Contemporary society
- ‘A crash is coming’
- Meritocracy vs. the people
- ‘We need dramatic social and technological changes’
- ‘Reflections on the New Encampment Culture’
- ‘Intelligenza artificiale ed elettricità’ (Google and Microcost now using more electricity than 100 countries, and Google’s CO2 emisions have increased 48% since 2019 owing to AI servers)
- ‘Regno Unito, qual è il conto salato della Brexit?’ (cost of Brexit in figures)
- ‘How Universities Killed the Academic’
- ‘The Loss of Things I Took for Granted’ (on students’ reading skills)
- ‘The Ghost of Joe McCarthy’
- ‘Il caso antisemitismo nei campus Usa’
- ‘Women in revolt achieved so much. Why are decades of progress now being reversed?
- ‘Der Israel-Hass der “Progressiven”‘
- ‘The Public Sector’s Misogyny Crisis’
- ‘Ocean Heat Record Broken, with Grim Implications for the Planet’
- ‘Why Generative AI Won’t Disrupt Books’
- ‘Why You Hate Your Job: A Theory on the Function of Bullshit Jobs’
- University of Chicago principles of freedom of expression
- ‘Jenseits der Disziplin’ (interview with Sigrid Weigel)
- ‘Political Thought in an Age of Conformity’
- ‘Iconoclasm of the Vanities: Why We Are Destroying Statues’
- ‘The Most Pressing Diversity Issue in Publishing?’
- ‘The End of Progressive Intellectual Life’
- ‘How American culture ate the world’
- ‘Bad Economics: How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance’
- ‘Der Populismus der liberalen Eliten: warum das progressives Schwarz-Weiss-Denken in die Irre führt’
- ‘Burdened by Books’
- ‘Treason of the Intellectuals’
- Why culture wars are an élite device’
- ‘Speaking Power to Truth’
- ‘The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harrass their citizens’
- ‘Making sense of conspiracy theorists as the world gets more bizarre’
- ‘Beware of Books’
- ‘A Tyranny without Tyrants?’ (review of Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit)
- ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’
Intellectual history
- Review of Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss: On Not Wanting to Know
- ‘The Absolutism of Data: Thinking Artificial Intelligence with Hans Blumenberg’
- David Collings’s Rubble of Culture (free download)
- ‘Stories Are Bad for Your Intelligence’
- ‘Imperial Miasma Theory’
- ‘The Cult of Carl Schmitt’
- ‘Philosopher of the Apocalypse’ (on Günther Anders)
- ‘Das Ich, das viel besagt’ (review of philosopher Dieter Henrich’s autobiography)
- ‘The Symbolic Animal’ (on Ernst Cassirer)
- ‘A Happy Contrarian’ (on René Girard)
Obituaries of scholars and artists I admire
- William Blissett (scholar, October 2025)
- Tom Lehrer (songwriter and satirist, July 2025)
- Alfred Brendel (pianist, June 2025)
- Marcel Ophüls (film director, May 2025)
- Frederick Ahl (classicist, February 2025)
- Helen Vendler (critic, April 2024)
- Marjorie Perloff (critic, March 2024)
- Maurizio Pollini (pianist, March 2024)
- Renata Scotto (soprano, August 2023)
- Mary Ann Radzinowicz (scholar, March 2023)
- Hans Belting (art historian, January 2023)
- Dieter Henrich (philosopher, December 2022)
- Jean-Luc Godard (film director, September 2022)
- Javier Marías (novelist, September 2022)
- Jean-Jacques Sempé (artist, August 2022)
- James Lovelock (scientist and writer, July 2022)
- Letizia Battaglia (photographer, April 2022)
- Frederick Burwick (scholar, March 2022)
- Harald Weinrich (scholar, February 2022)
- Jean-Paul Belmondo (actor, September 2021)
- Roberto Calasso (writer and publisher, July 2021)
- William St Clair (scholar and publisher, June 2021)
- Christa Ludwig (mezzo-soprano, April 2021)
- Vartan Gregorian (scholar and former president of the New York Public Library, April 2021)
- Marc Fumaroli (scholar, June 2020)
- Mirella Freni (soprano, February 2020)
- Jessye Norman (soprano, October 2019)
Nicholas Halmi 