In 1993, David Foster Wallace published an essay, titled “E Unibus Pluram,” in which he attempted to diagnose what he saw as the malaise of modern American culture. In the essay, Wallace describes ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. So when did it hit you that the 20th century might be maxed out on ...

Taking its name from the Greek eironeia (dissimulation), irony consists of purporting a meaning of an utterance or a situation that is different, often opposite, to the literal one. Maike Oergel, ...

With newspapers in Britain forecasting the potential catastrophe of a “no deal” Brexit—chaos at the borders, empty shelves in the supermarkets, the pound through the floor—Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of ...

We don't always recognize irony right away. An interdisciplinary research team at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main found that irony is primarily signaled by ...

It is a balmy, sunny day in the Athenian Agora, which is bustling with people in various draped cloaks. Look over there, the rays of the sun gently stroke the head of the imposing Acropolis, standing ...

There is a famous literary analysis quote that says “irony trumps everything,” because it “provides additional richness to the literary dish,” and it “keeps us readers on our toes, inviting us, ...