New Books

Shakespeare and Freud: What is the proper relation between psychoanalysis and literature?

Gauguin’s wild 1888 visit to Arles came to an end when Van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at him — then came at him with a razor... more »

East-West trade once went by sea via India, shipping pepper, ivory, cotton, and rhubarb. Is the historical Silk Road a myth? ... more »

Self-help meets the ancien régime in The Habsburg Way, which counsels having lots of children, dying well, and having a memorable funeral... more »

Sponges, corals, and cephalopods are very different from human beings. Do they nevertheless share aspects of our mental lives?... more »

Marilynne Robinson, pillar of moral seriousness, takes on the book of Genesis. Surprisingly, the result is dogmatism... more »

Some academics insist that children’s literature can be written only by children. "Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers"... more »

Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor does not sound like children’s literature — yet it was for W.H. Auden... more »

What is most indelible about Simone Weil is her mix of cosmic empathy and aggressive intolerance... more »

Monstrous motherhood. What can we learn from women who’ve abandoned their children?... more »

What it means to be a stone. Rocks can behave in ways that defy our imagination, and increase our access to awe... more »

We are all storytellers, certain assumptions embedded in our discursive maneuvers. Has that ability degraded?... more »

Some writers are at their best when denouncing idiocy rather than praising greatness. Consider Christopher Hitchens ... more »

Few poets have suffered more from the early overestimation of critics than Delmore Schwartz. He never quite recovered... more »

The "1812 Overture," Tchaikovsky’s best-known work, is a gaudy monstrosity. One more paradox in a life full of them.... more »

Guy Davenport knew that he was working at the end of a tradition. He was the last high modernist... more »

Equality is at the center of liberalism, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But the relationship has long been fraught... more »

Nietzsche was a vehement critic of every kind of egalitarianism. Odd that his reputation was rescued by leftist scholars... more »

Ideology, totality, utopia, form: Frederic Jameson, now 90, has never wavered in his obsessions... more »

The desire to unite art and life. The Russian and Soviet avant-garde wasn’t a school or a style. It was a mentality... more »

The Sylvia Plath stigma. Why are her female readers portrayed as unserious, depressive fangirls?... more »

Dickinson and Darwin. The poet's and the naturalist’s lives overlapped, as did their desire to synthesize the material world... more »

Fanny and Louis. She was wild and tiny and central to his literary achievements... more »

Cromwell: The name redounds as shorthand for villainy and political skill. The truth is far more interesting... more »

We’re all Faustians now. What’s at stake isn’t so much our souls as our privacy, along with much else... more »

For 30 years, C.S. Lewis was an Oxford don. The life was just his speed. “I enjoy monotony”... more »

Henry James on Henry James. When he reflected on his own oeuvre, he couldn’t get out of his own way... more »

Women in water. Swimming has long been a hugely important arena to assert autonomy and independence... more »

“It takes a special kind of person, somewhat daft in a socially useful and quite pleasant way but nonetheless somewhat off his head, to give himself to bookselling”... more »

Quantum mechanics initiated not only a scientific revolution but an epistemological upending that is still apparent... more »

Joan Didion is not to blame for the myriad, irksome acolytes she inspired. That doesn’t make them any less insufferable... more »

The upside of ignorance. Our sense of self is partly based on what we don’t know — on being wrong... more »

The most serious objections to the arguments of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus are found in the work itself... more »

Voltaire called Blaise Pascal “the sublime misanthrope.” As much aphorist as philosopher, he was a theologian above all else... more »

Thom Gunn was an old-fashioned modern – existentialist in preoccupation and Elizabethan in form... more »

What did Irving Howe deride as “a strange mixture of Guevarist fantasia, residual Stalinism, anarchist braggadocio and homemade tough-guy methods?'... more »

Delmore Schwartz is best known for his descent into madness and his ruined potential. What about his actual poetry and prose?... more »

Democracy and theater. Ever since the two emerged together in Athens, thinkers have debated the relationship between them... more »

By the 1960s, Nietzsche was about to be marginalized into obscurity. The revival of his reputation was thanks to an Italian philologist... more »

Essays & Opinions

Studying philosophy has been flattened into a single option: academic. What happens if that goes away?... more »

“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism... more »

Every era recreates Mozart in its own image. In our time, he's a scatological imp who loves four-letter words... more »

Blasphemy seems like an anachronistic offense. But Salman Rushdie’s case is thoroughly modern... more »

Disappointments of literary Brooklyn. For one would-be writer, little magazine subculture was alienating and disgusting... more »

A real reader, insisted Nabokov, is a rereader. He was wrong, and so is the high-minded horde of rereading evangelists... more »

C.L.R. James planned a short trip to “dreadful” America and stayed for 15 years, even as his distaste for U.S. politics grew... more »

Dickens was a scoundrel; Tolstoy an exploitative sex addict; Alice Walker an anti-Semite. Still, read them ... more »

In praise of reference books. The best way to satisfy a young and weird mind’s desire for useless knowledge... more »

Grades at American universities are so inflated they’ve become meaningless. Time to do away with them altogether... more »

Is AI-generated writing mimicking us, or are we imitating AI? Resisting the allure of maximal clarity and minimal idiosyncrasies... more »

Behold the strange and wondrous world of plankton, a vast ecosystem giving rise to the idea of the ocean... more »

A funny thing happened to Marxist political philosophers. When they stripped away the BS, there was nothing left but liberalism ... more »

Whitewashing Nietzsche. Generations of academics have tried to argue away his appeal to young men... more »

Our decisions are caused by neural mechanisms and biological processes. Even if uncoerced, are they still freely made?... more »

Literary fame is fickle and fleeting. So what makes a book endure? Lincoln Michel has a few theories... more »

The demand to “decolonize” places and things is ubiquitous. What does it mean?... more... more »

Matthew Arnold thought Chaucer “lacked high seriousness.” But Shakespeare couldn’t have done without him... more »

The venerable lab mouse. Its ubiquity in biomedical research is a bizarre accident of history... more »

Film and philosophy. Stanley Cavell yoked Kant with Capra, Hegel with Hepburn. To what end?... more »

When women turn life into literature and speak rather than remain silent, we call it gossip... more »

“I can feel the neurons in my brain struggling and striving. Yes, I can feel it. Now you think I’m crazy.” Anne Carson has Parkinson’s... more »

When the leading lights of physics gathered in Mussolini’s Rome, they clashed over cosmic rays... more »

“Facts don’t change minds because, most often, it’s the framework through which we analyze them that is at stake”... more »

For Montaigne, cruelty was the worst vice. But being mean, however fraught, has definite social value... more »

When a piece of writing exhibits moral excellence, we naturally assume it reflects the morality of the author. That’s often a mistake... more »

An effort is afoot to rescue the humanities’ relevance by pooh-poohing its founding commitments. That won’t work... more »

Great artists make poor propagandists, says Phil Klay. The activist’s job is activism, and the artist’s job is truth ... more »

Elias Canetti described his polemic against death as the book he was born to write. But he couldn’t finish it. He could barely start it... more »

Tristan Foison flourished as a musical fabulist by revealing exactly how classical music ennobles bullshit... more »

History is full of instances when science was subjugated to ideology, and science suffered. Is that happening now in America?... more »

Unlike computers, humans thrive on ambiguity and equivocation, on double entendre and sophistry, on blunders and embarrassments... more »

Oh, Oblomov! “Follow my example, ye small-time yuppies and wage slaves… brothers and sisters led by the nose by dreary, servile little bosses”... more »

Writers are susceptible to pressure from both market and peers. That’s not to say literary excellence isn’t the result of individual genius... more »

What happens if you commit to memorizing a poem every week? Jacob Brogan on the overlooked pleasures of repetition... more »

Note a conspicuous absence in contemporary literature: the unfiltered voice of raw manhood on the page
... more »

An old and fraught strain of historiography is resurgent: history as not simply a record but as sacred oracle... more »

Does a free and competitive marketplace of ideas generate truth? Or does it simply respond to – and even exacerbate – people’s biases?... more »

TikTok has a billion users clamoring to be part of the zeitgeist. Why can't they stop scrolling? Roxane Gay falls down a rabbit hole... more »

Do we extract moral wisdom from reading? Or is reading itself a form of moral instruction?... more »

Critics have traded the pleasure of reading for disenchanted explanations of what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us... more »

Do the world's museums, many of which are filled with treasures from the colonial era, have a future? Of course they do!... more »

Surrealism then and now. In the late '60s, the movement was outflanked by the left. Now it's been passed on the right... more »

Solzhenitsyn's warning. After the gulag, he smelled intellectual rot wherever he went. Naive killjoy or vindicated prophet?... more »

Is a public philosophy still possible? Don’t confuse intellectual titillation with the examined life... more »

"The historian-as-self-appointed-indispensable-public-adviser-on-current-politics collapsed into a pile of pretty evident absurdity"... more »

How is it that some writers can be so moral on the page and so cruel in their lives? Consider Alice Munro... more »

“Marlowe endures as a parallel universe Bard, a kind of shadowy counter-Shakespeare, the great, queer, sacrilegious poet and playwright of damnation”... more »

Whatever Foucault’s sins, his liberal critics have him wrong. He didn’t start the identitarian culture war... more »

It's a gas! The strange story of the discovery that nitrous oxide creates delusions and blocks pain... more »