New Books

In America, science was shaped by the CIA, the State Department, and the Cold War. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily without intellectual integrity... more »

To understand Whitman’s impact on present-day writing, look no further than a poetic project on delight — delight in cardinals, in log piles, in nicknames... more »

Lincoln was out of his depth politically. Moral hazard in banking isn’t a serious threat. Walter Bagehot had a talent for epic miscalculation... more »

The intellectual coward. Victor Serge knew the type: playing word games, dabbling in fashionable politics, inciting “nothing but a revolt of literary cafes”... more »

The rise and fall of an imperial discipline. Economics once wielded vast political influence, but is the intellectual marketplace now moving on?... more »

Eric Hobsbawm's parents died within a span of two years, from heart attack and lung disease. The teenager found a new family in the Communist Party... more »

Were Beethoven’s works politically charged? The historical context encourages such a view, but the music itself suggests something murkier... more »

Iris Murdoch likened language to a net cast over the mind, constraining thoughts according to the landings of its knots and threads... more »

Let us praise the semicolon, the punctuation that helps us pause and think as it pushes us forward to what's next... more »

Sexism and anthropology. Margaret Mead was fearless in her investigations of culture. But later, who could protect her academic reputation from vicious attacks?... more »

Film’s forgotten man Robert G. Haines appeared, as an extra, in many of the greatest movies ever made. What does his omnipresence mean?... more »

The way we think about derivative translations and pure originals is all wrong. It rests on clichés and lazy approaches... more »

A poetic friendship is born: Wordsworth had just abandoned his daughter; Coleridge then abandoned his own family to spend more time with Wordsworth... more »

The challenge facing any biographer of Frederick Douglass: Work your way behind the self-made public hero of the autobiographies and find the private man... more »

Simone Weil was devoted to alleviating the suffering of others. André Weil, her brother, was devoted to numbers. He became a great mathematician; she became unhinged... more »

Digressions galore, head-scratching logic, and a 26-sentence paragraph. A new biography of Chaucer is “a jargon-ridden exercise in academic colonialism”... more »

How do we spend our time? We overestimate how much we work and exercise, and we're no busier than we were a few decades ago. We just think we are... more »

Moral panics have traditionally been an indulgence of the right. Now they're associated with the woke left. What happened?... more »

Who kicked the snakes out of Ireland? For 500 years, that honor went to a Celtic saint, Columba. Then the cult of Patrick intervened... more »

A new book on the culture of UFO believers shows how the scholarly study of strange things can have strange effects... more »

Bruno Schulz dreamed of writing “The Book” — a singular, ideal work of literature. But magical imaginings can’t withstand the ordeal of their realization... more »

"Are we having fun, or are we in a hell where we’re merely communicating, learning too little too quickly, melting our brains into the abyssal portal?" How we talk online... more »

Is the recent vogue for socialism sufficent to revive the moribund reputation of Nelson Algren, arch-poet of destitution and degradation?... more »

When his fiancée wanted to try mesmerism, Hawthorne panicked: “There would be an intrusion into thy holy of holies — and the intruder would not be thy husband!”... more »

The ways we come to change our minds demonstrate the richness and strangeness of human reason... more »

Racist. Exploiter of children, animals, and the disabled. Abolitionist. Humorist: Who was P.T. Barnum?... more »

Rudyard Kipling was born in India to English parents. How did he come to spend his most creative years in Vermont?... more »

A historian’s historian and a scholar prized by a popular audience, Eric Hobsbawm was Zelig-like in his presence at world-historical moments... more »

For all the praise of Robert Caro, some aspects of his process go unremarked. He doesn’t psychoanalyze or generalize — he is the antitheoretical reporter ... more »

Plato associated laughter with loss of self-control. Epictetus never laughed at all. What's the philosophical significance of funny?... more »

“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 »

Essays & Opinions

Where books matter. Americans usually assume that literature exists to depict life, while Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature... more »

No, Sally Rooney is not the “great millennial novelist.” This generation is too diverse for that — its books seek specific audiences, not universal ones... more »

Alcoholic writers are mythologized — but consider their pain. “Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship,” Bukowski said, “and it’s a substitute for suicide”... more »

Charles Sanders Peirce was an intellectual titan, an American Aristotle. His obscurity stems from the abstruseness of his ideas and the machinations of his rivals... more »

The doomsayers rant that English is in decline, that we're speaking a degraded, faltering tongue. They've been saying so since the 14th century... more »

“Wake up, stay woke!” How a famously liberal liberal-arts college came to act like a small-minded, vindictive corporation... more »

When Umberto Eco died, obituarists struggled to explain his project. It was to explode the line dividing high and popular culture... more »

Democracy is in crisis! Or so warns a gaggle of alarmist books — all of which seem to poorly grasp how democracy actually works... more »

Efficiency for what? We talk of “optimizing” our diets, exercise, and appearance, but rarely of optimizing child care or political representation... more »

Being David Foster Wallace’s pen pal meant, at least for Susan Barnett, quips, dog discussions, and tolerating endless come-ons... more »

For Claude Lévi-Strauss, studying man is like studying a mollusk: One must find the geometric beauty of the task... more »

Despite a plethora of aesthetic points of view, there is still a line between respecting bad taste and being complicit in it... more »

"I write this because I’m dying as a poet," says Bob Hicok. "I’m a straight white guy, and the face of poetry is finally changing"... more »

H. G. Wells, diviner of the future. The art of prediction is difficult, he determined, and thus warrants an academic solution: “Professors of Foresight”... more »

John Ruskin’s literary reputation is in tatters, but he offered some wisdom. For example: “The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless”... more »

“We are sick of you and your weird diseases, go home!” A tour of the red-light district of Amsterdam with Oliver Sacks... more »

“You sit in a plaza and it occurs to you that other people have been in your situation, whatever it is, and this knowledge is at the heart of civility”... more »

Science has a data problem — its reliance on “statistical significance” has thrown it into disarray. An alternative standard beckons... more »

To celebrate a work, Jackson Pollock got drunk, arrived naked at a party, and urinated in the fireplace. Or so said Peggy Guggenheim... more »

How to rebuild Notre-Dame? Make it modern, some say, with a spire of glass or even crystal. Witold Rybczynski dissents... more »

A cache of Saul Bellow letters is discovered in the attic of a private residence — more evidence that the man was incapable of writing a boring sentence... more »

Nineteenth-century Paris was not a good place for female artists, as Berthe Morisot and her sister discovered. As Manet put it, “It’s annoying they’re not men”... more »

Against mindfulness. Sold as a remedy for all occasions, it oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself... more »

When Max Weber began his talk "Politics as a Vocation," he did so with ambivalence. "This lecture," he said, "will necessarily disappoint you"... more »

There are many casualties in trying to quantify student learning. Is the link between metaphor and imagination one of them?... more »

What does it cost to be a citizen of the literary world? Time, for one thing. But the demands we make of women writers are outsize ... more »

The December 1937 issue of Partisan Review featured works by Trilling, Wilson, and Picasso. But that's not why it was a milestone... more »

"Our most elite universities are today running away from their elitism.” But elitism, argues Anthony Kronman, is "something to be cherished and cared for"... more »

When it comes to syntax, Lionel Shriver throws in her lot with the pedants. How else to arrest semantic drift?... more »

John Stuart Mill was famous; Lord Byron was a celebrity. The distinction is rooted in history, culture, and how we consume our icons... more »

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 »