Essays

Recently, a friend sent me a list of people who did great things when they were old. It was a friendly gesture, meant to support my belief that it is possible to age "successfully." The list included Bizet, Cervantes, Cezanne, Churchill, El Greco, Rembrandt and Tennyson. Quite a group!

Paul Cézanne famously declared "I seek in painting." He spoke of his art in almost spiritual terms, as a quest to reach the distant goal he referred to as "realization." In a letter of 1904, the 65-year old master wrote that "I progress very slowly, for nature reveals herself to me in very comple

This was his way of disputing that 2014 was the warmest year on earth and that human-caused c

The French writer Marcel Aymé once wrote a short story in which the population of a small town, starving to death, suddenly discovered that if they looked at a painting of food with enough intensity, they would feel nourished, as if they'd eaten whatever was depicted on the canvas.

Every year I hope that someone like you or I will be celebrated on International Women’s Day. But it never happens.

Great experimental innovators are acutely aware of the costs of their particular form of creativity, as they spend long periods in pursuit of the elusive ideal of creating art that will be as powerful, vivid, and honest as reality.

"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
John Adams

At a time when endorsement of Darwinism is reflexively identified with belief in evolution, it may come as a surprise that alternative accounts are gaining acceptance.

The 2016 presidential campaign is already upon us and the debate is heating up ov

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we are at a transitional moment. For the past 70 years, the survivors of the Holocaust kept the memory of what had been done to them, to their families, and to European Jewry at the forefront of their society's consciousness.

Of course I like it when someone tells me I’m not old. But I always insist I am old, and that they are ageists, unwitting captives of Western culture’s misconception of the meaning of old age. ”You believe,” I say “that old means being decrepit, over the hill, used up, finished?

James Gilmore, the former Virginia Governor, has it wrong. Indeed, Governor Gilmore committed a categorical falsehood. What did Governor Gilmore say?

David Galenson: In our earlier interview, you said that living in New York was very important to you.

"It's so easy to become an author of novels. Others have done it, why not me?"

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