New Books

Was Condé Nast an “empire,” with editors shaping the course of the culture? Or did those editors 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 »

Born into a Mormon family in Utah, the pioneering lesbian poet May Swenson found her footing in Greenwich Village... more »

A “trance evangelist,” an Indian guru, Andrew Jackson, Oprah — in America, charisma takes on many forms... more »

Paradise Lost was not acclaimed by its first readers. Then came John Dryden, who popularized and distorted Milton's masterpiece... more »

Bocaccio, a relentlessly autobiographical author, put his fickleness and neuroticism on display in his work... more »

Have you heard about the classicist who wants to do away with classics? Meet Walter Scheidel... more »

Plato has been pressed into service as the avatar of an intellectual tradition so often that it's easy to forget he was a person... more »

William F. Buckley Jr. embodied conservatism in America. Yet he had trouble defining what it is or ought to be... more »

At Random House, Toni Morrison was an exacting editor. She turned her authors’ talent, and her own, into cultural and literary power... more »

Was Virginia Woolf a depressed recluse? Or a sociable type who enjoyed intimate dinner parties? A new collection of letters suggests the latter... more »

Hubris and design thinking: The history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference... more »

Steven Shapin: “The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people”... more »

Those in Gen Z are having less sex, and when they do have it, they are doing so in arcane arrangements. Is that a problem?... more »

Technology elevates efficiency over friction and seamlessness over inconvenience. Is that a bad thing?... more »

In America, has the backlash against Marxism been more influential than the theory itself? ... more »

Tom Crewe on the “ridiculous, sententious” writing of Ocean Vuong: “It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life”... more »

Thomas Mallon has mastered the bitchy aperçu and brisk, summarizing detail. In short, he's an ideal diarist... more »

Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker seek to parochialize the human, showing that our activities may just be a cosmic sideshow... more »

An architect’s eccentric residential design, a manifesto house, is a rare instance of an artist putting polemic into practice... more »

The Divine Comedy, repeatedly rescued from obscurity, has long perched awkwardly between canonical reverence and cultural neglect... more »

Analytic philosophy offers the fantasy of free inquiry, but really just leans on “common sense” to justify the status quo — or so charge its critics... more »

In 1959, Richard Ellmann published a biography of James Joyce. The genre would never be the same ... more »

To the ancients, revolution was a perversion. To French philosophes, it marked human progress. How did that change in meaning come about? ... more »

The 7,000 languages spoken in the world today can be divided into 140 families. The languages most of us speak belong to just five... more »

How do we prove something is true? Tools like “statistical significance” can introduce arbitrariness to the establishment of facts... more »

Literary theory’s method wars are a bleakly irrelevant sideshow, a panic over living-room decor while the house burns... more »

Is beauty more powerful than argument? Robert Gooding-Williams believes it’s powerful enough to refute racism... more »

"Flaming and undisciplined genius." The uneasy yet fecund sibling rivalry of Gwen and Augustus John... more »

Robert Crumb was born into a dysfunctional family beset by alcoholism, abuse, and incest. Comics saved him... more »

The many Machiavellis. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Carl Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries... more »

The liberal university is collapsing because liberalism as America's governing consensus is collapsing. David Rieff explains... more »

“Americans are thinking about Marx to a degree not matched since the 1960s, or perhaps even the 1930s”... more »

An existentialist before the label existed, Blaise Pascal regarded humanity as simultaneously great and wretched, noble and despicable... more »

What is art for? It's a way to explore feeling without creating “inescapable consequences,” says Brian Eno... more »

Artists don't need to declare their beliefs to use religious symbols, rich in meaning as they are. But we want them to be saying something... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

Geoff Dyer: “The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign — immaturing with age”... more »

“Violence follows Harry Crews around like an oversized lapdog, eager to spring upon him with bone-crunching love”... more »

You won’t look to ChatGPT as a role model for the life of the mind, but A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality... more »

Politicians love to mock seemingly useless studies of shrimp treadmills and gecko mechanics — but silly science plays a vital role... more »

James Schuyler, whose poems exuded calm, was prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes... more »

Geniuses behaving badly is a historical commonplace.  Indeed, it's enough to wonder if the label is a license to misbehave... more »

The impossible genre. Biography incorporates every style and school. We categorize it as nonfiction, “but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation”... more »

“Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones”... more »

From 1770 to 1790, a new view of liberty ascended to a position of ideological dominance. Why?... more »

Sandra Cisneros: “Every woman writer could use a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But what really serves a woman, in my opinion, is a house”... more »

Yes, much about poetry gets lost in translation. But to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to misrepresent both poetry and translation... more »

Critics take Shulamith Firestone’s schizophrenia to reveal some truth about feminism, or family tragedy, or psychiatry. That’s nonsense... more »

Jordan Peterson somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook... more »

What made the Enlightenment extraordinary? Not just a set of ideas or what was said but also how it was said... more »

“Avoid adverbs” is advice commonly encountered by writers. It's also bad advice. By all means, use adverbs – carefully, not exuberantly... more »

Modern aesthetics encouraged a warm relationship between an artwork and its viewer. What happens to art in an age of enmity?... more »

John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Mark Twain revival: “How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent?”... more »

The missive mania of Seamus Heaney. He once wrote 14 letters during one flight, and routinely wrote 15 per day... more »

Some of Edward Said’s ideas have become canonical. Others are as contentious today as they were 30 years ago... more »

Huge sums of money are being invested in life-extension research. Success would be a disaster, warns Francis Fukuyama ... more »

Criticism without flair is dull. Criticism without sensibility is useless. Henry James knew this well... more »

Was Martin Amis, famous for his love of style and idolized for his own, in fact guilty of crimes against it?... more »

Rarer than great diarists are great critics. Rarer still are those who write both great novels and great criticism, such as Virginia Woolf... more »

"Questions of who or what is in The New Yorker or The Paris Review or who has a deal with Knopf and why are irrelevant and uninteresting"... more »

Seen by reporters as a factory churning out bland 800-word “takes,” the New York Times opinion section has become a force... more »

Only total, all-consuming dedication will give you a happy, healthy child — and other myths of mothering... more »

“Gone are the days when an insular clique of critics had the ability to make or break artists’ careers — and good riddance”... more »

Poets and parties. Asked at a soiree if he was having fun, T.S. Eliot replied, “Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all”... more »

Demonology. Look back through history, and mankind’s demons all sort of appear the same. Why is that?... more »

“Never leave me alone with poets,” and other demands from the few men who've edited The New Yorker ... more »

How to hop trains. A comprehensive guide exists, but you have to look for it in the right places... more »

“How can we renew the potential of the university to serve as a space that shelters criticism and literary judgment and aesthetic education?”... more »

“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate”... more »

The case for mortality often argues that living forever – the boredom! – is worse than certain death. Nonsense, says Kieran Setiya... more »