Josh Emmons tries to name an embarrassing feeling about art: the sad, amused, "not-schadenfreude" when excellent art is ignored....

James Boswell’s restless curiosity and his desire to sit at the feet of greatness and listen made him the ur-TED talk audience member....

That a public man such as Thomas Cromwell can be understood so differently by writers acting in good faith is due to a number of factors: his distance from us in time, our incomplete record of his correspondence, the nature of politics, and the nature of observation....