New Books

In his 30s A.N. Wilson drank “on a positively Slavic scale” with other literary journalists, gossiped, and slept around ... more »

Beware “storification” — our overreliance on storytelling conventions to understand the world around us ... more »

 Outside the delusions of humanities professors, teaching and writing about Marlowe and Austen is not a form of radical politics   ... more »

The descendants of Thomas Henry Huxley inherited not only his flair for argument but also his affinity for sweeping questions   ... more »

The hidden past of an underappreciated instrument. The banjo's African roots have been neglected or misrepresented ... more »

The relationship between musicians and critics ranges from affable to antagonistic to utterly bizarre... more »

Few things generate more powerful legends than martyrdom and massacre, and that is certainly true of the Paris Commune... more »

The new beach read. It’s less a pulpy work of summer escapism — and more a musing on an evolving ecological disaster ... more »

Franz Kafka, aphorist. His work in this genre is low-key, discreetly funny, and extremely strange   ... more »

What's captivating about Dylan's songwriting is the strange mix of care and carelessness. Not so in his prose    ... more »

Shirley Hazzard's style: a thick maze of foreshadowing and indirection, inevitability and destiny, all-knowing and far away... more »

1888 was a tragic year for Nietzsche. His mind was unraveling just as his reputation was starting to rise... more »

“To wrestle with the unsavory aspects of ancient literature is to do the hard work of self-examination” ... more »

Arthur Miller, after the fall. His great theme — the ease with which a life can be discarded — became his fate    ... more »

The work of the critic is to be decisive, knowledgeable, authoritative. Emily Ogden is not most critics ... more »

Hayek and The Road to Serfdom. The Austrian economist's iconic book is the work of someone who felt left out... more »

The Holocaust poses impossible questions for history, including: What to make of perpetrators who acted in contradictory ways?... more »

It was 1978 and Haruki Murakami was watching a baseball game when he suddenly realized: I think I can write a novel ... more »

A late-life gift from the greatest living songwriter, Bob Dylan's annotated playlist reveals a lot about music and even more about him ... more »

Schiller's smells. Did the philosopher and poet really insist on writing within sniffing distance of rotten apples?    ... more »

The novelist Amina Cain’s first foray into nonfiction is light reading — so light, in fact, it puts you to sleep ... more »

Asphyxiation by flower petals, macrophallocracy, 22-course dinners: Was Heliogabalus by far the most depraved of Rome's emperors? ... more »

In an Agatha Christie novel, "violent murder might happen at any moment—and yet the meals and tea still arrive on time”... more »

Bob Dylan’s new book, like his music, features scarlet women, jughead criminals, wanton judges, and unscrupulous gamblers   ... more »

In the time of slavery, ghost stories were a way of keeping Black children safe from a host of terrors... more »

A journey into the interior of a cell — goopy cytoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, nucleus — offers hard-won lessons ... more »

Lee Siegel: “It is nearly impossible to have a rational argument that is not built out of the sticks and stones of emotion”... more »

Everyone has a story, sure, but don’t be seduced by the “mindless valorization of storytelling,” warns Peter Brooks.... more »

Self-injury as a form of expression can offer agency to the artist. But what's in it for the audience?... more »

Is thinking a sense, “just like sight, taste, hearing, feeling or touch”? The German philosopher Markus Gabriel makes the case... more »

In his 20s, Darryl Pinckney had a guide through Manhattan's literary life: Elizabeth Hardwick... more »

A literary love triangle. In the summer of 1910, things got complicated among Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Frances Gregg... more »

In 1974, Jan Morris became the highest-profile Brit to change genders. Every line of today's battles was scripted then... more »

Does moral progress advance in the same way as scientific and technological progress? Not exactly... more »

“Movement never lies.” Martha Graham developed new ways for dancers to move, and to say new things with their bodies ... more »

The challenge of Casanova: What’s left to say, in 2022, about one of history’s most notorious sexual predators?... more »

John le Carré left behind brilliant, untidy letters for his biographers. More unexpected are the memoirs of his longtime mistress... more »

How did young Charles Darwin transform from diffident specimen collector to scientific theorist? Luck had a lot to do with it ... more »

On too many campuses, philosophical inquiry ends with self-help bromides. Good for enrollment, bad for the mind   ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Baby Einstein, magnetic logic games, music boxes that play Mozart: The didacticism of modern toys is novel — it’s also a mistake    ... more »

The most influential essay of the 20th century? Gordon Moore’s “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits”   ... more »

 From lead paint to an orange pigment used as rat poison, humanity’s obsession with color has often had toxic consequences    ... more »

“This vile thin paper is my abhorrence. It is characteristic of the age.” For 19th-century bibliophiles, literary culture was already in decline    ... more »

Los Angeles’s “Immersive Van Gogh” exhibit presents a terrible question: What if an art museum were more like the airport? ... more »

Apocalypticism, millenarianism, eschatology — the end times come in many versions. Ours might be the most pessimistic yet... more »

Proust-industrial complex. A century has passed since his death, but he is as unignorable as ever... more »

Haruki Murakami: “While the novelist is creating a novel, he is simultaneously being created by the novel” ... more »

Read old books, says Michael Dirda. "The great books are great because they speak to us, generation after generation" ... more »

The “economic determination of politics” was a pipe dream, argued István Hont. We should have listened more closely... more »

“Longtermism is a technocratic dream that purports to give some of the wealthiest people in the world the ability to plan the far future of humanity”   ... more »

Does Joan Didion's dining-room table hold some residual energy from her? It's another kind of magical thinking... more »

Is geography destiny in world affairs? No, it’s the human-made landscape, not the natural one, that will shape the next century ... more »

How’s an author meant to react to the shrinking market for books? With jealousy and competitiveness, of course    ... more »

The Velveteen Rabbit is a beloved classic of children's literature. It is also a genuinely philosophical work... more »

To comprehend the difference between smell and flavor, plug your nose and taste a jelly bean ... more »

Many writers are respected for their style, but few for their humanity: Vonnegut was admired for both... more »

Puritanism did not prevail in America because it tends to backfire, says Jill Lepore. Twitter’s pious mercilessness is no exception ... more »

Bill Deresiewicz: "Wokeness flattens art, and it seeks to flatten our response to art. It wants us all to have the same response to any given work”   ... more »

The dreariness of book clubs. They are boring because we avoid uncomfortable questions.    ... more »

Beware the “Stasi in our skulls,” warns Jonathan Rauch. Don’t become the police of our own minds: frightened, neurotic, demoralized ... more »

It’s become a mantra of American Marxism: “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” Where does that idea come from? ... more »

Why does the novel matter? For Karl Ove Knausgaard, the justification is its ability “to go into the world and hold it open”... more »

Languages are discrepant, words are slippery. Yet the case for translation, warts and all, is strong... more »

Durkheim is taught as a purveyor of timeless insights. But what of his blatant sexism and support for French imperialism?... more »

James Bennet’s firing from The New York Times was a sorry affair marked by cowardice and midcareer risk management... more »

Working at The New York Review: "Bob and Barbara are dinosaurs and we’re these mammals running around afraid of getting squashed"... more »

“What harm is done by letting conductors into our chamber music? More than you’d suspect”... more »

A collective amnesia stalks the book world: We assume queer writing is found only in the present. That’s wrong... more »

What’s the real threat to free expression: cancel culture or the fear of cancel culture? Eve Fairbanks pushes for the latter... more »

What exactly do we study when we study something like the South Asian diaspora? What is the purpose of ethnic studies?... more »

A bomb exploded outside the bedroom window of Freeman Dyson? He elaborated in one of his letters to a friend... more »

“I was never on a quest for sex itself, I was always on a quest for rock ’n’ roll.” It’s time to reconsider the groupie... more »

All aboard the Gone Girl cruise — yes, a cruise based on a novel about a woman faking her own abduction to take revenge on her partner... more »

Radical leftism must do more than pursue “citational justice,” equitable artistic representation, and fair tenure practices... more »

From violence in Berkeley to firings over gender-neutral bathrooms, the war on higher education is 50 years old... more »

Good writing exists between as-few-words-as-you-need and as-many-words-as-you-want, says Benjamin Dreyer. Where to draw the line?   ... more »

The corporatized position statement expresses solidarity, grief, and concern at various global events. It’s also devoid of politics   ... more »

Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon were all “bad” Catholics. Was that key to their literary success? ... more »

“There is no surer sign of intellectual and moral bankruptcy than an association with the thought of Carl Schmitt” ... more »

As neuroscientists learn more about the brain, the more it's clear how little we understand about consciousness... more »

Is the capacity for caregiving innate, automatic, and distinctly female? No, the maternal instinct is a myth... more »

Surrealist ethnographer, tragic humanist, sensation-seeking existentialist: Who was Diane Arbus? ... more »

Leon Wieseltier on intersectional environmentalism: “To argue that the hole in the ozone layer was made by racism is to play into the hands of the hole-punchers” ... more »

In 1822, Henri Beyle was balding, fat, and prone to plagiarizing and misspelling. How did he become the author we know as Stendhal?  ... more »

The Italian author Francesco Pacifico raises a complex matter: Why do American editors keep editing the sex out of his fiction?... more »

I.B. Singer became famous as a guardian of Yiddish culture. Yet his work tended to subvert such pieties ... more »

Raymond Geuss has made a career of critiquing liberal philosophers like John Rawls. With Rawls’s influence fading, is that wasted work?... more »

Life is hard. How to respond to it intellectually and emotionally arises with fresh urgency in each generation... more »

There is no lack of formulas for how to open a story. But great short stories elude well-worn schemes ... more »