New Books

George Packer, one our best reporters and storytellers, has a knack for picking memorable subjects. His latest: his own anxieties about America's future   ... more »

The heroines of anthropology: One became a professor, one died, one was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and two quit academe  ... more »

The first of Dostoevsky’s seizures happened on his honeymoon. "If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married"... more »

Borges to his English translator: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark…. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny”  ... more »

We take graphs and charts for granted, but in their earliest incarnations — to help understand longitude or train times — they were revolutionary ... more »

Jon Meacham, a soft-spoken historian with the president’s ear, is impressively —  and maddeningly — everywhere... more »

"Within this wide great Universe,/Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare." The Faerie Queene approaches atheism  ... more »

Early 19th-century America was gripped by a war on science. Edgar Allan Poe battled for both sides... more »

The way we grieve now. For the social-media influencer Amanda Kloots, going offline was never an option, even when the worst happened  ... more »

Dave Hickey's idiosyncratic blend of high and low - French theory and California surfing - gave him an unmistakable voice  ... more »

Much has been made of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt. What about her influence on him?  ... more »

The Homeric Question: Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer?... more »

Before conquering Broadway and Hollywood, Mike Nichols was a bullied, hairless Jewish refugee without a word of English  ... more »

The shock isn’t that America’s fragile union broke apart so spectacularly in 1861, but that it didn’t happen sooner  ... more »

He invented or perfected the short story, the mystery, science fiction, and gothic horror: Is Poe the most influential American writer?   ... more »

Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: A history of political murder
... more »

What do two centuries of American self-help best sellers say about the country? Louis Menand digs in  ... more »

“Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.” In a pandemic, such theft is even more prevalent  ... more »

"It is startling to witness just how much the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at Jefferson's own university dislikes its patron, Thomas Jefferson”  ... more »

To understand architecture, look beyond surface materials, like brick and glass, to the technologies that fueled construction... more »

Dilemma of the Dylan biographer: His fabulism is baked into his DNA. Explaining him is about as interesting as explaining a magic trick   ... more »

Mabel Loomis Todd is remembered as a literary villain: a seductress who butchered Emily Dickinson’s poems while editing them. The truth is more complex... more »

What’s the link between revolutionary thought and conservative disposition? Consider George Berkeley... more »

Salman Rushdie has many theories as to why his recent work has been considered abominable. If only those theories carried water... more »

How we dress -- and why. Our wardrobes are filled with coded messages about power, wealth, and status.   ... more »

The novelist Joshua Cohen is clearly a genius. Now if he could only channel his prodigious talent toward a calmer sort of wisdom  ... more »

Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein: Why did lesbians tend to be not just custodians but also creators of modernist work?  ... more »

Edmund de Waal’s tour of belle époque Paris is singular in its preoccupation — or obsession — with things... more »

For most of history, there were just two types of food: plants and animals. Then along came a third, more akin to poison... more »

For most human history, life expectancy was 30 and a quarter of children died before their first birthday. What changed is humanity’s greatest achievement... more »

As a child, Kurt Gödel wouldn't stop asking questions. He acquired a nickname, Herr Warum: "Mr. Why"  ... more »

For Adrienne Rich, the gap between life and art was fraught. She was too narrow or too wide, too personal or too political   ... more »

"Spite is for people who want to shove you off the garden walk. A more humane politics would ask how to make the path wider"  ... more »

A tip from alchemists of yore: Tag your books with Greek graffiti for an impression of academic credibility and a hermetic mystique... more »

A worldview based on identity and suffused with grievance is ascendant. Is it here to stay?  ... more »

Critical race theory stems from a small corner of legal academia. But conservatives, citing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, are caricaturing its significance as something very different... more »

Meet Ruben Blum, historian, Jew, fictional creation of Joshua Cohen, and the center of a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas... more »

Jhumpa Lahiri has inspired a school of good immigrant fiction: Lahirism, in which pretty prose and realist narrative culminate in subtle revelation  ... more »

The age of swagger. Late Victorian and Edwardian England was marked by empire builders, activists, and rich men behaving badly   ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Historical fiction has long been the fusty domain of mothballed characters using words like “Prithee!” No more  ... more »

For Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition were central to modern identity. Now concerns over online reputation risk supplanting that principle  ... more »

David Hockney has known only fame and adulation. Why? His images are bright, breezy, decorous, and a bit boring... more »

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on those who “do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy”... more »

In Joan Didion's writing, she doesn't quite tell us what she means. But we know how she feels... more »

Art galleries and auctions can feel like intimidating, insular places. Here’s how to successfully buy art... more »

Philosophy barely progresses, but what impedes it? Perhaps the solutions to the problems it takes on generate their own problems  ... more »

When a writer declines to such a degree as Naomi Wolf has, we need to ask: Was she always full of shit? ... more »

Why have English departments fallen on hard times? Because professors stopped speaking the truth about literature  ... more »

Retrospectives at the Tate and the Met, a five-volume catalogue raisonné, many biographies: Is there anything left to say about Francis Bacon?... more »

“The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism”  ... more »

If theology, science, and philosophy once shaped souls, a new power has superseded them: HR, the central organizing power of society... more »

A clock is not just a clock. It was created for social and political purposes, and it has a distinctive hold on our lives  ... more »

Rachel Cusk’s “tribute” to Mabel Dodge Luhan does not not so much update her story as erode its complexity  ... more »

For progressives, Foucault can no longer be “the ‘unsurpassable horizon’ of critical thought.” So what comes next?   ... more »

Coming out of a long depression, William James made a study of habits. The healthiest ones, he concluded, are those we manage to break... more »

The antagonistic relationship between writers and critics has produced a rich literature of trolling. Both parties are vulnerable to humiliation... more »

Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think  ... more »

Thomas Nagel on moral intuition: Treating people decently is a vital part of our lives, regardless of the consequences  ... more »

Because the art world is loath to fully censor harmful works, a new tactic has emerged: “curatorial activism”... more »

Book reviewing: An elegy. Ever since there has been literature, there have been critics. Now that’s in doubt   ... more »

Who's the 83-year-old muckraker who turned up a Chinese government operation at the University of Chicago? Marshall Sahlins... more »

Conservatives have an unlikely tool to fight the new progressivism and the church of intersectionality: the theories of Michel Foucault... more »

Thomas Sowell, a year into his U. of Chicago Ph.D. under Milton Friedman, remained a staunch Marxist. What changed his mind?... more »

Freud and others warned about the violence and irrationality of crowds. We hear less about their immense dignity   ... more »

"Can someone tell when you Google them?" Becca Rothfeld considers the emotional investment and aesthetics of online stalking... more »

For Leo Strauss, the public sphere was for unsophisticated opinion writing, not true philosophical reflection  ... more »

Among the most reproduced books in English are the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and The Compleat Angler, a 17th-century fishing manual... more »

Mary Beard: “Classics is what we make it, and the fact that the classical world has been misrepresented should not be used against it” ... more »

What has Covid done to the arts? It’s “not a recession. It is not even a depression. It is a catastrophe”... more »

When Richard Wright moved to Paris, he did not turn his back on America. Rather, he gained a new vantage ... more »

The textile hypothesis: The reason for humankind’s shift to agriculture has to do less with food and more with clothing... more »

Bolaño's shadow. Marketing trends mislead the few U.S. publishers devoted to Latin American literature ... more »

She was born in Germany; he was born in Newark. Their differences were obvious. But Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth had common cause   ... more »

Why did Stephen Hawking support kooky ideas like the building of ultra-tiny spacecraft? He needed money  ... more »

Why are architectural awards going to buildings that are drab and lifeless? Modern architecture has taken a wrong, wrong turn... more »

The tyranny of the footnote. In the age of Google, chasing one literary citation leads to another, and down a digital rabbit hole   ... more »

Bloated by methodological hot air, literary studies is charged with callow polemicizing and careerist branding. Time to take a step back  ... more »

Ross Douthat scans the landscape for novelists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and everywhere sees torpor and repetition   ... more »

Are literary scholars aesthetic experts or moral experts? They haven’t claimed either mantle, and the result is a vacuum of expertise... more »

Life as an underemployed academic can be paranoid, anxious, stupefying. It's the stuff of literature  ... more »

Humanists like Jill Lepore see data as an enemy epistemology. That doesn’t have to be the case   ... more »

It's not unusual for philosophers to receive death threats - especially if they are philosophers who deny that humans possess free will... more »

What determines the thickness of novels? The 19th century favored lengthiness, the early 20th brevity. Now they’re long again. Why?... more »

Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think  ... more »

The authenticity hustle. Be yourself! Stay true to yourself! Find yourself! That's what the conformist poseurs say  ... more »

In a time of sanctimony literature, novelists and novels are stupefyingly smug and egregiously simplistic. Becca Rothfeld explains   ... more »

When did we start believing that colleges transform lives and change society? What happens when that notion starts to crumble?... more »

Who determines what science means? For Andrew Jewett, the answer is philosophers, pundits, and polemicists — not scientists themselves  ... more »

In 2017, Black writers for the first time won more literary prizes, 38 percent, than writers of any other race or ethnicity   ... more »