New Books

In 1990, Stephen Greenblatt dismissed psychoanalysis. Now he's giving Freud a second chance, not least to point out that Shakespeare got there first... more »

Reading Rushdie in Tehran. Iranian intellectuals approach his work with a mix of repulsion and admiration... more »

Nostalgia has been dismissed as sick, sentimental, stupid, reactionary, and intellectually vacuous. Is it really that bad?... more »

Besides harp playing, medieval minstrelsy featured baking, spying, diplomacy, propaganda, carpentry, and the training of dancing bears... more »

Polyamory used to be the domain of fringe figures with strange views. Now we can't seem to stop talking about it... more »

Wake up, reach for your phone. The digital revolution prompts a question: Do you remember what it was like to wake up before you had a smartphone? ... more »

A vituperative 1979 debate pitted E.P. Thompson against Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson. At stake: Should history focus on realism or theory?... more »

Are lessons from early human history useful to us? “Defend the coasts from marauders” can only take us so far... more »

England had five native languages; in Burgundy, trilingualism was the norm. In medieval times, the monolingual impulse had not yet set in... more »

Surrealism: What began as a utopian dream soon descended into in-fighting, dogma, and intolerant authority figures... more »

Melancholia, nostalgia, depression, exhaustion, bitterness, mourning: The dark psychic life of radical movements... more »

“The Bad Dad Joke is defined as much by what it leaves out as what it includes. Fear, rage, self-aggrandizement”... more »

In 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was a bestseller. It left a decades-long taint over the field of plant behavior research... more »

“I’m drunk today and I don’t talk very clearly.” In interviews and letters, the painter Francis Bacon issued a multitude of apologies... more »

It’s hard to get good at one art form. Harder still to get good at another. Nicholson Baker is a cautionary tale, whether he realizes it or not... more »

Conservative writers once pilloried the left with patrician gravitas. Their stylistic assurance has devolved into a flat hackishness... more »

Saskia Hamilton's parting gift. The lines of her final poetry collection are as tragic as they are dignified... more »

The end of the pub? British nightclubs and pubs are struggling as people opt for Netflix and nights in. The culture is worse for it... more »

Keith Haring, who disliked saying what his art was about, attributed it to a mystical force. “The message is the message”... more »

I worry, therefore I am. Anxiety isn’t an ailment to overcome so much as a pillar of our humanity... more »

Readers crave inspirational stories of women through history becoming kickass revolutionaries. That narrative flattens the Bluestockings... more »

Imagine a robot’s version of the history of the world: machinic developments, heroic software engineers, new chip architecture... more »

Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »

A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »

“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »

A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »

For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »

Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »

AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »

Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »

A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »

Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »

“[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »

Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »

Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »

Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »

Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »

The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »

Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »

Essays & Opinions

Liberalism was originally an ethical doctrine that addressed the fundamental question of how to live well. Why has it become a narrowly political project? ... more »

There is a distemper in American social life — arguments pass rapidly from vulgar declamation to sickly apology and back... more »

For Emily Dickinson, letter writing was a form of publication, of circulating her work to a select group of readers... more »

Before the 20th century, splendid buildings were heavily ornamented. No more. Blame a Swiss-trained clockmaker and a clique of radical German artists... more »

A History of British Ferns was published to acclaim in 1840, spawning 50 years of Pteridomania — fern fever... more »

Since the Renaissance, the fine artist has been elevated above the merely decorative artist or furniture maker. That line is blurring ... more »

“The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble”... more »

Jack Conroy, poet of the proletariat, dug ditches and scrapped sheet metal. His literary magazine had double the circulation of Partisan Review... more »

What can we learn from filler words? Wilfred M. McClay makes the case that “like” is different from “uh” and “um”... more »

Economics is just fancy equations and — in Thomas Piketty’s words — a “childish passion for mathematics.” Are such critiques fair?... more »

Is the field of postcolonial studies inauthentic, a prisoner of Western mentalities? Amitava Kumar reflects on fierce debates in India... more »

How did Richard Owen, a pioneering Victorian paleontologist, inspire such intense hatred among his contemporaries?... more »

Diversity is a master concept of our time, but what happens when diversity of identity and diversity of ideology conflict?... more »

“There is no end to war and no end, it would seem, to the uses Shakespeare can be put to in war”... more »

A paradox of modern political life: The more times feel unprecedented, the more we reach for past parallels... more »

The passing of Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler feels like the definitive end of a poetic era that has been slowly dying for years... more »

We think we remember works of art rather well, says Julian Barnes. But we often don't, and that's not a bad thing ... more »

“If a computer can write like a person, what does that say about the nature of our own creativity?”... more »

The Order of the Third Bird is a somewhat secret society of artists and avant-gardists who congregate suddenly at museums, then vanish... more »

"Is there some universal criterion of lastingness — some signal of ultimate meaning — that can defy the tides of time, change, history?” Cynthia Ozick on Philip Roth... more »

“If poetry is worth anything, it is worth getting mad about.” A.O. Scott on the late Helen Vendler... more »

As you navigate the cul-de-sacs of modern coupledom, Laura Kipnis has some advice: Don’t divorce a memoirist... more »

In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »

Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »

Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »

“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »

“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »

How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »

In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »

“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »

Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »

The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »

What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »

Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »

Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »

What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »

We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »

“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »

"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »

Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... more »

As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »

Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »

Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »

“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »

The Monster of Ravenna, the Monk Calf, and, of course, the Pope Ass. Why were 16th-century luminaries printing pamphlets on monsters?... more »

“Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”... more »

Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. It took Min Jin Lee 28 years to write Pachinko. But slow writing has its virtues... more »

"The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape" ... more »

Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »