New Books

Derek Parfit believed we should live more impersonally. By ignoring his friends and family, he lived up — or, rather, down — to this principle... more »

In 1966, Philip Rieff labeled and lambasted “therapeutic culture.” It is ever more apparent he was on to something... more »

How four women – Arendt, de Beauvoir, Rand, Weil – concluded that philosophy had to be utterly reimagined... more »

Schoenberg, stigmatization. The argument that classical music took a wrong turn in the middle of the 20th century is downright wrong... more »

The chapter. It dates to 13th-century narrative units in the Gospels, before the separation of sentences and even of words... more »

Humans make machines, and machines remake humans. Small devices have revolutionized humanity in big ways... more »

For the 11th-century Benedictine monk Saint Anselm, reading was a form of communion. It still is... more »

Who was the greatest writer of the Latin American Boom? Not Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, but José Donoso... more »

The liberal’s dilemma. Are they suffering from their own success, or from the fact that liberalism has never been tried?... more »

Dickens the devious? A new biography stretches credulity to portray the writer as pathologically deceitful... more »

Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more »

“To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more »

Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more »

George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more »

Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more »

Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more »

John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more »

Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more »

In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more »

Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more »

Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more »

“Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more »

Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more »

Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more »

Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more »

Is indeterminacy the goal of the humanities? Or are actual political goals — organizing, coalition-building — within its remit?... more »... more »

The thoughts and the career of Don DeLillo, an old soul from another era, prefigures our own, even now... more »

Ibn Sina and Biruni were polymaths of the same time and place. But they differed in personality and perspective... more »

“Where authors find jobs, where they go to school, how they get published: These social facts have aesthetic consequences”... more »

John le Carré's serial philandering was more than a character flaw. It was integral to his literary life... more »

The tyranny of beauty. Empress Elisabeth of Austria washed her hair with raw egg and brandy, and sometimes she slept in a mask lined with raw veal... more »

You’ve heard it before: Digital disruption will sweep aside our staid universities. A new book asks: Has the time finally come?... more »

Lou Reed came to embody a New York that exists only in memory — a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze... more »

In 18th-century London, literary clubs offered debate and fine dining to their gentleman members. Joseph Johnson’s club was different... more »

The 19th-century British literary celebrity Michael Field was not, in fact, a brilliant young man, but rather the nom de plume of two women... more »

For Martin Jay, intellectual life has both a transcendental side and a mundane side. The two are in conflict... more »

Edith Hamilton’s books on Greek and Roman mythology, written after she retired from teaching, were a publishing phenomenon... more »

What can we learn from the Dutch master painters? That beauty is to be taken seriously... more »

Hearing Homer. A recent translation of the Iliad gives a new generation of readers a clearer understanding of the epic... more »

Essays & Opinions

Objective measures are our most effective weapon against racism and sexism, says Steven Pinker: blind auditions, traffic cameras, SAT... more »

Are there objectively correct answers to the big philosophical questions? A meta-ethicist makes the case that there are... more »

“You’re not allowed to be whiter than him ... And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.” Patricia Lockwood meets the pope... more »

Susan Sontag and George Steiner could be extraordinarily ill-mannered. But their critical ardor remains infectious... more »

A best-selling philosophical text on Amazon is the decade-old dissertation of a writer best known as Bronze Age Pervert... more »

Rescuing Pushkin from commemoration and co-optation: He “deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath”... more »

Censorship is a widespread problem among scientists. It’s most often driven by the scientists themselves... more »

Do animals need complex brains to experience consciousness? New work on scallops, jellyfish, and crabs suggests not... more »

When Gawker went girly and created a home for radical self-disclosure and all-abiding contempt. Moe Tkacik looks back... more »

My queue, myself. Ordering DVDs from Netflix served as a kind of biography of the various phases of my life... more »

Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more »

George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more »

The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more »

No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more »

Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more »

The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more »

Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more »

Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more »

Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more »

Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more »

In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more »

“A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »

Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more »

Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more »

Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said,  “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more »

Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more »

“How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more »

A student stood up and said: ‘This author is a misogynist.” Gale Walden on dating, loving, and teaching David Foster Wallace... more »

A good novel is a good novel, and a bad novel is a bad novel, regardless of who – or what generative AI – wrote it... more »

Unfairly besmirched as screechy, hectoring, and juvenile, the exclamation point is in dire need of a reputation reclamation... more »

We celebrate the humanities and we bash the humanities, but rarely do we pause to ask: What the hell are the humanities?... more »

George Eliot offers us “neither a gospel, nor imitable heroines, but a kind of negative wisdom about our relations”... more »

As memoirists know, it is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. But memory is wet sand... more »

Teaching “problematic” writers is a minefield. Affronted students can generate a social-media scandal — and bad course evaluations... more »

“Restructuring your inward being … is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business”... more »

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Evolution is not over... more »

Ben Lerner writes beautifully about meritocracy’s discontents. He has also “perfected the humblebrag as auto-fictional style”... more »

The René Girard resurgence puts envy, rivalry, and scapegoating center stage in diagnosing the modern human condition... more »

RIP, literary fiction. The genre, born in response to conglomeration in 1980, has become an anachronism... more »

The varieties of feminism can be seen in the magazines their advocates created: Ms., Bitch, Bust, Sassy, Feministing, Jezebel... more »

Christian Lorentzen on the new alienations, obsolete vanities, and petty, unfulfilled apolitical careerism of his generation... more »

Bookstores are full of tales of wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens. Who’s behind all this? Lester del Rey, inventor of fantasy... more »

Is there a greater dismissal of American literature’s achievement than the withholding of the Nobel from Don DeLillo?... more »

Alchemy, phrenology, astrology — it’s easy to know when an intellectual project fails. But how does one succeed?... more »

“Technophobia is explicit in the text and implicit in the format of Liberties; the medium and the message are perfectly aligned”... more »

“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »

The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »

“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »

“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »

Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »