The Independent Scholar

In today's issue: McKenzie-McHarg on how "conspiracy theory" went from neutral forensic language to an argument-ending verdict Catherine Liu on trauma as the professional class's preferred substitute for the word "exploitation" Morgan Meis, who spent a lifetime on Benjamin's angel of history, finally seeing it and wishing he hadn't Clara Mattei going viral for saying capitalism was built through f...

In today's issue: Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm writing a genealogy of genealogy and turning the humanities' favorite method on itself Christine Abigail L Tan using Zhuangzi to dismantle the self that thinks it deserves its success Theo Baker's Stanford portrayed as a campus run like a giant app Isaac Butler on how the culture wars were manufactured at the NEA, not born inevitable Ray Brassier's Fa...

In today's issue: Zena Hitz on why 1,600 people per semester are reading great books for free online, outside any university Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's case that there has never been an energy transition, and that the nuclear lobby coined the idea The Harper's Bazaar short story readers suspect a machine wrote Amy Kind's argument that imagination is a cognitive skill, and what happens when we outsour...

In this week's issue: The Sydney Morning Herald retracts an op-ed defending AI after the author used AI to write it David S. Reynolds on why Jamestown 1619 and Plymouth 1620 are still fighting it out in American politics David Runciman in the LRB on healthy and unhealthy scoring — gamification, and C. Thi Nguyen's The Score Wiley absorbs Emerald Publishing for £337 million, adding 500 journals and...

In this week's issue: Olga Tokarczuk admits asking AI "darling, how could we develop this beautifully." Then Riverhead walks it back A Chronicle of Higher Education professor assigns the same 20-page article she has used for five years. Zero students finish it Michael Hofmann on a 1951 German-Jewish novel that took 70 years to reach English readers J. Robert Lennon confesses to having dismissed La...

In this week's issue: The Commonwealth Short Story Prize, Granta , and an algorithm that caught what five human judges missed Becca Rothfeld in The New Yorker on the NYRB reissue of Leslie Fiedler's 1960 Love and Death in the American Novel Joyce Carol Oates on literary theory as a generation's wrong turn Chris Cutrone in Platypus Review answering Gabriel Rockhill on whether the Frankfurt School w...

In this week's issue: Stefan Collini on the UK university system as near-accomplished ruin, with data James Marriott's The New Dark Ages and the question of whether literary studies invented its own crisis Geoff Shullenberger applying Lukács to Silicon Valley's Singularity faith A book about AI corrupting truth, undermined by AI-fabricated quotes A lost Leonora Carrington painting found with her p...

In this week's issue: A book about AI's threat to truth — caught by the NYT using AI-hallucinated quotes, with no fact-checker involved at any stage A federal court letting a public university's shutdown of student magazines stand — and what that means for institutional control of campus publishing The historian who changed how America thinks about marriage never finished a PhD — Steven Mintz make...

In this week's issue: Simon Sebag Montefiore publicly challenging The Economist over its review of Molly Crabapple's new history of the Bund — naming the specific Bundist leaders Stalin had shot in the back of the neck Naomi Kanakia's new Princeton UP book making the left case for the Great Books — launched the same day at McNally Jackson Seaport A network of fake academic journals publishing over...

In this week's issue: The $500M Hindutva Ramayana film — and the 1991 essay by A.K. Ramanujan its producers would rather you had never read Harper's on Esperanto, including the Vatican's largely forgotten endorsement of a constructed language invented by a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist The lost Sholom Aleichem novella whose protagonist makes Tevye the dairyman look like a saint Pope Leo XIV's firs...

In this week's issue: Harold Bloom's private letters, finally published — and why the man who called himself a "monster of reading" sounds nothing like the oracular author of The Western Canon A Sydney panel with Mariana Enriquez, Bora Chung, and Matt Alt on what gets lost when writers write for global markets instead of local ones The first English translation of a Sholom Aleichem novella that ne...

In this week's issue: Yang Shuang-zi's Taiwan Travelogue wins the 2026 International Booker — and why the translator's name deserves equal billing Namwali Serpell's On Morrison : the argument that Toni Morrison's formal genius has been buried under her own symbolic importance 42 Jewish authors accuse the Jewish Book Council of institutional bias — including a Booker-shortlisted novelist among the...

In this week's issue: Russia raided its own Institute of Philosophy and put the head of an Aristotle translation project under house arrest — the backstory involves a disgruntled ex-director, Dugin's Telegram network, and six years of nationalist pressure Sally Rooney finally has a Hebrew publisher: a two-person basement operation in Jerusalem that is the only Israeli house meeting BDS criteria A...

In this week's issue: A prize-winning story in Granta flagged as 100% AI-generated — and neither the publisher nor the Commonwealth Foundation has said a word Antonia Bembo's 1707 opera reaching the Opéra Bastille for the first time, 319 years after it was composed Michael Wood in the LRB arguing Ozon's restraint gets Camus right in ways Visconti's romanticism never did Sergio Ramírez — stripped o...

In this week's issue: Becca Rothfeld argues Anglophone publishing ignored Marlen Haushofer for decades — despite The Wall being a postwar classic in German-speaking Europe Ben Lerner's new novel has its unnamed narrator drop his phone in a hotel sink and then publish a fabricated interview from memory — reviewed as an "outrageous riff" on Walter Benjamin's angel of history A previously unpublished...

In this week's issue: Quentin Skinner — the Cambridge historian who reshaped political philosophy — on why Hobbes and Machiavelli mean completely different things by "freedom," and his new Liberty as Independence How 25 literary agents shaped more than half of 21st-century prizewinning American fiction, and the one woman behind postmodernism Lisa Robertson's second novel in a lifetime of poetry —...

In this week's issue: Mario Vargas Llosa's posthumous final novel — a hybrid essay-fiction on Peruvian identity, música criolla, and the concept of huachafería — now available in English Quinn Slobodian arguing that "empire" has become polemic rather than analysis in critical tech writing — and proposing three sharper alternatives from dependency theory A federal judge declines to approve Anthropi...

In this week's issue: Thomas Nagel reviewing T.M. Scanlon on punishment — and why he still can't sign off on anti-retributivism Grasset's dissident authors rename their counter-assembly the États généreux and bring a historian of publishing to the podium Douglas Stuart on grief, queerness, and the Isle of Harris in John of John , with Alan Cumming asking the questions A Korean translator's decade-...

In this week's issue: Achille Mbembe at the Africa Forward Summit — why the "rule of gerontocracy" has already ended, even before a single strongman falls Beryl Satter's decade-in-the-making follow-up to the book that powered "The Case for Reparations" — and the critic who invokes Hofstadter against her Hungary's most prestigious literary journals name the rival publications quietly receiving mini...

In this week's issue: A majority of Grasset's foreign authors — Han Kang among them — refuse to submit their next books to the house after a politically motivated CEO firing Ailton Krenak, the Brazilian Indigenous philosopher who painted his face black on the floor of Congress in 1987, and what his Anthropocene thought means now Fathi Triki on why philosophy in the Arab and African worlds is final...

In this week's issue: How a 10% commission quietly became a million-dollar-a-year tax — and why writers are running from Substack A UVA professor's decades-long argument that consumer culture has broken the university, and what "god-terms" have to do with it Grammarly putting Stephen King, Carl Sagan, and bell hooks to work as AI editors — without asking any of them Russia's publishers blacking ou...

In this week's issue: A federal judge rules that DOGE used ChatGPT to unconstitutionally cancel $100 million in NEH grants — and the AI flagged a Holocaust anthology as DEI Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai opens La Lettura on the eve of Turin, asking publicly where books of value have gone and whether anyone reads them anymore Mac Barnett, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, says...

In this week's issue: A previously unknown 40-chapter typescript of Die Blechtrommel surfaces at the Akademie der Künste — what it tells us about how Grass actually built the novel The NYRB on Dorothy Tse's Hong Kong novella City Like Water — surrealism under surveillance, and a literary tradition you probably haven't read Carlo Rovelli in Noema: there is no hard problem of consciousness — and why...

In this week's issue: Habermas's final interviews, collected in Il fallait faire mieux… — and why Le Monde calls it a "magisterial exercise in intellectual auto-history" Hugues Jallon, former Seuil CEO, on why French publishing is both a target and an echo chamber for the far right Cleveland State trying to eliminate its Poetry Center Press, Coetzee on translation as political force, and Grayling...

In this week's issue: Five major publishers and Scott Turow suing Meta over Llama — and the lead plaintiff is Elsevier, which has been on the other side of an academic boycott for years Žižek's new provocation in Prospect: why he is "resigned" to the paradox that preserving freedom sometimes requires censorship A Swiss federal court ordering a humanities scholar to repay $51,000 in grant funding f...