New Books

“We do not,” says Nicholas Christakis, “find a functional society without love, friendship, cooperation, or personal identity.” How hard has he looked?... more »

Iris Murdoch has fallen out of fashion, but her work is worth retrieving as a moral philosophy with a steely-eyed suspicion of intellectual confidence... more »

Big books remind us how hard the work of understanding can be. Aphorisms offer "a micro-model of empirical inquiry"... more »

Jenny Odell’s defense of empathy, attention, and doing nothing contains much that is true and little that is fresh... more »

Chaucer has been reduced to “Jolly Geoff,” an unserious and ribald writer. Time to repair the reputation of the father of English poetry... more »

Why miniatures matter. Alluring and inaccessible, they represent possibility and impossibility at once. They are tiny, but infinite in what they evoke... more »

A literary celebration of the condom’s invention, 1744’s The Machine, or Love’s Preservative hailed he who “arm’d thus boldly wages am’rous Fight”... more »

Telepathy, metamorphoses, fairy counterparts that haunt us in the shadows — so proposed a serious-minded 17th-century Scottish minister... more »

What becomes of science when evidence is absent – as it is in some areas of physics? Other criteria, including aesthetic ones, come into play. So does speculation... more »

Funny, aphoristically cynical, wisely paradoxical: Walter Bagehot could also be priggish, condescending, and just plain wrong, but he was piercingly intelligent in his views of Victorian economics... more »

John Updike had a rule for book reviewing: Judge an author for what he wished to do, not what you wish he had done. Can we hold him to his own standard?... more »

To love one’s country, one must acknowledge its past. In America, that means unpacking false universalism and examining its history of ideas... more »

Will Google rule? We accede to governance by “objective” algorithms, writes Matthew B. Crawford, but at a high political cost... more »

Our swimming pools, our selves. In place of the 20th-century throng of public bathing, we have the immersive solipsism of the infinity pool... more »

“The Soviet Union, it must be remembered, was a regime founded by freelance writers and editors. In other words, a nightmare.”... more »

On loving Wordsworth. He was “a solemn and unsexual man” with a talent for making you believe things without really telling you what they were... more »

A history of human imagination. Why the ability to see what isn't there is "the most essential bit of machinery we have"... more »

The complex history of gestures. Our nonverbal communication — from the “flagrant pelvis” to fascist salutes to Friends — is deeply rooted... more »

Lillian Ross’s brilliant viciousness spanned American letters: Capote was a leech, Nora Ephron a liar. And you wouldn’t have wanted to get her started on the NYRB... more »

In the 1980s, George Will’s conservatism was prophetic. Today his political sensibility is antiquated, addressing problems that no longer exist... more »

Thoreau was a fault-finder; Emerson, a showoff. They wanted to be friends, but, as Emerson put it, “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables”... more »

Einstein during World War I. Cut off from scientists abroad, he tried to extend his untested ideas about relativity into a more powerful theory... more »

Thirty years since Cass Sunstein's first steps as a public intellectual, the world has changed. But not his ideas, or his dreary prose... more »

Sherlock Holmes and his world are an inexhaustible source of spinoffs, parodies, and adaptations. Michael Dirda has the latest... more »

"If what makes humans unique is the power of seeing what is not there, what makes them so destructive is that they believe what they have seen to be real"... more »

A psychologist studying empathy is like a climatologist studying polar ice: "We discover how valuable it is just as it recedes all around us”... more »

When people write about Vasily Grossman, they often start by complaining that he is insufficiently appreciated — which is hardly true... more »

Before its “golden age,” TV was thought to be formulaic, fluffy trash. The change in regard is in no small part the work of Emily Nussbaum... more »

Pundit on a pilgrimage. For David Brooks, a midlife awakening yielded a most unexpected insight into himself: “I realized I was a religious person”... more »

Graham Greene in Havana. What better destination for a novelist who delighted in exposing conflicting loyalties and shifting political allegiances?... more »

Robert Caro is a scholar of power — how it's obtained, how it's used. So it's odd that he seems so oblivious to his own... more »

“London’s only Lady detective.” Maud West had a talent for disguise, infiltration, and self-promotion. Her career is a snapshot of social change... more »

Nothing to lose but our iPhones. Cal Newport’s "digital minimalism" might restore solitude, conversation, and leisure to overcrowded lives... more »

The lost art of reading holy texts. We too often seek only superficial confirmation of our interpretive biases. A more deliberate approach is needed... more »

Why we obsess over what we wear: New clothes appear to bestow a charm and intellect we otherwise can’t quite muster... more »

The most enterprising Marxist. Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, offers a manifesto for socialism that is thrillingly non-utopian... more »

The Naomi Wolf formula: convert dissatisfaction into epiphany, ignore facts and laws of nature, make blanket recommendations for all women... more »

How best to tell the story of philosophy? Instead of moving from one peak to another, wander the fertile valleys in between... more »

Time to read and think and, for Wordsworth, ply his skills with the spade. Why were the Quantock Hills so inspiring to Romantic poets?... more »

Essays & Opinions

The moon landing wasn't so much a triumph of science or a testament to the expansion of human horizons. The triumph was aesthetic... more »

We flinch in the face of the Bible's misery and violence, chauvinism and misogyny, idealism and generosity, forgiveness and humaneness... more »

Defense of the hipster. The mid-2000s aesthetic is much loathed, but its critics miss a crucial point: Even superficial movements matter... more »

Walking has long been an essential literary act. But why do advocates of a good stretch of the legs have to be so damn smug about it?... more »

J.B.S. Haldane created the field of population genetics and fought in the Spanish Civil War. But it's his quotability for which he is remembered... more »

In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a rival drug dealer. Eighteen years of incarceration later, he reflects on the trials of literary life behind bars... more »

So photos of meals on Instagram are nothing but food porn? Let's not be so cynical. What if those pictures are a new incarnation of an ancient instinct: prayer?... more »

In his final years, Manet painted tiny, beautiful works. His critics dismissed these as prettified diversions, but he was after something larger... more »

Dramatic horseback escapes, false identities. The Cold War’s first global manhunt wasn’t for a spy. It was for Pablo Neruda... more »

Tolstoy memorably described boredom as “the desire for desires.” Erich Fromm called it "one of the greatest tortures." But what's lost when we lose the ability to be bored?... more »

Academics think their work is timeless, like 13th-century monks’ transcriptions of Aristotle’s Poetics. Yet never underestimate the power of trendiness... more »

As Margaret Atwood has said, “every utopia contains a little dystopia” — something certainly true of Victorian fiction’s all-female paradises... more »

“Why the books? Why the babies? Why the essays? Why so many, why so fast?” Jill Lepore reveals her motivation — the memory of a brilliant friend... more »

Natalia Ginzburg’s family — left-leaning Jews in Fascist Italy — watched in horror as terror, internal exile, and prison began to permeate “ordinary” life... more »

The history of the poster. The form, which inspired dress-up parties in 1890s Paris, went on to be celebrated by Russian constructivists and derided by Sontag... more »

“The way to one’s own heaven,” wrote Nietzsche, “always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell.” Could happiness exist without hell?... more »

Death of the anonymous author. If algorithms can pinpoint the identity of a writer — say, Elena Ferrante — does art as a whole lose out?... more »

To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness. Yet that's exactly what we do by pursuing happiness... more »

Intellectuals agree: Unlike our ancestors, we live in a disenchanted society. But what of our obsession with healing crystals, chakras, and the occult?... more »

Iris Murdoch was that great, rare thing — a writer whose vision made you feel the sublime. Why aren't her books more widely read?... more »

During the Cold War, America's culture policy was foreign policy. Since then, America's culture policy has become a culture war... more »

"Summer reading is always a balancing act between the books I have loved, the books I feel I oughta love, and the books I sense I will love"... more »

Is discussion overrated? Is it not as likely to generate bitterness, and division as it is to enlighten or foster consensus?... more »

If the Apollo missions brought us the age of consumer technology, Jill Lepore isn't impressed: "My country went to the moon and all I got was this lousy surveillance state"... more »

The buzzword of this decade is authenticity, which is a shame because it impedes progress and aspiration... more »

Svetlana Alexievich is on a mission to collect memories before they disappear, to correct for the rewriting of history by propaganda... more »

“We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoyevsky wrote.” The America of Nelson Algren’s imagination... more »

Lacan, the terrible. He was avaricious, classist, and an awful father. Tasked with treating his suffering daughter, he headed to the brothel instead... more »

The origins of beach reading. A 19th-century invention, it was for “airy, buoyant, salty, sunny, breezy” books. Or, it was the consumption of “pestiferous trash”... more »

What is liberalism? A politics? A temperament? A credo? Maybe it's like a rhinoceros: A once-successful animal that now stands on the edge of extinction... more »

The debate over political correctness has devolved into camps hardened by moralism and hypocrisy. Another path is possible... more »

Jared Diamond once at least went through the motions of adding statistical and scholarly evidence to his books. No longer... more »

Intellectuals easily uncover Orwellian traits in American politics. They have a harder time, writes George Packer, acknowledging the Thought Police closer to home... more »

Andrea Dworkin was prescient; she lived a version of Me Too long before Me Too. Yet her analysis of pornography has little traction. Why?... more »

Sylvia Plath at Smith College. She read Chaucer and Dante, and she broke off relationships. “I want a man who isn’t jealous of my creativity in other fields than children”... more »

This year the Modern Language Association’s annual conference took as its principal subject the death of its own significance... more »

The ever-expanding subtitle. Publishers pile up keywords in a mad attempt to boost SEO. Time for readers to revolt?... more »

Against knowledge. It’s a crude, archaic concept, a relic of a bygone age, and it harms our real ways of thinking... more »

It’s like Waze, but for social theory. Cass Sunstein wants government to help citizens navigate their lives. What if they don’t know where to go?... more »

For Adrienne Rich, the great philosopher of secrets, the wish to keep and share them goes to the heart of intimacy, and why we value art... more »

The click-swipe-and-rate economy has devastated journalism, art, literature, and entertainment. Now it's coming for the academy... more »

When are writers polymaths, and when are they merely trespassing superficially into areas of knowledge they haven’t mastered? The lesson of Naomi Wolf... more »

Art in an age of self-exposure. Gone is the withholding of secrets — novelists now put self-consciousness front and center... more »

The idea that thinkers should distinguish private from public views is associated with Leo Strauss and the right. Now it's ascendant on the left... more »

Should writers still make things up? With more fact-based fiction, purely fictional fiction faces a new reality... more »

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him," said Arthur Miller, who understood shame... more »

She had Sartre for conversation; he, only drunks and gamblers. Inside the short-lived long-distance relationship of Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir... more »

Leslie Epstein has spent 40 years in the same wooden chair in the same lopsided room teaching fiction. The job is changing... more »

Slaughterhouse Five at 50. Despite Vonnegut’s conviction that the book was a failure, it has endured surprisingly well... more »

"How much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement.” Lucian Freud’s brute nudity... more »