Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »
The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »
The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned ... more »
Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism ... more »
High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies ... more »
Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality” ... more »
Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »
Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »
Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province ... more »
Jordan Petersen is rich, famous, and unhappy. His anxiety landed him in a Russian hospital. Now he's back from breakdown ... more »
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »
We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »
Sherry Turkle, MIT’s “one-woman emergency empathy squad,” is a critic of technology amid its evangelists...more... more »
What can we learn from Philip Roth, master careerist? Lawyer up early, listen to critics while scorning them publicly, sell out whenever possible ... more »
"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it" ... more »
The tragic legacy of “comfort women” has divided South Korea and Japan for decades. Enter the dubious claims of a Harvard law professor ... more »
What Freud got right. According to a new book, his ideas weren’t just ahead of his time — they are ahead of ours ... more »
A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »
Parul Sehgal read 125 years of writing in The New York Times Book Review. She found mostly a dearth of style and a failure of criticism... more »
At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon... more »
Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress ... more »
The book blurb requires too much work and induces too much guilt. As Viet Thanh Nguyen says, “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave.”... more »
René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »
Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors ... more »
What happens when race, class, and power collide at an elite liberal-arts college? No one emerges unscathed ... more »
More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie... more »
Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification? ... more »
No human invention has destroyed the civilization that invented it. We haven't been careful or wise — just lucky ... more »
Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew ... more »
“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman” ... more »
Two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, exemplify two radically different ideas about politics and design... more »
Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more »
Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »
Unearthing Caligula's pleasure garden. Was he assassinated because he was a monster, or was he made into a monster because he was assassinated? ... more »
When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes... more »
In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »
How to write, according to Martin Amis: No fancy syntax; use line breaks liberally; be original; see things with a poet’s eye... more »
A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more »
In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust ... more »
Psychosis and dissociation were key mechanisms for Surrealist artists. Down with Western logic! they cried. Long live paranoia!... more »
Alan Greenspan wished he’d never spoken of “irrational exuberance”; Thomas Kuhn rued introducing “paradigm shift” — coiner’s remorse is real ... more »
Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »
What is the cultural sway of magazines when there are 20-year-old TikTok influencers with many more subscribers than Time? ... more »
A mammoth new biography of Philip Roth is imminent. Who better to review it than, well, Philip Roth? ... more »
"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »
In Victorian times, one sat erect in polite society. Enter the scandalous American rocking chair — a “lazy and ungraceful indulgence”... more »
The legacy of British imperialism is everywhere: Even the word “loot” is appropriated — from the Hindi “lut,” the spoils of war... more »
Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »
Classics is beholden to a traditional, triumphalist, “Western civ” model. If the field doesn’t change, it doesn’t deserve to survive ... more »
When it comes to Patricia Highsmith, the question of mental illness, of course, arises. Her personality was interwoven with those of her characters ... more »
Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system ... more »
Computers can’t understand a haiku or conjure a fairytale. They can't grasp literature at all. And they never will. Here's proof ... more »
Joan Didion's potency and influence stems for her ability to repurpose an ingrained sense of futility into a tool of critical analysis... more »
Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist” ... more »
Seth Abramson's books promise "proof" of Trumpian misdeeds. In reality, they are incoherent summaries of other people's reporting ... more »
To separate science from pseudoscience, it helps to consider the rationales of UFOlogists, Yeti enthusiasts, and yes, anti-vaxxers ... more »
Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances ... more »
There is “a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course” ... more »
After residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, along with a Guggenheim and a MacArthur, Bette Howland never wrote another book ... more »
Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind... more »
Reading Heidegger in Beijing. He's a rock star in academic circles there. But kindly ignore the corruptive impact of a bad regime on a great thinker ... more »
Golden age of the cigarette. The war over smoking is too easily cast as one of heroes and villains - in truth things were much messier ... more »
Criticism is often a cycle of destruction, a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own ... more »
Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »
Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism ... more »
Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »
Jordan Petersen is rich, famous, and unhappy. His anxiety landed him in a Russian hospital. Now he's back from breakdown ... more »
Sherry Turkle, MIT’s “one-woman emergency empathy squad,” is a critic of technology amid its evangelists...more... more »
The tragic legacy of “comfort women” has divided South Korea and Japan for decades. Enter the dubious claims of a Harvard law professor ... more »
Parul Sehgal read 125 years of writing in The New York Times Book Review. She found mostly a dearth of style and a failure of criticism... more »
The book blurb requires too much work and induces too much guilt. As Viet Thanh Nguyen says, “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave.”... more »
What happens when race, class, and power collide at an elite liberal-arts college? No one emerges unscathed ... more »
No human invention has destroyed the civilization that invented it. We haven't been careful or wise — just lucky ... more »
Two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, exemplify two radically different ideas about politics and design... more »
Unearthing Caligula's pleasure garden. Was he assassinated because he was a monster, or was he made into a monster because he was assassinated? ... more »
How to write, according to Martin Amis: No fancy syntax; use line breaks liberally; be original; see things with a poet’s eye... more »
Psychosis and dissociation were key mechanisms for Surrealist artists. Down with Western logic! they cried. Long live paranoia!... more »
What is the cultural sway of magazines when there are 20-year-old TikTok influencers with many more subscribers than Time? ... more »
In Victorian times, one sat erect in polite society. Enter the scandalous American rocking chair — a “lazy and ungraceful indulgence”... more »
Classics is beholden to a traditional, triumphalist, “Western civ” model. If the field doesn’t change, it doesn’t deserve to survive ... more »
Computers can’t understand a haiku or conjure a fairytale. They can't grasp literature at all. And they never will. Here's proof ... more »
Seth Abramson's books promise "proof" of Trumpian misdeeds. In reality, they are incoherent summaries of other people's reporting ... more »
There is “a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course” ... more »
Reading Heidegger in Beijing. He's a rock star in academic circles there. But kindly ignore the corruptive impact of a bad regime on a great thinker ... more »
Do "woke" American ideas on race, gender, and post-colonialism really pose an existential threat to France?... more »
When Charles Darwin met Harriet Martineau, she enjoyed a level of influence he could not imagine. And she challenged his dim view of women ... more »
Cassandra of the internet age: As far back as the mid-'80s, Michael Goldhaber was worried about the attention economy. ... more »
Juliet did not say "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore [is he] Romeo?" So why do so many people deface quotes with brackets? ... more »
How Mary-Kay Wilmers refashioned the London Review of Books in her image: literary and eccentric... more »
The book pirates of 18th-century France devised a strategy: Republish works by Voltaire. It was “an enterprise of solid gold”... more »
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is one of the most prominent classicists of his generation. He's not sure the field should exist ... more »
The law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule call for rule by social-scientific elites. That would be a disaster... more »
Silvia Foti's grandfather is a national hero in Lithuania. He also worked with the Nazis to kill Jews. His story has echoes across Eastern Europe ... more »
In 1995 a Luddite and a Wired co-founder made a bet: In 25 years, will technology have destroyed society? A verdict is in ... more »
There are many shades of blue — cerulean, azure, navy, royal — but not a new one in two centuries. Until now... more »
The history of the restaurant. Each generation thinks it eats better than the last. The pandemic will challenge that assumption ... more »
Takedown artist Lauren Oyler is unapologetic: “I’m not afraid of being disliked by people that I already dislike.” How will critics receive her novel? ... more »
Since the Second World War, scientists have understood the human brain as a predictive machine. Is that still a useful metaphor? ... more »
It's thought that Newton's Principia was such a monster of technical detail that few read it. That's a myth, it turns out ... more »
Oligarchs stepped in to bolster the arts in post-Soviet Russia. But is the work they have bankrolled any good? ... more »
Should artificial intelligence model the brain or the mind? The debate has led to a fractious split in the field... more »
Darwin in space. If there is life on other planets, it will have evolved along the same lines as life on earth ... more »
Russian avant-garde art has been a font of fakery for decades. Some artists, celebrated in the West, may never have existed ... more »
The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »
High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies ... more »
Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »
What can we learn from Philip Roth, master careerist? Lawyer up early, listen to critics while scorning them publicly, sell out whenever possible ... more »
What Freud got right. According to a new book, his ideas weren’t just ahead of his time — they are ahead of ours ... more »
At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon... more »
René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »
More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie... more »
Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew ... more »
Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more »
When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes... more »
A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more »
Alan Greenspan wished he’d never spoken of “irrational exuberance”; Thomas Kuhn rued introducing “paradigm shift” — coiner’s remorse is real ... more »
A mammoth new biography of Philip Roth is imminent. Who better to review it than, well, Philip Roth? ... more »
The legacy of British imperialism is everywhere: Even the word “loot” is appropriated — from the Hindi “lut,” the spoils of war... more »
When it comes to Patricia Highsmith, the question of mental illness, of course, arises. Her personality was interwoven with those of her characters ... more »
Joan Didion's potency and influence stems for her ability to repurpose an ingrained sense of futility into a tool of critical analysis... more »
To separate science from pseudoscience, it helps to consider the rationales of UFOlogists, Yeti enthusiasts, and yes, anti-vaxxers ... more »
After residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, along with a Guggenheim and a MacArthur, Bette Howland never wrote another book ... more »
Golden age of the cigarette. The war over smoking is too easily cast as one of heroes and villains - in truth things were much messier ... more »
Acid humor, a flair for pith, a feel for the uncanny — Joan Didion’s talents have been celebrated for decades. Let’s not stop now... more »
"Yeats saw so deeply into the contours of his age that the shape of the future became somewhat discernible" ... more »
Was the painter Francis Bacon a truth-teller about humanity's animal nature, or a mere mimic, best at rendering feet, doorknobs, and toiletware? ... more »
Both Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath were caught in the web of literary fame. But he lived to 74, she died at 30. The difference is instructive ... more »
As a 23-year-old social-media influencer tops the best-seller list in France, the old guard fights back: “147 pages of emptiness, 19.50 lost euros” ... more »
In her writings, Mary Wollstonecraft flouted social norms. In life, she often defied her own pronouncements ... more »
Did E.E. Cummings’s relationship with a French prostitute really have a serious effect on his work?... more »
We inhabit a dystopian reality, says John Gray, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction... more »
Dostoevsky endured emphysema, hemorrhoids, and six epileptic fits a week. And yet, in his overheated and unventilated office, he persisted ... more »
Mozart in Vienna. In 10 years he composed a half-dozen symphonies, 17 piano concertos, and several operas. It was as close to perfect as he ever came... more »
Being Francis Bacon. He lived with such intensity because death was a constant presence ... more »
The postcapitalist theorist Mark Fisher worked at the periphery of journalism and academia, penning few books. And yet his influence is enormous ... more »
Pirate publishers saturated the market and filled warehouses with unsellable stock. Result: the publishing crash of 1783... more »
Robert Gottlieb on Harold Bloom: "It is a tremendous pity that the final statement from a critic of such significance...should be this disjointed effort" ... more »
What are dreams? A kind of theater of the unconscious? Random neural firings? A Darwinian adaptation? ... more »
Young people rush to join the creative class of artists and academics. But beware the sacrifices that come with doing what you love ... more »
Lucian Freud was violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous. If he was not the devil, he was certainly the devil's advocate ... more »
Wikipedia, comprising more than 55 million articles, is enormously popular. Is it "the last bastion of shared reality"? ... more »
The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned ... more »
Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality” ... more »
Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province ... more »
We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »
"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it" ... more »
A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »
Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress ... more »
Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors ... more »
Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification? ... more »
“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman” ... more »
Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »
In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »
In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust ... more »
Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »
"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »
Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »
Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system ... more »
Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist” ... more »
Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances ... more »
Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind... more »
Criticism is often a cycle of destruction, a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own ... more »
In the 1950s, writers began to formulate a critique of technology. Since then we've rushed into an uncritical embrace. What now?... more »
A biography paints Tom Stoppard as unfailingly kind. The playwright’s reaction? He is “not as nice as people think” ... more »
On pop futurism. The genre's method? Sketch out possible future, highlight emergent trend, and promise way for reader to benefit ... more »
The ur-existentialist. Kierkegaard was torn by his desires for recognition and for walking the path of a self-denying Christian ... more »
The provincialism of American literary culture: We want books that "speak to the moment," espousing a political urgency. That's small-minded ... more »
A fact about the academic humanities? "Bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they make the case for their departments"... more »
Transgression was the founding gesture of the avant-garde. Now the avant-garde can seem a little "rapey." What changed? ... more »
Philosophers have sought for centuries to understand beauty. Now scientists are giving it a try ... more »
Helen Frankenthaler was many things, but perhaps not “a Shakespeare of the Eisenhower era,” as a fulsome biography asserts... more »
Christopher Hitchens's widow and agent are trying to sink a biography in progress. Whose interests are they serving? ... more »
"I am detail-oriented," "I am a team player" - cover letters require us to use language in horrific ways ... more »
Geniuses are often obsessive, self-centered, and offensive. As Edmond de Goncourt put it: Almost no one loves a genius until he or she is dead... more »
Art of the zinger. In the delivery of a ringing - and withering - phrase, Clive James was without parallel ... more »
Joan Didion was 70 before she finished a nonfiction book not drawn from magazine assignments. Her talent is spinning craftwork into art ... more »
Critics hold that “the question of correctness is generally irrelevant” in poetry. But they’re mistaken about poets’ mistakes... more »
19th-century science supposedly elevated the disinterested mind over human vitality. But Alexander von Humboldt’s story challenges that narrative ... more »
Derrida and Foucault are often categorized by their critics as like-minded thinkers. In fact, they spent most of their lives disagreeing ... more »
Conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. The problem isn’t with the theories, but with our susceptibility to them... more »
The American elite is now the first national ruling class - a good thing in some ways, bad in others. Michael Lind explains ... more »
Plagued by anxiety attacks, Beckett turned to poetry, cardiology, psychoanalysis, and finally, obscure 17th-century Christian mysticism... more »
Adam Smith was at most a deist, and David Hume was an avowed skeptic. But religion influences the economic ideas they produced ... more »
There’s an app for that! The notion that technology offers the best solution to any problem is appealing. And dangerous... more »
How should we read? For Will Self, “we would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text” ... more »
The paradox of political science: Only by remaining aloof from the messiness of politics can it achieve the scientific authority it craves ... more »
“I have never written a plot-driven novel,” held Ursula Le Guin. “I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t” ... more »
The isolation artist. Edward Hopper's paintings make an emotional resurgence amid our sustained solitude ... more »
When Catherine Camus was informed of the death of her son Albert, all she could say was, “Too young” ... more »
Americans say they want 2.5 children, but they're having only 1.7, on average. Why? Ross Douthat's case for larger families... more »
Ferociously dull and laden with puffery, the academic book review is a tedious genre that's outlived its purpose ... more »
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