Semantic Coherence: Arts & Letters Daily – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

VERITAS ODIT MORAS
Thursday May 28, 2026
Support Arts & Letters Daily

[H4] Subscribe to our Newsletter

Alternate view

Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

May 28, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
"The age when you can run a literary magazine on trust is over. You can either decide AI submissions are fine, or you can filter for them"... more »
[H3] New Books
Trivial pursuits. How do you know if a game — whether elegant, complex, or embarrassingly simple — truly matters?... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
"Information commons" sounds democratic. But it suggests that knowledge is something you retrieve, not carry... more »
May 27, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
She called Judith Butler evil and Susan Sontag boring. Camille Paglia is 79 and unrepentant ... more »
[H3] New Books
He appeared to be a pauper, but John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, was quite successful, owning 1,200 acres across three states... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
For Sergiu Klainerman, mathematics and physics aren't neighboring disciplines. They're two fields destined to converge... more »
May 26, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies, and so it was the natural home of the genre-defying Donald Barthelme... more »
[H3] New Books
Leslie Fiedler, the wild man of American letters, argued that our literature was less realism than repression... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
On BookTok, the reader’s response to a book isn’t evidence in service of a judgment; it is itself the judgment... more »
May 22, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Is criticism a moral good? In 1968, the question was unavoidable. Now we've forgotten to ask.... more »
[H3] New Books
Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno: How recondite mid-century thinkers became villains in America's culture wars... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Em dashes, bad metaphors, and not-X-but-Y sentence constructions. Did a literary prize go to an entirely AI-written short story?... more »
May 21, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Homer and the mummy. Why was a fragment of the Iliad buried with a body more than 2,000 years ago?... more »
[H3] New Books
"Show don't tell." "Kill your darlings." Writers love rules, even when rules can't solve their problems... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
The naturalist John Cade studied things like snakes’ tails and the kookaburra’s cry. Then he started giving lithium to manic-depressives... more »
May 20, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
He was imprisoned by the Nazis; she was sent to a sanitorium. For Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, love was not a luxury they could afford... more »
[H3] New Books
At Stanford, undergraduates faking perfection are thrown ungodly sums of money. But what’s it all for?... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
A.S. Hamrah's film criticism elides the distinction between comic prose-poetry and reflexive contrarianism... more »
May 19, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
That presidential biography, narrative of a shipwreck, or forgotten war story? “The days when dad books reigned supreme are gone” ... more »
[H3] New Books
The canine gaze. Dogs in Western art are surrogate viewers and compositional anchors... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
On Substack, young “writers” jockey for status, but virtually none are writing about anything other than the world of writers itself... more »
May 18, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Marilyn Monroe was the world's most photographed woman, and among its loneliest. To be wanted is not to be loved... more »
[H3] New Books
Translating Kafka. Borges found freedom in his labyrinths. For Primo Levi, it was like recovering from an illness... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Universities preach AI literacy. On campus, the reality looks more like cognitive surrender... more »
May 15, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
He was a spy, a Zen priest, a fisherman, and a Bigfoot obsessive: Peter Matthiessen never had just one life... more »
[H3] New Books
T.M. Scanlon’s 1982 essay “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” heralded the emergence of a new ethical theory... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Loud, naïve, ham fisted, needy. The American tourist used to be regarded as the most obnoxious creature in the world... more »
May 14, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Nicholas Christakis was at the center of Yale's Halloween controversy. He wants to move on. The culture war has other ideas... more »
[H3] New Books
Living in Berlin during World War II was like dancing on a volcano — full of raucous parties between the bombing raids... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Liberal democracy and liberal education fell together. To save the first, we must resurrect the second... more »
May 13, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
“If you’re in a household where the currency is stories, it’s an environment which is conducive to learning those tricks”... more »
[H3] New Books
It’s been over a decade, and scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began. What went wrong?... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
The weirdness of quantum matter. A seemingly simple question — what is the world made of? — might have a surprising answer... more »
May 12, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
The caricature of Camus as an absurdist and existentialist is a convenient fiction. But fiction nonetheless... more »
[H3] New Books
"Cultural Marxism" means whatever you need it to mean. Which is why it never goes away. ... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
The problem with a literary culture of images is that images have an exceptionally short shelf life. People soon grow bored with them... more »
May 11, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Narrative history moves us., which is exactly the problem. We mistake emotion for understanding... more »
[H3] New Books
Zoom out and it becomes clear that the defenders of humanistic liberalism have been decisively losing the battle over ideals... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
He warned against idleness, then stopped doing anything at all. The compelling contradictions of Samuel Johnson... more »
May 8, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
David Chalmers was wrong. There is no “hard problem” of consciousness, and the supposed “explanatory gap” is nonsensical... more »
[H3] New Books
James Schuyler, the most neglected poet of the New York school, may now be its most necessary... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
"In the current climate where poet is activist (or vice versa), the poems also start to look a lot like cant"... more »
May 7, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Jonathan Swift’s last joke. His epitaph is, it turns out, an elaborate way of haunting an enemy from the grave... more »
[H3] New Books
Ibram X. Kendi’s “Great Replacement” theory encompasses so many disparate examples that it loses its explanatory power... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Despite his reputation as a conservative ogre, Harvey Mansfield’s latest book is immensely clever, subtle, and thought-provoking... more »
May 6, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
What happens when a Catholic, Oxford-trained mind intersects with a jaunty midcentury American voice? Wilfrid Sheed... more »
[H3] New Books
Dissidence is not a political stance, career, or personality type. It occurs when the distance between beliefs and actions becomes intolerable... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
“Of all the defects of American gerontocracy today, one of the worst is our failure to face mortality and embrace old age”... more »
May 5, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Adapting Messiah for the screen is an odd midlife crisis. For Jack Kevorkian it made sense... more »
[H3] New Books
Kimberlé Crenshaw, coiner of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” is genuinely puzzled by the controversy her ideas have aroused... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
To get through World War II, the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen faked his own death, hid out in a hotel, and accumulated experience... more »
May 4, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's "annoying Socratic gadfly," spent decades championing lost causes. At 94, he's suddenly winning... more »
[H3] New Books
You've seen crows picking at roadkill. Disgusting? Those birds are doing us a favor... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
AI anxiety predates AI. The fear that machine writing will replace human writing has a long history... more »
May 1, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
How two filmmakers, a borrowed camera, and a Judas Priest concert led to an immortal documentary... more »
[H3] New Books
Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus certain all philosophical problems were solved. Then spent his life disagreeing.... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Will human-written fiction become artisanal cheese, a luxury for the wealthy few while others eat Velveeta?... more »
April 30, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
From Bacon's "sound houses" to the Star Wars cantina: Why does science fiction sound like that?... more »
[H3] New Books
The music critic Michael Steinberg, finding his profession “an irritant and a depressant,” went to work for orchestras... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Kierkegaard vs. Copenhagen's tabloid press. "Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion"... more »
April 29, 2026
[H3] Articles of Note
Two of Picasso’s lovers committed suicide; another had a psychological breakdown. But the worst thing he ever did to women was paint them... more »
[H3] New Books
Your sous vide wand. Your car. Your search results. All enshittified, all on purpose, all at once. Cory Doctorow explains... more »
[H3] Essays & Opinions
Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the depth of our own... more »
Sign Up for our Newsletter

[H4] Subscribe to our Newsletter

[H2] Articles of Note
"The age when you can run a literary magazine on trust is over. You can either decide AI submissions are fine, or you can filter for them"... more »She called Judith Butler evil and Susan Sontag boring. Camille Paglia is 79 and unrepentant ... more »Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies, and so it was the natural home of the genre-defying Donald Barthelme... more »

Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

Is criticism a moral good? In 1968, the question was unavoidable. Now we've forgotten to ask.... more »Homer and the mummy. Why was a fragment of the Iliad buried with a body more than 2,000 years ago?... more »He was imprisoned by the Nazis; she was sent to a sanitorium. For Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, love was not a luxury they could afford... more »That presidential biography, narrative of a shipwreck, or forgotten war story? “The days when dad books reigned supreme are gone” ... more »Marilyn Monroe was the world's most photographed woman, and among its loneliest. To be wanted is not to be loved... more »He was a spy, a Zen priest, a fisherman, and a Bigfoot obsessive: Peter Matthiessen never had just one life... more »Nicholas Christakis was at the center of Yale's Halloween controversy. He wants to move on. The culture war has other ideas... more »“If you’re in a household where the currency is stories, it’s an environment which is conducive to learning those tricks”... more »The caricature of Camus as an absurdist and existentialist is a convenient fiction. But fiction nonetheless... more »Narrative history moves us., which is exactly the problem. We mistake emotion for understanding... more »David Chalmers was wrong. There is no “hard problem” of consciousness, and the supposed “explanatory gap” is nonsensical... more »Jonathan Swift’s last joke. His epitaph is, it turns out, an elaborate way of haunting an enemy from the grave... more »What happens when a Catholic, Oxford-trained mind intersects with a jaunty midcentury American voice? Wilfrid Sheed... more »Adapting Messiah for the screen is an odd midlife crisis. For Jack Kevorkian it made sense... more »Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's "annoying Socratic gadfly," spent decades championing lost causes. At 94, he's suddenly winning... more »How two filmmakers, a borrowed camera, and a Judas Priest concert led to an immortal documentary... more »From Bacon's "sound houses" to the Star Wars cantina: Why does science fiction sound like that?... more »Two of Picasso’s lovers committed suicide; another had a psychological breakdown. But the worst thing he ever did to women was paint them... more »Dwight Garner: “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches”... more »Upward Bound, a novel by a profoundly autistic author, raises an awful but unavoidable question: Who actually wrote it?... more »Tantrums, tears, and meltdowns. The history of chess grandmasters is replete with tragic stories of lives undone by delusion and paranoia... more »Due to changes in the DSM, it’s now difficult to be diagnosed with hypochondria. And yet the disease persists as a character type... more »Cass Sunstein: “To attribute social terribleness to liberalism is reckless. Liberalism isn’t a force in history. It’s not Voldemort”... more »What if the conscious self is an illusion that can’t absorb the philosophical heft we assign it?... more »Brooding on verandas, slurping Pepsi Max, carefully observing the color of urine — across thousands of pages, certain Knausgaardian tropes repeat... more »A major discovery in Central Asia. More than a dozen books published in a single week. Is “Blake Whiting” the most productive historian working today?... more »Ben Lerner: “Wherever I am now, I am not a young novelist. Heart surgery will do that to you, in addition to everything else”... more »Who gets Guggenheim fellowships? A century’s worth of data shows the rise of creative artists, and the decline of humanists and natural scientists... more »“The American novel offers the dream of escape: away from civilization and into the forest, away from marriage and onto the sea, away from history and back to boyhood”... more »"Most historians would rather go out naked in public than prune their copious footnotes." Not Albert O. Hirschman ... more »In early-19th-century Britain, body snatchers were such a problem that lead-lined coffins, metal cages, and other hardware were used to protect the dead... more »The book review flourished in tandem with the Enlightenment. Now both are in decline, leaving a great deal at stake. David Bell explains... more »Robert Musil offers a salve for Western egocentrism: The self is not a single, enduring substance but a collection of sensations... more »Uncanny and vaguely malevolent, the institutional Gothic style replaces bloodthirsty lords with soulless corporations... more »In the 16th century, with telescopes and microscopes emerging, a curious malady emerged: Men believing they were made of glass... more »The "literacy crisis" is older than the iPhone and A

VERITAS ODIT MORAS
Articles of Note from Arts & Letters Daily

(Page 1 of 40)

next »

[H2] Articles of Note from Arts & Letters Daily

May 29, 2026 | Alasdair MacIntyre believed that Western morality, having lost its rationale, was replaced by something thinner: mere moral passion  ... more »

May 28, 2026 | "The age when you can run a literary magazine on trust is over. You can either decide AI submissions are fine, or you can filter for them"... more »

May 27, 2026 | She called Judith Butler evil and Susan Sontag boring. Camille Paglia is 79 and unrepentant ... more »

May 26, 2026 | Houston is a city of unexpected adjacencies, and so it was the natural home of the genre-defying Donald Barthelme... more »

May 22, 2026 | Is criticism a moral good? In 1968, the question was unavoidable. Now we've forgotten to ask.... more »

May 21, 2026 | Homer and the mummy. Why was a fragment of the Iliad buried with a body more than 2,000 years ago?... more »

May 20, 2026 | He was imprisoned by the Nazis; she was sent to a sanitorium. For Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, love was not a luxury they could afford... more »

May 19, 2026 | That presidential biography, narrative of a shipwreck, or forgotten war story? “The days when dad books reigned supreme are gone” ... more »

May 18, 2026 | Marilyn Monroe was the world's most photographed woman, and among its loneliest. To be wanted is not to be loved... more »

May 15, 2026 | He was a spy, a Zen priest, a fisherman, and a Bigfoot obsessive: Peter Matthiessen never had just one life... more »

May 14, 2026 | Nicholas Christakis was at the center of Yale's Halloween controversy. He wants to move on. The culture war has other ideas... more »

May 13, 2026 | “If you’re in a household where the currency is stories, it’s an environment which is conducive to learning those tricks”... more »

May 12, 2026 | The caricature of Camus as an absurdist and existentialist is a convenient fiction. But fiction nonetheless... more »

May 11, 2026 | Narrative history moves us., which is exactly the problem. We mistake emotion for understanding... more »

May 8, 2026 | David Chalmers was wrong. There is no “hard problem” of consciousness, and the supposed “explanatory gap” is nonsensical... more »

May 7, 2026 | Jonathan Swift’s last joke. His epitaph is, it turns out, an elaborate way of haunting an enemy from the grave... more »

May 6, 2026 | What happens when a Catholic, Oxford-trained mind intersects with a jaunty midcentury American voice? Wilfrid Sheed... more »

May 5, 2026 | Adapting Messiah for the screen is an odd midlife crisis. For Jack Kevorkian it made sense... more »

May 4, 2026 | Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's "annoying Socratic gadfly," spent decades championing lost causes. At 94, he's suddenly winning... more »

May 1, 2026 | How two filmmakers, a borrowed camera, and a Judas Priest concert led to an immortal documentary... more »

April 30, 2026 | From Bacon's "sound houses" to the Star Wars cantina: Why does science fiction sound like that?... more »

April 29, 2026 | Two of Picasso’s lovers committed suicide; another had a psychological breakdown. But the worst thing he ever did to women was paint them... more »

April 28, 2026 | Dwight Garner: “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches”... more »

April 27, 2026 | Upward Bound, a novel by a profoundly autistic author, raises an awful but unavoidable question: Who actually wrote it?... more »

April 24, 2026 | Tantrums, tears, and meltdowns. The history of chess grandmasters is replete with tragic stories of lives undone by delusion and paranoia... more »

(Page 1 of 40)

next »

Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

Sign Up for our Newsletter

[H4] Subscribe to our Newsletter

Front Page
Support ALD
Get our Newsletter
Contact Us
Advertise
The ALD Archives
Articles of Note
New Books
Essays & Opinions
Nota Bene
Random

VERITAS ODIT MORAS
New Books from Arts & Letters Daily

(Page 1 of 40)

next »

[H2] New Books from Arts & Letters Daily

May 29, 2026 | Sensitivity readers promise authenticity but deliver essentialism. Who really benefits when identity polices the imagination?... more »

May 28, 2026 | Trivial pursuits. How do you know if a game — whether elegant, complex, or embarrassingly simple — truly matters?... more »

May 27, 2026 | He appeared to be a pauper, but John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, was quite successful, owning 1,200 acres across three states... more »

May 26, 2026 | Leslie Fiedler, the wild man of American letters, argued that our literature was less realism than repression... more »

May 22, 2026 | Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno: How recondite mid-century thinkers became villains in America's culture wars... more »

May 21, 2026 | "Show don't tell." "Kill your darlings." Writers love rules, even when rules can't solve their problems... more »

May 20, 2026 | At Stanford, undergraduates faking perfection are thrown ungodly sums of money. But what’s it all for?... more »

May 19, 2026 | The canine gaze. Dogs in Western art are surrogate viewers and compositional anchors... more »

May 18, 2026 | Translating Kafka. Borges found freedom in his labyrinths. For Primo Levi, it was like recovering from an illness... more »

May 15, 2026 | T.M. Scanlon’s 1982 essay “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” heralded the emergence of a new ethical theory... more »

May 14, 2026 | Living in Berlin during World War II was like dancing on a volcano — full of raucous parties between the bombing raids... more »

May 13, 2026 | It’s been over a decade, and scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began. What went wrong?... more »

May 12, 2026 | "Cultural Marxism" means whatever you need it to mean. Which is why it never goes away. ... more »

May 11, 2026 | Zoom out and it becomes clear that the defenders of humanistic liberalism have been decisively losing the battle over ideals... more »

May 8, 2026 | James Schuyler, the most neglected poet of the New York school, may now be its most necessary... more »

May 7, 2026 | Ibram X. Kendi’s “Great Replacement” theory encompasses so many disparate examples that it loses its explanatory power... more »

May 6, 2026 | Dissidence is not a political stance, career, or personality type. It occurs when the distance between beliefs and actions becomes intolerable... more »

May 5, 2026 | Kimberlé Crenshaw, coiner of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” is genuinely puzzled by the controversy her ideas have aroused... more »

May 4, 2026 | You've seen crows picking at roadkill. Disgusting? Those birds are doing us a favor... more »

May 1, 2026 | Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus certain all philosophical problems were solved. Then spent his life disagreeing.... more »

April 30, 2026 | The music critic Michael Steinberg, finding his profession “an irritant and a depressant,” went to work for orchestras... more »

April 29, 2026 | Your sous vide wand. Your car. Your search results. All enshittified, all on purpose, all at once. Cory Doctorow explains... more »

April 28, 2026 | Seamus Heaney took Dante, not Yeats, as his model — and transformed Northern Ireland's Troubles into purgatory... more »

April 27, 2026 | "Turning gold into gold." What's it like to translate the Bard into Bengali, and Lear’s verdict on Cordelia into Chinese?... more »

April 24, 2026 | Malcolm Cowley, who rescued Faulkner, launched Kerouac, and shaped the canon, is a forgotten man who made others unforgettable... more »

(Page 1 of 40)

next »

Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

Sign Up for our Newsletter

[H4] Subscribe to our Newsletter

Front Page
Support ALD
Get our Newsletter
Contact Us
Advertise
The ALD Archives
Articles of Note
New Books
Essays & Opinions
Nota Bene
Random

VERITAS ODIT MORAS
Essays & Opinions from Arts & Letters Daily

(Page 1 of 40)

next »

[H2] Essays & Opinions from Arts & Letters Daily

May 29, 2026 | You’ve heard of effective altruism, but what about “effective accelerationism”? The stance thinks the solution to our cultural ills lies in technology... more »

May 28, 2026 | "Information commons" sounds democratic. But it suggests that knowledge is something you retrieve, not carry... more »

May 27, 2026 | For Sergiu Klainerman, mathematics and physics aren't neighboring disciplines. They're two fields destined to converge... more »

May 26, 2026 | On BookTok, the reader’s response to a book isn’t evidence in service of a judgment; it is itself the judgment... more »

May 22, 2026 | Em dashes, bad metaphors, and not-X-but-Y sentence constructions. Did a literary prize go to an entirely AI-written short story?... more »

May 21, 2026 | The naturalist John Cade studied things like snakes’ tails and the kookaburra’s cry. Then he started giving lithium to manic-depressives... more »

May 20, 2026 | A.S. Hamrah's film criticism elides the distinction between comic prose-poetry and reflexive contrarianism... more »

May 19, 2026 | On Substack, young “writers” jockey for status, but virtually none are writing about anything other than the world of writers itself... more »

May 18, 2026 | Universities preach AI literacy. On campus, the reality looks more like cognitive surrender... more »

May 15, 2026 | Loud, naïve, ham fisted, needy. The American tourist used to be regarded as the most obnoxious creature in the world... more »

May 14, 2026 | Liberal democracy and liberal education fell together. To save the first, we must resurrect the second... more »

May 13, 2026 | The weirdness of quantum matter. A seemingly simple question — what is the world made of? — might have a surprising answer... more »

May 12, 2026 | The problem with a literary culture of images is that images have an exceptionally short shelf life. People soon grow bored with them... more »

May 11, 2026 | He warned against idleness, then stopped doing anything at all. The compelling contradictions of Samuel Johnson... more »

May 8, 2026 | "In the current climate where poet is activist (or vice versa), the poems also start to look a lot like cant"... more »

May 7, 2026 | Despite his reputation as a conservative ogre, Harvey Mansfield’s latest book is immensely clever, subtle, and thought-provoking... more »

May 6, 2026 | “Of all the defects of American gerontocracy today, one of the worst is our failure to face mortality and embrace old age”... more »

May 5, 2026 | To get through World War II, the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen faked his own death, hid out in a hotel, and accumulated experience... more »

May 4, 2026 | AI anxiety predates AI. The fear that machine writing will replace human writing has a long history... more »

May 1, 2026 | Will human-written fiction become artisanal cheese, a luxury for the wealthy few while others eat Velveeta?... more »

April 30, 2026 | Kierkegaard vs. Copenhagen's tabloid press. "Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion"... more »

April 29, 2026 | Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the depth of our own... more »

April 28, 2026 | A writing experiment reveals AI's likely future: Individual productivity rises; collective intelligence decays... more »

April 27, 2026 | The New York art critic Jerry Saltz recently unearthed 40,000 slides: Here’s what the art world of the 1990s looked like... more »

April 24, 2026 | “Slavery has been such a widespread practice throughout human history that it has rarely needed a particular racial ideology in order to take root”... more »

(Page 1 of 40)

next »

Since 1998, Arts & Letters Daily has linked to more than 17,000 articles, book reviews and essays. Consider supporting us. »

Sign Up for our Newsletter

[H4] Subscribe to our Newsletter

Front Page
Support ALD
Get our Newsletter
Contact Us
Advertise
The ALD Archives
Articles of Note
New Books
Essays & Opinions
Nota Bene
Random