New Books

The history of vanilla — the world’s favorite flavor — is rife with counterfeiting, pilfering, piracy, smuggling, and account fraud... more »

An instant classic that has endured for seven centuries, the history of the reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a history of Western taste... more »

Know your meme. In the early 2000s, technology, art, and amateurism combined to reach such cultural achievements as LOLcats... more »

“If anyone builds it, everyone dies.” Eliezer Yudkowsky thinks hyperintelligent AI could be worse than nuclear war... more »

Charlotte Brontë was a secular saint who cared for her frail siblings in the face of their cruel, selfish father — or so the story goes... more »

New York City saw its first traffic jam in 1913. The cause? A Henri Bergson lecture at Columbia... more »

To understand what’s lost when a waiter tells you to scan a QR code, peruse the history of the menu... more »

Sally Mann is not just a taker of ethereal photographs. She is a Southern yarn-spinner, a humorist, and a darkly comic raconteur... more »

What’s the greater scandal: A few bad actors producing shady studies — or major psychologists' apparent ignorance of basic data precautions?... more »

What makes a good job for a poet? For Constantine Cavafy, a post at Egypt's Department of Irrigation Service gave him ample free time... more »

"What growing up fundamentalist helped me learn early on is how terribly wrong you can be while thinking very hard”... more »

Greenwich Village was “vicious” for James Baldwin — “partly because of the natives, largely because of the tourists, and absolutely because of the cops”... more »

Beware the AI Prophets and their horde of hype-mongers, grifters, techno-messiahs, and pseudo-intellectuals... more »

"Sometimes an era is graced with a gift — a book that is not merely deficient in the usual ways ... but epochal in its ineptitude"... more »

Stupidity is one of those things that's always just there, forever and always. Can it really have a history?... more »

The Medieval moon. The moon was taken to be a cause for the Black Death, a symbol of female foolishness, and a drinking partner... more »

How did a large swath of the Anglophone intelligentsia turn against free speech — one of its best, and most ennobling, traditions?... more »

“Against the backdrop of inevitable human mediocrity, rules are attractive because they promise to insure a generally acceptable level of competence”... more »

Baseball is both out of sync with the times and out of touch with its own history. As Roger Angell put it: “I hate modern baseball”... more »

Oliver Sacks knew three things about himself: He took everything to excess, he wasn't a conventional neurologist, he preferred patients to colleagues... more »

A veteran shaman wonders: Why do tourists come to see him when they aren’t sick? And why do they all hate their parents?... more »

William F. Buckley, curious about marijuana, sailed into international waters to try it. Then he dabbled with LSD... more »

James Baldwin was larger than life — a Black American Socrates. He was attuned to fragility, alienation, and anguish... more »

Agnes Callard claims a Socratic ethic in her latest book, but instead of probing and questioning she delivers resolute answers... more »

“Literary history does not, it turns out, have many examples of people appreciating great chaptering”... more »

A century of scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical. Is Einstein the exception?... more »

If anyone could pull off a campus novel about hell, it should be R.F. Kuang. And yet, her latest dark tale of academia drags... more »

John Updike was that rarest of things: a writer who sounds the same in private as he did in public.... more »

Stephen Batchelor has spent a lifetime trying to transcend divisions between Buddhist and Greek thought. The work goes on... more »

"A mental patient, like an alcoholic, is endlessly cunning when it comes to subverting salvation, and Shulamith Firestone was one of the best"... more »

When biologists talk of evolution, they tend to mean Darwinian natural selection. But what about other types of evolution, which explain other things?... more »

Revenge delivers such an intoxicating chemical high that we regularly stage and imagine grievances necessitating justice... more »

“We are obsessed with bad sex and how to protect against it, and we talk about that almost to the exclusion of good sex and how to have it”... more »

A new genre has appeared on the book scene: a biography of a biography. Joseph Epstein has mixed feelings... more »

Jamaica Kincaid is known for her political writing. Let's also consider her early, humorous work and her passion for gardening... more »

The CIA Book Club started with dropping copies of Animal Farm by balloon into East Berlin... more »

Looking to pinpoint the era in which the culture began coming apart at the seams, Paul Elie makes the case for the ‘80s... more »

Is it possible to exclude ideology from debate on our most controversial social issues? Thomas Chatterton Williams thinks so... more »

Constantine Cavafy is an indispensable poet that was throughout his life poised to disappear into obscurity... more »

Essays & Opinions

In 1956, Gore Vidal declared: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag”... more »

Many writers find writing agonizing. Few have expressed that feeling as vividly as Cynthia Ozick... more »

Mary Carleton, the “German Princess,” charged with bigamy and theft, was a sensation in 1660s London. More than 500 people visited her in jail... more »

Cormac McCarthy could remember nearly everything he had read or heard. He was also a hoarder, with an affinity for nonstick cookware and tweed coats... more »

Why are even tenured professors, people with the most secure jobs on earth, so unwilling to speak their minds?... more »

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the 18th century did. Welcome to the postliterate society... more »

Consider the snail. One lung, one heart, one foot, 15,000 teeth, and first appeared 200 million years before dinosaurs... more »

What does an essayist need from a reader? To be willing to enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities... more »

Large language models vacuously reflect our writerly traditions back at us. So why does their embrace of the em dash shock us?... more »

To fend off the creeping prevalence of AI-written prose, one must adopt a new kind of literacy, an adaptive practice of bullshit detection... more »

What makes a literary “it” girl? Going to certain magazine parties, being beautiful, and writing on Substack, comprise the cliche... more »

Gertrude Stein, clown princess. "All the attention directed at Stein has been unfair or misplaced, even from her admirers"... more »

A $23-million Stradivarius is just an instrument that tickles “human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat”... more »

The paradox of lexicography: A golden age for the appreciation of language coincides with the demise of the dictionary... more »

The hoarder, the mansplainer, the guy with bad timing — we need character sketches to help us articulate, and change, our qualities... more »

Substack “is the emerging locus of the literary world, and may swallow it completely in the next five years”... more »

Social media has devolved into slop —  and users are logging off. Its death rattle will be not a bang but a shrug... more »

Criticism used to be aimed at shaping taste. Now it largely reflects the audience's taste back to it... more »

Mary Oliver and her detractors. Her sincerity, simplicity, and commercial success were all deeply suspect. But why?... more »

What’s most striking about the attack on higher education is not how illiberal it is; it’s how little Americans care... more »

Really digging into a work of literature is one of the great liberal arts. What if it’s a dying art?... more »

Robin D.G. Kelley: “The myth of the liberal university, of the transcendent intellectual, of the power of reason shatters at once”... more »

V.S. Naipaul has taken up a great Romantic ideal: making literature congruent with life. Failure is built into the project... more »

ChatGPT came into being in late 2022. It took only a few years for everyone to start talking like chatbots... more »

Funding of science has become larger and more bureaucratic. What have we lost? Oddball ideas... more »

A literary star of the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Redmon Fauset often gets overlooked. Why?... more »

Pop-music critics have long been jerks, cranks, and spoilsports. Now the unthinkable has happened: They've become nice... more »

"Systems collapse, things break down, and time tends irreversibly towards disorder and eventual annihilation"... more »

Historical error often helps build national consciousness — and so correcting the record can feel like a threat to the nation... more »

AI can inform. Novels can transform. What will shape the human spirit in decades to come? David Brooks has thoughts... more »

By the Victorian era, Milton had been demoted from sublime poet to good liberal, a republican robbed of radicalness... more »

In the study of English, how did criticism come to supplant rhetoric, belles-lettres, literary history, and philology?... more »

Literary masters offer much wisdom on lassitude and lethargy. But can they help you get in shape? Dwight Garner investigates... more »

The university compensates for what many modern democracies struggle to do: think and act across long historical durations... more »

Human nature is real, says Francis Fukuyama, and it's been a decisive force in political philosophy. Why does that fact provoke such resistance?... more »

James Baldwin juggled countless contrasting ideas, as well as the ability to live with these contradictions... more »

For Iris Murdoch, morality hinged on escaping our egos and attending to others — and so it was rooted in love... more »

“Evil can be a spiritual experience, too.” Mary Gaitskill turns to the words of murders and rapists to understand violence... more »

How to describe a Cynthia Ozick's essays? "Ideas are earthquakes; feelings are floods; literature can lift us up or smite us down"... more »

F. Scott Fitzgerald: the most foolish of American writers. He was foolish in his successes, and no less foolish in his many failures... more »

Alekseyevich Bunin was renowned for his romantic poems and sensual prose. He was also a peerless insult artist... more »

"To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of constantly multiplying targets would not be entirely wrong"... more »

How to distinguish perfectionism from the mere pursuit of excellence: Reaching the goal doesn't help... more »

We're watching the last meaningful distinctions between creating and copying dissolve, and most people couldn’t care less... more »

The anthropomorphic mistake: It isn’t to see emotion where there is none. It is to see the wrong emotion... more »

Ibsen and the paradox of progressive moralism. He demonstrated how claims to serve ideals are often ways of serving ourselves... more »

Written reviews have long been the currency of cultural coverage. Now they are imperiled – and worthy of defense... more »

The shushing librarian performed a public service: defending quiet. Now "reading rooms" are turned over to zoom calls... more »

In poetry, the liminal is a tired, vague, often meaningless signifier. Not for Laura Gilpin... more »

For Christopher Lasch, sloppy writing was a form of sloth, and ambiguity was a form of lying. In other words, style revealed the soul... more »