to Guy's Hospital in London following complications from jaundice and died within weeks of an operation whose exact nature has never... Read more...
Catching the Butterfly: Dana Dragunoiu on the Elusive Vladimir Nabokov
Catching the Butterfly: Dana Dragunoiu on the Elusive Vladimir Nabokov
In the summer of 1958, a novel that had been rejected by four American publishers and quietly printed in Paris by a press better known for pornography arrived in the... Read more...
The Heretic of Logic: James R. Meyer on Why Gödel, Searle, and Math’s Sacred Cows Don’t Hold Up
The Heretic of Logic: James R. Meyer on Why Gödel, Searle, and Math’s Sacred Cows Don’t Hold Up
In 1930, at a philosophy conference in Königsberg, a young Kurt Gödel waited quietly for his moment to speak. The gathering had been convened to celebrate the triumph of formal... Read more...
David Schwartz
Was Enrico Fermi Really the Last Man Who Knew Everything? David Schwartz Investigates
On the afternoon of December 2, 1942, a group of scientists gathered beneath the stands of a disused squash court at the University of Chicago and waited. They were standing... Read more...
Biljana Dojčinović
The Complicated Brilliance of John Updike: A Conversation with Biljana Dojčinović
In January 2009, John Updike checked himself into a hospice in Danvers, Massachusetts, and spent his final days doing what he had done virtually every morning of his adult life:... Read more...
Robert Miltner
The Things Robert Miltner Talks About When He Talks About Raymond Carver
In 1981, an editor at Knopf named Gordon Lish sat down with a manuscript Raymond Carver had submitted and did something that has generated argument ever since. He cut. He... Read more...
Alberto Pionke
Measured Liberty: Albert Pionke on the Paradoxes of John Stuart Mill
One morning in 1826, John Stuart Mill woke up and felt nothing. He was twenty years old, had read more than most scholars twice his age, and had been constructed—there... Read more...
Jay Parini
The Unrepentant Aristocrat: Jay Parini on Gore Vidal’s Enduring (and Maddening) Legacy
In the summer of 1968, two men sat across from each other on live television during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and conducted one of the most famous exchanges... Read more...
James L. W. West III
In the Heart of Darkness: James L. W. West III on William Styron’s Life and Legacy
In 1967, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner to immediate and tumultuous acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize and selling hundreds of thousands of copies, as readers hailed it as... Read more...
Helena Kelly
Decoding Dickens: Helena Kelly Exposes the Life and Lies Behind the Icon
On the night of June 9, 1865, a train traveling from Folkestone to London derailed on a bridge under repair at Staplehurst, sending several carriages plunging into the river below.... Read more...
Jay Parini
Navigating Borges' Labyrinth: Jay Parini’s Powerful Journey of Memory and Meaning
In the autumn of 1971, a young American graduate student named Jay Parini found himself driving a nearly blind Jorge Luis Borges through the Scottish Highlands in a borrowed car... Read more...