Articles of Note

Whether writing fiction or fact, E.L. Doctorow had a keen understanding of how the past informs the present. He's dead at 84... New York Times... The Guardian... Newsweek... Mother Jones...... more »

Joe Gould, author of the longest book ever or never written, was known as a delightful eccentric: harmless and even lovable. He was neither... more »

New taboos have replaced old in terms of profanity. We no longer fear the wrath of God or descriptions of sex. We fear offending groups... more »

How to speak American: Steal words, invent new ones, turn nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. Smush words together... more »

Sappho. Or is it Psappho? We know so little about the poet from Lesbos, we’re even unsure of her name. Can translators convey her greatness?... more »

A medieval man in modern times, Léon Bloy kept a vow of poverty and suffering, cheered the sinking of the Titanic, and wrote of suicide, incest, and cannibalism... more »

Damien Hirst has traded drinking, drugs, and showing off his foreskin for yoga and a return to art curation. Can he save his reputation?... more »

From Baltimore to the Aspen Ideas Festival to Paris, Ta-Nehisi Coates has spread a message: Racial indignity is always physical... more »

To understand 20th-century economics, it helps to view the discipline as an 80-year argument between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman... more »

How did the academy end up investing so much in a nebulous, useless, and overly romantic notion like “critical thinking”?... more »

If consciousness and experience can ever be explained with  scientific precision, would we no longer see humanity through a humanistic lens?... more »

Most of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poet friends were on some drug most of the time. Not Ferlinghetti. “Somebody had to mind the shop”... more »

Entire industries once ran on intuition. Artists were signed because someone had a hunch. Now, among talent spotters, the gut has given way to the algorithm... more »

How a Rutherford, N.J. street huckster's white chickens and red wheelbarrow inspired a 16-word manifesto of American modernism... more »

Denis Diderot arrived in Paris young and obscure. Soon he was notorious and in jail. Curiosity was his lodestar... more »

Ornette Coleman was a freak – about his music, clothing, beard, philosophy. Yet his life was a conventional one, he insisted: “Born, work, sad and happy and etc.”... more »

The life of an artist isn't easels, turpentine, and raffia-wrapped Chianti bottles so much as struggle and poverty. Making art is work, not a privilege... more »

We live in the hyperpresent, obsessed by the instantaneous. So why are we enthralled with Deep History and its all-encompassing purview?... more »

When tolerance melts into indifference, and polite reserve replaces judgment, it's doom for the fine arts. Michael Lewis explains ... more »

David Foster Wallace has been canonized as self-help slacker saint, magnet for moral veneration. In short, the very thing he struggled against ... more »

Once the redoubts of abstruse and jargon-heavy monographs, university presses are now the last great hope for serious nonfiction... more »

The rise of 3-D printing will transform the future of museums into a contest between accessibility and authenticity... more »

Philip Larkin will soon have a flagstone at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, alongside the memorials to writers he did his best to avoid... more »

Inside Kevin Wheatcroft’s mazelike house is the largest collection of Nazi artifacts in the world. “Hitler’s eye for quality was just extraordinary”... more »

Why are the leaders of the New York Public Library so intent on destroying one of the world’s great repositories of knowledge?... more »

Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t take on faith everything between the covers. Behold the imperiled state of facts in book publishing... more »

Pornography is old. But our ability to track how porn affects us is relatively new. The upshot: Porn has been unfairly maligned... more »

The education of a young poet. T.S. Eliot was at Harvard from 1906 to 1914. But he had to escape to put to use what he’d learned there... more »

Nabokov in Utah. Among marmots and Mormons, the author collected butterflies, smoked five packs a day, and suffered a bad friction burn on his buttocks... more »

In the ‘20s, a female sculptor like Barbara Hepworth had three options: assimilate, decorate, or detonate. She chose the third... more »

New Books

We picture Joan Didion as either young and nonchalant, smoking a cigarette, or elderly and grieving. Through it all she's held the world at a distance... more »

“What pleases the public is always what’s most banal,” wrote van Gogh. Does our obsession with “Sunflowers” suggest that his own work has lapsed into banality?... more »

Sir Thomas Browne, a minor writer with a major style, is credited with 784 neologisms, including "electricity,”  “hallucination,”  “ferocious,” and “swaggy.” But a model thinker for our time? Not quite... more »

Three lives in nine objects: How tattered love letters and a portable writing desk reveal Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë... more »

The unbearable maleness of the philosophy department. Blame the gladiatorial element, the misguided definition of “brilliance,” the curriculum... more »

When it comes to criticism, Kingsley Amis said it best: “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, there’s little point in writing.” That spirit is in far too short supply... more »

Harper Lee’s nonsensical string of clichés, Go Set a Watchman, materialized so mysteriously. A neat example of exploitative publishing... more »

When literary society was glamorous. The historian Antonia Fraser enjoyed gardens and cricket, danced with T.S. Eliot, and was instructed by Queen Elizabeth to have a fling... more »

Moral philosophers say we’re lazy, scared, and immature. The solution? “Grow up!” Too bad the diagnosis doesn’t consider actual human beings... more »

The speechwriter. To put words in the mouth of public officials is to realize the meaninglessness of words in public life... more »

The Middle Ages are derided as a time both reprehensible and ridiculous. Nonsense! Those years were not dark but alive with technology, art, curiosity, capitalism... more »

Entrenched and unacknowledged Anglocentrism. Today’s academic debates suffer linguistically. Why? They take place in English... more »

Success for a literary magazine: longevity, influence, readership, financial stability, imitators. But they all depend on offering the strange and new... more »

Feminism has altered how we live, and those changes are joyful and terrible. Few grasp this with the unflinching wisdom of Vivian Gornick... more »

Life in a time of mass starvation. Lena Mukhina was 16 when the German army began its siege of Leningrad. She survived. Sort of... more »

To be immersed in Victorian-era politics, as was H.G. Wells, was to be engaged in a fierce debate among Darwinians, Malthusians, and eugenicists... more »

Openness and its discontents. Participation, transparency, collaboration: The great promises of the Internet aren't what they seem... more »

The midcentury male writer: angry, bighearted, loving, hungry for fame, fiercely competitive, tragic, drink-soaked. William Styron knew all too well ... more »

Over beer in an Oxford pub, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis talked torture, Tertullian, bores, odd place names, and the revitalization of Christian intellectual life... more »

One of the functions of Nazism was social advancement, and few Nazis were as opportunistic as Joseph Goebbels. He embraced barbarism, but that was hardly unusual... more »

The editorial license of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm. They stripped fairy tales of cruelty, licentiousness, rococo delirium, sophisticated comic irony... more »

The essayist Max Beerbohm was always more lauded than read. Adored by the likes of Virginia Woolf, he earned a reputation that stranded him on a pedestal... more »

Challenges of a Bloomsbury childhood: growing up in a ménage à trois, being courted by a parent’s former lover, paternity secrets, emotional blackmail... more »

Max Brod was a middling, if prolific, writer. He was also, of course, a close friend of Kafka. Together they explored museums, theaters – and brothels... more »

Marriage, a fraught and mysterious institution, inspires both passion and pragmatism. Gabriel García Márquez called it “the conjugal conspiracy”... more »

Whether glass, ruby red, or furry slippers; winged boots or glowing-hot iron shoes; footwear is a recurrent fairy-tale motif. Why?... more »

Everything you know about perception is wrong – and it’s the fault of Western philosophers, starting with Descartes. Or so John Searle would have you think... more »

The first literary duel: Hector and Achilles. Among the last: Allen Tate against Karl Shapiro, in 1948. The unlikeliest weapon: unsold books... more »

In defense of pragmatic pessimism. As a corrective to the deluded optimism of the happiness industry, worrying is more essential than ever... more »

Essays & Opinions

In praise of boredom. Society worships multitasking, purposefulness, and returns on investment. Why bother with art or literature? Claire Messud explains... more »

The belief system of Silicon Valley can't account for a plateau of progress. But expectations have outrun reality, says John Markoff. 2045 is going to look a lot like today... more »

What is a book cover? A skin, a membrane, a safeguard, a translation from text to image, an anxious effort to corral the boundless contents inside... more »

More data have been created and stored in the past 15 years than in the previous history of humanity. To handle the information glut, read avant-garde poetry... more »

Handwriting is by no means obsolete in a digital age. Consider the useful alchemy in which language, the body, and our sense of identity intertwine... more »

Joseph Mitchell’s journalism didn’t stand out. Then he met the anthropologist Franz Boas. Mitchell’s reporting absorbed the ethnographic insights of social science... more »

Laughter, forgetting, and French. Milan Kundera’s shoddy memory, his run-ins with history, his abandoning Czech – what did it all mean?... more »

What good is the study of ethics if it doesn't make us more ethical? It breaks down strictures and transports us to wild, unpredictable places... more »

When your book gets a bad review, you want to lash back. It won’t turn out well. J.C. Hallman knows – but still... more »

“There is no reading,” said Nabokov, “only rereading.” Is it only on a second (or fifth) pass that a text fully opens? Tim Parks investigates... more »

Anxiety was the defining quality of postwar life. Ours is the age of creepiness and the creepy critic: fastidious, erudite, tendentious... more »

Hannah Arendt, pariah. Her life, ideas, and writings isolated her from the intellectuals of her day. They also made her uniquely cosmopolitan... more »

You gaze at length upon your bookshelves, fussing over bent pages and scuffed spines. Is your obsession a mark of culture or vain superficiality?... more »

Robert Louis Stevenson was a surpassingly odd man of charm and charisma. He was also maddeningly self-involved. Ego fueled his imagination... more »

Where morality meets rationalism. Is Peter Singer’s “effective altruism” the apotheosis of ethics, or an unempathetic, politically naive, elitist doctrine?... more »

ISIS is sadistic, but it taps an ancient fantasy: the return of a ruler who can transcend dreary, piecemeal politics and make a world without compromise... more »

The great kvetch of the English department: Enrollments are down because students care only about money. But is the problem students or their professors?... more »

Was the ancient world a hotbed of esotericism, in which philosophers self-censored, smuggling subversive ideas between the lines? Not exactly ... more »

Forget the gossip and trivia factoids — what did Susan Sontag stand for? Seriousness of purpose, patience of intellect, education of the heart... more »

To feel born too late, and to find that an ennobling failure, are very Czech emotions. And they permeate the work of a very Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal... more »

“The love song, whether from Shakespeare or his lessers, is to the currency of our feelings what the dollar bill is to our economy, the dining-room table to our family life – the necessary, inevitable thing.”... more »

Wealth, trade, technological development, the emergence of cities, more comfort and consumption: For it all, we have war to thank... more »

Once the shocks no longer shock, and the taboos are shattered, what will be left of high culture is sentimental nihilism. Popular culture is a necessary corrective.... more »

We live in technological times. Everything is optimized. It’s time to revive a humanistic tradition of robust criticism. Time to revive Arnold Toynbee... more »

John Berryman: In his youth, a splendid dancer; later, a nervous, erratic man; finally, a broken alcoholic – and brilliant poet... more »