Why am I here? How can I live a good life? What does it mean to have a mind and be a person? Since the days of antiquity, philosophers have puzzled over fundamental questions like these that sit at the very heart of our lived experience and interactions with the world. Solving these problems is not merely about increasing our knowledge of the world, to fill up academic textbooks and sit on library shelves, but to impart wisdom to aid us as we navigate through life's uncertainties and its profoundest mysteries.

Mark Twain continues to bedevil the academy, if not the reading public. Like Kipling, he has been by turns reviled and revered, often for the wrong reasons. Daniel Karlin considers the difficulties in dealing with an American classic.

The Measure of Homer bounds acrobatically backwards and forwards across the centuries, from the aristocratic Greek symposium of the sixth century BC to Christian Gdanmaa in the fifth century AD. By Peter Thonemann.

Have you ever seen a book on the side of the road and had an internal crisis about whether to pick it up and risk a deadly infectious disease or leave it to be eaten by rats only to lead to an extremely intelligent rat population that will eventually take over the planet? Either way, it’s a lose-lose situation, death by disease or by genius rats.

Strict instructions are issued before interviewing George RR Martin: do not ask about The Winds of Winter, the sixth book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, the one fans keep haranguing him about and Martin has been writing since 2011. Focus on Fire and Blood, his imagined history of the Targaryen dynasty, and all will be well. So I prepare for the interview with a certain amount of trepidation.

With his new book, The Creative Spark, Agustín Fuentes, a primatologist and anthropologist currently at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, boldly puts forth the idea that what makes humans special is creativity. The ability of humans to switch back and forth between considering what is, and dreaming of what might be, and to then put these thoughts into actions (often collaboratively), has brought us a very long way from our primate origins to the tool-wielding, world-shaping force of nature of today.

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This week, Victor LaValle’s new novel The Changeling hits shelves. This is only the most recent installment in a long series of great works of literary horror, and as a reader of primarily literary fiction, but with a major soft spot for, as they say, “genre,” its release has me thinking about horror and high-brow literary fiction and the ways in which they intersect.

Sam Argyle reviews "Not All Dead White Men," in which Donna Zuckerberg critiques the decontextualized use of classical texts.

Polish codebreakers paved the way for Alan Turing to decrypt German messages in the Second World War. Joanne Baker commends a gripping tale. Alan Turing’s crucial unscrambling of German messages in the Second World War was a tour de force of codebreaking. From 1940 onwards, Turing and his team engineered hundreds of electronic machines, dubbed bombes, which decrypted the thousands of missives sent by enemy commanders each day to guide their soldiers.

More than a decade since his last book, Thomas Harris – author and creator of one of literature’s most famous monsters, the sophisticated, psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter – is set to release a new novel. The as-yet-unnamed novel has long been anticipated since 2004, when Harris signed a reported eight-figure deal for two books. The first was 2006’s Hannibal Rising, but no details of a second have ever been revealed.

The internet! It’s good for buying things, for reading your relatives’ racist screeds on Facebook, and for judging strangers from afar. But it’s also occasionally quite good at crowdsourcing customized entertainment at remarkable speeds.

Twenty-two years ago, Joseph Bitetto's mother went into labor prematurely. EMTs raced to her home, administered first aid and rushed her to the hospital. "There was blood everywhere, on the ground, on the toilet... My mom was bleeding out profusely," Bitetto told CNN. "If the EMTs didn't act accordingly and fast, she was in danger and I was in danger." Both mother and child survived. Bitetto's grateful father thanked the doctors and police. But in the midst of chaos, he never got a chance to thank the medics.

Students in Duluth will no longer automatically get schooled in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or the trials of Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” In an effort to be considerate of all students, the two novels, which contain racial slurs, will no longer be required reading in the district’s English classes next school year. They will still be available in the schools for optional reading, however.

Reading, education can help ensure that prisoners who gain freedom, keep it.

What makes a science fiction story a space opera? By T.W. O'Brien.

The Swedish Academy has been consumed by charges that a man close to it sexually assaulted women, and that the academy mishandled the allegations.

AT THE CORNER of 8th and Market in San Francisco, by a shuttered subway escalator outside a Burger King, an unusual soundtrack plays. A beige speaker, mounted atop a tall window, blasts Baroque harpsichord at deafening volumes. The music never stops. Night and day, Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi rain down from Burger King rooftops onto empty streets. Empty streets, however, are the target audience for this concert. The playlist has been selected to repel sidewalk listeners — specifically...

In the Western world, only since the mid-18th century has it been possible to discuss ethical questions publicly without referring to Christianity. Modern thinking about morality, which assumes that gods do not exist, or at least do not intervene, is in its infancy. But the ancient Greeks and Romans elaborated robust philosophical schools of ethical thought for more than a millennium, from the first professed agnostics such as Protagoras (fifth century BCE) to the last pagan thinkers. The Platonists’ Academy at Athens was not finally closed down until 529 CE, by the Emperor Justinian.

The writer, who died at 89, invested common words with the power of a constructive, shaping force.

Some of the most searing poems by Korzhavin, who has died, at the age of ninety-two, focus on his decision to go into exile, to America, in the seventies. By Masha Gessen.

Only in his supposedly lost years was Wilde free to express his genius in his life. By Alex Dean.

How is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant? According to Shakespeare, it could not happen without widespread complicity. By Stephen Greenblatt.

"Dodgson had taken a travelling chess set with him, which proved a boon on some of their long train journeys; he also recorded his first impression of Moscow as 'bulging gilded domes, in which you see as in a looking-glass distorted pictures of the city.'” By Mark Davies.

Gary Saul Morson on the rise and fall of the first Russian populists.

A.E. Hotchner, who grew up to be pals with Ernest Hemingway and Paul Newman, just published a mystery about a boy, a long-ago summer and a jewelry heist.

Twenty-one documents found in the U.K.'s National Archives add context to the Bard's feelings toward power and monarchy

And One Singer-Songwriter. By Sarah Henstra.

The Bard gave Queen Margaret more lines than any other female character, and more than King Lear.

It's always fun to speculate about how we'll die, like to break the ice during a party or while chatting in the subway with terrified strangers. We've all done that, right? Well. these people took it to a whole new level.

An interview with Paul Tang, whose People' Recreation Community has tapped into an intriguing new market.

With the onslaught of e-books, what will the rare book even look like 50 years from now? 200? Will it exist?

London's Lambeth Palace, home to the Archbishop of Canterbury, also has a leading historic book collection. The palace's library was the scene of a major crime that stayed undiscovered for decades.

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Etymology, or the study of the origin of words, is dry, dusty stuff that will give you allergies if you play with it too long.