Anthony Grafton

How to Cast a Metal Lizard

The knowledge that underpins our world of things has been discovered over centuries, produced as the result of collaboration and generally unrecorded. How does a historian overcome these obstacles?

Pico della Mirandola’s Mystical Thinking

A new book cuts through generations of misguided commentary on the most famous speech of the Renaissance.

The Threat to the Editorial Institute

A Hero of the European Mind

Piero le Fou

A series of Piero di Cosimo’s paintings, with commentary by Anthony Grafton.

The Ravishing Painting of Piero di Cosimo

Scrawled Insults and Epiphanies

Marginalia are on the march. The New York Society Library recently opened Readers Make Their Mark, an exhibition of annotated books from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries from its own collection.

Reliving the Renaissance

Everyone who was anyone in the sixteenth-century art world liked Pieter Coecke van Aelst.

A Great Master at the Met

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, a Renaissance man of a new kind

Can the Colleges Be Saved?

The shaky foundations of American higher education

The Most Charming Pagan

Why Are Our Universities Failing?

The Wrong Way to Lower College Costs

Want to know how to solve the problem of ever-increasing college costs? A lot of people have answers. One of the Very Serious People who can give you one is the economist Richard Vedder, professor at Ohio University, Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.

The Cronon Controversy

Many observers are worried about the latest skirmish in the battle to destroy American higher education, which involves the distinguished environmental historian William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin.

Jumping Through the Computer Screen

Move the Warburg to L.A.?

Save the Warburg Library!

Save the Warburg Library!

Much of Britain’s industry has disappeared. The recently vaunted financial sector is in disarray. But British universities remain world leaders. The conditions that have made this possible included, in the past, a loose, egalitarian organization, substantial autonomy for scholars and teachers, and a generous esprit de corps. Yet instead of preserving this distinguished and successful sector of British life, both Labour and Tory governments seem bent on rearing hierarchies, crushing autonomy, and destroying morale.

‘A Jewel of a Thousand Facets’

The Pope and the Hedgehog