New Books

Political earnestness can be tedious in an essayist. But in Olivia Laing, it's leavened by empathy and an omnivorous curiosity... more »

Bearded like a deep-sea fisherman, baggy-eyed, high on drugs or alcohol, the novelist Robert Stone cut a curious figure at catered cocktail parties... more »

“Cosmopolitanism” is often meant as a dig at the Davos set of footloose capitalists. But the term contains rich philosophical potential, says Martha Nussbaum... more »

Darwin wrote more than a dozen books. Some of them are easily ignored. Some are fun and charming. Some grind through important stuff. One of them flows briskly and changed the world... more »

Wordsworth's credentials as a sage and prophet of nature were unimpeachable. Then he suffered "the longest, dullest decline in literary history"... more »

Whoever has the most galleries when he dies, wins. Such is the consensus among art collectors like the particularly ruthless Larry Gagosian... more »

Stylish novelists like Ottessa Moshfegh and Ling Ma give us curiously passive, apathetic characters. What’s behind this tedious tendency?... more »

William Blake's flint cottage, Rudyard Kipling's stone manor: What role do houses play in the lives of creative people?... more »

If you elide crucial historical context, it’s easy to make religious notions of the afterlife look like freakish curiosities. A recent book does just that... more »

No modernism without lesbians. More than a sexual preference, lesbianism created the conditions for an artistic revolution. Or so claims Diana Souhami... more »

In his letters, Robert Frost is never tedious, always fun, appallingly crafty, and unusually trusting in people he barely knew... more »

Freud was a social philosopher, using a scientific guise to lend his ideas more authority. Or so argues a new book... more »

During the 16 months Einstein spent in Bohemia, he did nothing much. But the banality of his experience there is itself worth consideration... more »

Could it be that loneliness was invented around 1800? The separation of self and society has deeper roots, as Hamlet or Othello might testify... more »

“Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising. … Ideally, the only difference would be the logo.” So it went at the Warhol Factory... more »

George Gershwin attacked a “crude, vulgar, and unadorned” version of jazz. But were his experiments in the genre just cultural appropriation?... more »

Lucian Freud’s art was an obsessive quest to exert maniacal control over contour, color, and light. He was a King Lear of the brush... more »

Tarred as elitist and conservative for its New Critical roots, formalism is making a comeback. Will it stick this time?... more »

Before the 1600s, the workplace drug most commonly consumed in the West was beer. Then capitalism brought a craze for something new: coffee... more »

Shrinking news coverage, online consumer reviews, the withering of literature in public esteem: an audit of book reviewing in uncertain times... more »

Explainer journalism never lets actual events get in the way of big ideas. Exhibit A: Ezra Klein’s new book... more »

Writing about music is a difficult thing, saying in words that which words cannot say. Philip Kennicott gets it exactly right... more »

How was America transformed from a “rabidly anti-theatrical” society to one that, by 1833, viewed Shakespeare as its great national author?... more »

The battle between Noah Webster and Joseph E. Worcester still matters because it was over the words Americans use to understand themselves... more »

Americans seem headed for an “endless autumn” — plenty of free time, but creativity, warmth, and hope in short supply... more »

The reality of numbers. Does it matter if numbers are, in a philosophical sense, real, as long as they work as expected? Depends on whom you ask... more »

We are confronted with two new, substantial Hitler biographies. How much more is there to say? Quite a lot, it turns out... more »

iBauhaus. Was this laboratory of Modernism, founded in 1919, a progenitor of the iPhone? The case is by turns persuasive and preposterous... more »

Newly married to George Orwell, Eileen Blair cried a lot and typed his manuscripts in the dark. Things went downhill from there... more »

The joyousness of dogs. We love them and they love us, as no small measure of philosophical material bears out... more »

The obstreperous Becketteers watched in chagrin as the literary gig of the century — writing Beckett’s biography — went to a young woman... more »

Presidents and their books. Thomas Jefferson was more of a reader than a writer. John Adams couldn’t stop writing... more »

Morbidly depressed, William James hung on not through intellectualism, but by making the value of his life a hypothesis... more »

What new can be gleaned from the French Revolution’s central paradox: how so many citizens were slaughtered in the name of liberté, égalité, fraternité?... more »

In Regency England, even aristocratic younger sons had to work. Their choices: the army, navy, clergy, or law. Each had its indignities... more »

Because few bankers are men of letters, and few men of letters are bankers, Walter Bagehot remains unique. As does his supercilious literary style... more »

Warhol’s pranks, like dressing up as a box of Brillo, sound dumb. But we still live in his world... more »

Liberalism is besieged, we must rush to defend it! So goes a popular narrative. But post-liberalism is more bark than bite... more »

Depictions of Emily Dickinson vary by decade. In the ’80s she was seen as a model feminist; in the ’90s, as queer. Today we see her as driven... more »

Essays & Opinions

Peter Schjeldahl predicts what we'll experience when can once again wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember... more »

An artist's gifts are meant for giving. That's always been a dilemma for gifted people. In the digital age, it's a crisis... more »

The art world has survived outlaw days and obscene money, keeping its culture intact. But can it survive the coronavirus?... more »

What to read in quarantine? Colette, Hilary Mantel, and classic, 700 page academic tomes. It’s a good time for slow reading... more »

The coronavirus marks the end of an era defined by liberalism and rising living standards. What will shape the new world order?... more »

The case for Don DeLillo. By every metric of literary greatness, he is in the highest percentile. Give him the Nobel Prize. This year... more »

"You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone," says Jill Lepore, "but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear"... more »

Two years ago, Joseph Epstein set out to learn Latin. As his dream of mastery has given way to reality, what remains is his love for the language... more »

Auden was filthy, strewing old food, cigarettes, and martini glasses everywhere. Such squalor, he protested, was necessary for a man of letters... more »

A pandemic is a time for rethinking everything, for changing one’s mind, for putting down books by fashionable theorists... more »

The literature of contagion is vile, says Jill Lepore. "Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute... more »

The critical theorist as coronavirus denier. Giorgio Agamben uses outdated jargon to make once-fashionable arguments that now seem absurd. Who's listening?... more »

In praise of marginalia. "Like having a child or planting a garden, annotating a book is an expression of hope for the future"... more »

Any critic who wants to write something lasting must do so in part from aggression. Few have been more successful than T.S. Eliot... more »

Society, Durkheim held, was a social fact irreducible to psychology or economics. In a time of pandemic, we’re all Durkheimians... more »

When Alex Perez praises Philip Roth and Henry Miller, people react as if to an atrocity. And yet he can’t get enough of these problematic white dudes... more »

What does a writer do when his words stop working? Wait for the muse to recharge or dwell in the struggle to overcome your own silence... more »

“Be of good cheer,” advises Geoff Dyer, reflecting on the pandemic. But inwardly he’s clutching his head like Munch’s screamer... more »

In literature, a disease is not just a disease. It is a return of the repressed, a manifestation of an eternal crisis... more »

Much of the poetry we love most is wistful and regret-filled. Why? The all-too human hankering for things to be other than they are. Michael Dirda explains... more »

Through Umberto Eco’s eyes, the library functions not to enlighten, but to disorient — to overwhelm your self-confidence... more »

In 1948, Camus discovered Simone Weil’s manuscripts. They revolutionized not only his sense of suffering but his sense of self... more »

George Steiner, an unrepentant elitist, was a moral force for high art. Among his virtues was a hunger to be more serious... more »

Long gone are the days of Dickens and Kafka — the novel has been brought low. Are its days numbered?... more »

George Scialabba, who has spent a lifetime suffering from depression and reading about others', has some advice... more »

The University of Chicago is renowned for its commitment to open debate and rigorous inquiry. Is that still true of its English department?... more »

In praise of passive protagonists. The insipidity of characters like Candide and Bartleby belies their triumphant potential... more »

Faulkner arrived in Hollywood in 1932 and made a lasting first impression: He was drunk, disheveled, and bleeding from the head... more »

It's been said that most writers are lucky to have one original book in them. A lot of literary careers consist of rewriting it again and again... more »

All is not well in the humanities. Why are its adherents so eager to convince themselves otherwise? Charlie Tyson unpacks “reassurance lit”... more »

The real Joan Didion. Her work isn’t about her family or about death, but about the allure of alienation from all that... more »

The idea of selfhood, taken for granted in secular societies, depends on a theistic worldview. John Gray explains... more »

In 2004, Richard Rorty went to Tehran. Thousands came to hear how philosophy could build democracy. They got something different... more »

Writers like V.S. Naipaul felt shame and self-loathing for Caribbean literature. Then came Kamau Braithwaite, who threw off the burden... more »

The stock market is a fickle beast. Is there such a thing as a philosophically responsible investment?... more »

In the early modern world, melancholy was no trivial matter. It could manifest as flatulence, migraine, or the belief that one is a shellfish... more »

Dave Hickey, at 80, is a broken-down lion of a man. What remains is a vision of art that extends to every realm of human endeavor... more »

Wrongly dismissed as a “depressive sexist,” Michel Houellebecq is actually the most serious and important novelist in Europe... more »

Millennial tries fancy thing (Sweetgreen salads, puffer jackets, Goop), is surprised to find life unchanged. Such “late capitalism” essays are everywhere — and are pointless... more »

Prepper Camp, as Lauren Groff discovers, spans Emersonian self-reliance, ninja survivalism, and homemade Mace... more »

Is feminist rage justified? That depends, argues Martha Nussbaum, on whether it manifests as vigorous protest or servile inactivity... more »

What can insect colonies teach us about politics? That self-interest isn’t as natural or as pervasive as we may think... more »

Judith Butler: Opening up possibilities requires radical imagining, which can embarrass you or make you seem a little crazy... more »

Are literary men abhorrent? Indeed so, says Adrienne Miller, former literary and fiction editor of Esquire, who counts the ways... more »

Bertrand Russell found prison life agreeable — plenty of time for reading and writing. The only problem was a guard shushing his laughter... more »

In the early 20th century, Newyorkitis was a disease. Its symptoms? Egotism, pompousness, greed, and “a circumscribed mental horizon"... more »

"The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress"... more »

Scientific authority never conveys moral authority. So why do economists, posing as philosopher-kings, claim insight into matters of right and wrong?... more »

"What is the correct response to a ruinous history? What, if anything, is the artist’s “duty”? Zadie Smith on Kara Walker... more »

Why is pop music so depressing? Fifty years ago, it was all about love, joy, and happiness. Now, it's hate, sorrow, and pain... more »