New Books

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 »

In 1829, Thomas Carlyle declared the "age of machinery." Nearly 200 years later, we don't simply use machines; we inhabit them... more »

“Not one photograph devoid of social significance!” Images do not obey social directives, but that didn't stop the Soviets from trying... more »

Pei-Shen Qian was a talented street painter who found no success – until he began to forge the works of his idols... more »

In an anthology of mid-century American poetry composed in psychiatric hospitals, James Schuyler deserved prominent billing... more »

More than 100 books have been written about Gustav Mahler. Too few do what needs to be done: defend his use of cowbells... more »

Can the real William Blake be rescued from his reputation as a hedonic, revolution-loving proto-hippie?... more »

W.G. Sebald's reputation has grown so imposing that it is a relief to discover an earlier, less polished version of the writer... more »

We’ve been condensing information into pictures since cave-wall paintings. But is that an excuse to use emojis?... more »

How much does Jewishness explain Partisan Review's famously pugnacious intellectual style?... more »

Who was Leopold Stokowski? The most elusive and controversial conductor in America... more »

“Unalive,” “grape,” “You’re so skibidi…” The literary innovations of Gen Alpha have arrived. They are driven, unfortunately, by influencers... more »

Geoff Dyer has made a literary career out of humorous high jinks and stylistic experimentation. His latest work departs from all that... more »

Early photography, the domain of “the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed,” could be a death-defying pursuit  ... more »

Behind every visionary lies a calamity. For Plato, it was an extraordinary philosophical experiment in Syracuse... more »

When the communist regime in Poland fell, it was a victory for writers and readers and the CIA as much as trade unionists and politicians... more »

Charming English icon or barbarism personified? Samuel Pepys’s diary is a reminder of the complexities of warming to the past... more »

Size matters, but not as much as organization. Anthony Grafton on libraries, then and now... more »

Was Condé Nast an “empire,” with editors shaping the course of the culture? Or did they merely reflect existing cultural change?... more »

Is there anything epistemically admirable or useful about those who seek bliss in ignorance?... more »

Humans and nature: As Annie Dillard put it, “I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany”... more »

The Salt Path is the latest memoir with an author accused of fabrication or embellishment. Why does it keep happening?... more »

“Novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind”... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

What happens if you splice, slice, and rearrange 121 Lewis Lapham essays? You distill the Laphamian vernacular... more »

The uses of anthropomorphism. We often misinterpret animal emotion, but denying their emotions is also a category error... more »

The problem with analytic philosophers isn’t that they turn their attention to what interests them. The problem is that it isn’t all that interesting... more »

Henry James’s eloquent cruelties. His razor sharp criticism took literary failings as evidence of their authors’ personal inadequacies... more »

Admirers called Alexandre Kojève “The Professor.” Others took a dimmer view: “the snake in the grass.” Both perspectives had merit... more »

Russian literature has long maintained a deep hold on the Western mind. But is Gen Z really mad for Dostoyevsky?... more »

The French liar. Descartes was, for his sharpest critics, a seductive purveyor of ignorance and Catholicism... more »

Could it be that momentous theological differences between Christians and Jews stem from bad translations?... more »

Ottessa Moshfegh interviews her former crushes, Joyce Carol Oates posts cat pics: Substack is where authors go to get weird... more »

Mountains rise, species disappear — in the incomprehensible vastness of time we encounter the geological sublime... more »

Engagement with art and literature is a way of turning toward the world, towards reality, even in a state of captivity or desolation... more »

The science of consciousness has stagnated around two opposing approaches: physicalism and idealism. There’s another way... more »

Geoff Dyer has been described as an “essayist,” “comic writer,” “humorist,” and worst of all, “travel writer.” How dare they, he asks... more »

For Kurt Vonnegut, survival was a kind of "cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line"... more »

Only mediocrities adhere to rules of writing, so make your prose purple — the purpler the better... more »

The geopolitical stakes of the race for AI dominance prompt a thorny question: Can we preserve both our humanity and our security?... more »

Why do writers write? For pleasure, meaning, money, fame – and for no reason at all. Lydia Davis explains... more »

The mystery of Sylvia Plath is that she was simply ordinary right up to the point that she became extraordinary... more »

Humans have long mistaken fluency for presence. Now, with the rise of hyper-fluent AI, our notions of identity will be tested... more »

The doubt disorder. At the 28th Annual OCD Conference, Andrew Kay asks: What is OCD, and where does it come from?... more »

“Offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority”... more »

For influential 20th-century anthropologists, religion could not be reduced to its social function or explained away by other metadiscourses... more »