The New Republic

Of all the varieties of underappreciated artist, circus acts might just have it the worst. Their technical virtuosity is taken for granted, but is what they do actually art? In 1893, Paul Cinquevalli, one of the greatest jugglers of all time, succeeded in catching an egg on a plate without breaking it. It took him nine years to learn the trick, and he soon dropped it from his routine, because audiences weren’t particularly impressed. READ MORE >>

Here is my nominee for the worst phrase in the English language: “it is what it is.” The phrase combines resignation, even despair, with self-congratulatory smugness. It is a fatal combination, because one really should not be self-congratulatory about despair. READ MORE >>

Two capuchin monkeys are sitting in separate chambers where they can see each other. Researchers have asked each monkey to do the same task, and they both earn a reward for performing it correctly. But one gets cucumber slices and the other gets grapes—a much tastier treat. At first, the monkeys do the task and get their respective rewards, no problem. But then the monkey getting cucumber slices glances over and notices her companion’s grapes. She throws a huge tantrum, tossing away her cucumber slices. READ MORE >>

Maurice Sendak, the much beloved children’s author and artist who died last year at the age of 83, hoped, according to his devoted friend Tony Kushner, that My Brother's Book, posthumously published this month, would be his masterpiece. Unfortunately, it is not. READ MORE >>

Around, let’s say, 1885 the young French poet Jules Laforgue was living in Berlin and scribbling observations in his notebooks. READ MORE >>

Put aside the woes of the Republican Party: Not all opportunity is lost under the conservative umbrella. What appear to be the two most crushing recent moments for the American right—the Supreme Court's upholding of most of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the reelection of President Barack Obama—were in fact gifts from God to his favorite industry: the fundraising, merchandising, and publishing apparatus of the conservative movement. READ MORE >>

Few historians are as accomplished or as consistent as Bernard Bailyn, the Adams University professor emeritus at Harvard University and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American history. READ MORE >>

The archive, indispensable to the historian, may prove an unreliable ally of the memoirist. This is the case in Alexander Stille’s sprawling effort to comprehend, catalog, and memorialize three generations—including his own—of his family. READ MORE >>

Perhaps it’s the lackluster quality of recent Republican presidential nominees that is responsible for the current upsurge of interest in Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Esteem for Ike has risen along with nostalgia for the peace and prosperity of the 1950s. Nixon has remained an intriguing figure for his dramatic highs and lows, his obvious psychological torment, and the poignant contrast between his comparative progressivism and the die-hard conservatism of the modern Republican Party. READ MORE >>

“The essay, as a literary form, is pretty well extinct,” Philip Larkin wrote gloomily in 1984. Extinct was the right word, capturing the sense of an organism that could no longer survive in a changed environment. READ MORE >>