New Books

Given a lack of Mongol documents, the Golden Horde has been studied through the lens of those it conquered. A reconsideration is in order  ... more »

Why is it fine to consume some consciousness-altering plants, like coffee, but not others, like opium?   ... more »

Why do we go to war? Margaret Macmillan identifies three causes: greed, self-defense, and ideas. Idea-driven wars are often the cruelest   ... more »

To cool down, seals urinate on themselves, bees vomit, storks defecate. We sweat, for better and worse   ... more »

Almost every culture has a ritual of getting drunk in one another's company. What evolutionary purpose does intoxication serve?  ... more »

Out with cataloging, in with “interventions”? The study of antiquity is increasingly designed to buttress rather than question contemporary pieties  ... more »

Thoreau-bashing is in vogue, but it is misdirected. The real problem isn’t his quietism, but his obsession with self-emancipation  ... more »

Gabo and Mercedes met when she was 9 and he was 14. It was a marriage that lasted decades and survived literary stardom  ... more »

Was Graham Greene a Catholic writer or a writer who happened to be Catholic? Either way, he knew not to confuse theological and literary standards ... more »

Among other things, Jenny Diski proved that invention can arise from indolence as much as creativity... more »

Decades of occasional pieces and private blasts reveal Richard Dawkins’s inimitable mix of grandeur and scorn  ... more »

A litany of recent novels skewers the art world not for its hypocrisy, venality, or elitism, but for its disturbing vacuousness... more »

“I have a rule of never looking back,” Ian Fleming said. “Otherwise I’d wonder, ‘How could I write such piffle?’”  ... more »

July 27, 1794, was no ordinary day. In a mere 24 hours, the tide of the French Revolution turned from radical to conservative  ... more »

It’s all well and good to bash the triumphalism of the “cognitive elite.” But what does reforming meritocracy actually look like?... more »

Salman Rushdie can be an infuriating, humble-bragging, preposterous, tone-deaf know-it-all. And it’s all entirely forgivable... more »

Condemned by Kate Millet as an apologist for the patriarchy and priest of the phallus, does D.H. Lawrence deserve a second look?... more »

Adrienne Rich’s war on tokenism. Honorary degrees, letters of recommendation, National Book Awards — to Rich, they all stank   ... more »

Poe’s triumph. He made polymathic contributions despite the challenges he faced first as an orphan and then living in debt, with an invalid wife... more »

Voltaire is said to have consumed 72 cups a day; Balzac ate the grounds directly. Did coffee help cause the Enlightenment?... more »

In a new thriller written with James Patterson, Bill Clinton reveals such a naked fantasy version of himself that you can feel embarrassed for him... more »

The eccentricities of English. The language’s fitful development is an endless tussle between logic and habit  ... more »

The meat paradox. How do people who care about animals manage not to care about farm animals... more »

To the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, scholars suffered from “divine madness.” His cure: rising before dawn and combing one’s hair 40 times, front to back... more »

Listen to the way members of a cult talk and one thing becomes clear: You've probably at some point been in one  ... more »

Most widows of the Middle Ages have vanished into obscurity. But some of them shaped art history  ... more »

Yes, meritocracy is flawed. But it sure beats nepotism, patronage, clientelism, and venality  ... more »

Pablo Neruda’s memoir is stunningly vain, morally abhorrent, yet beautifully written. A new version renders it complete — or does it?... more »

In recent novels by Lauren Oyler and Patricia Lockwood, deceit, conspiracy theories, and dumb jokes thrive online. Tell us something we don’t know... more »

Cats seem to “accept life as a gift,” while we anxiously speculate about death, writes John Gray, who has compiled 10 feline philosophical lessons... more »

The economist Albert O. Hirschman’s insights have been watered down by Gladwell and Sunstein into “Hirschmanisms,” bland chestnuts repeated by the dinner-party bore... more »

Edgar Allan Poe’s zigzags from astronomy to the occult suggest a tragic narrowing in what it means to be scientific... more »

George Packer, one our best reporters and storytellers, has a knack for picking memorable subjects. His latest: his own anxieties about America's future   ... more »

The heroines of anthropology: One became a professor, one died, one was committed to a psychiatric hospital, and two quit academe  ... more »

The first of Dostoevsky’s seizures happened on his honeymoon. "If I had known as a fact that I had genuine epilepsy, I would not have married"... more »

Borges to his English translator: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark…. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny”  ... more »

We take graphs and charts for granted, but in their earliest incarnations — to help understand longitude or train times — they were revolutionary ... more »

Jon Meacham, a soft-spoken historian with the president’s ear, is impressively —  and maddeningly — everywhere... more »

"Within this wide great Universe,/Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare." The Faerie Queene approaches atheism  ... more »

Essays & Opinions

We’ve undergone a decade of unprecedented interest in Black arts and letters. But where is the work of Black artists raised in poverty?  ... more »

A lesson in Socratic humility: Map the terrain of your ignorance, plot its mountains and rivers, and try to navigate it... more »

Caitlin Flanagan has managed to evade the major vices: excessive eating, drinking, drugging, gambling. So what's got her at rock bottom? Twitter... more »

A mystery novel by a pseudonymous author arrives with a warning: “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.” Was it just a ploy for virality, or something else?   ... more »

The kind of writing that Janet Malcolm practiced so beautifully had long been disappearing when she died. Today it is nearly gone ... more »

The symbolic and social-media triumphs of Black celebrity intellectuals do not translate into meaningful change for the masses  ... more »

Our fact-challenged times have inspired a cottage industry testifying to the prescience of Hannah Arendt. But what was she actually saying?  ... more »

Classics has been charged with racism, colonialism, and fascism. Some rush to condemn the field, others to defend it — but there’s a middle way   ... more »

The future-oriented poetry of Osip Mandelstam’s contemporaries seems dated now. His words, however, have flourished with time ... more »

Nuclear war, rising oceans, biotech gone mad — literature is awash with dystopian themes. We need a little more of the utopian impulse... more »

Lauren Berlant’s “beautiful disservice”: making others believe “that the university was a place where love, care, and original thought could flourish”  ... more »

America’s aspirational class assumes that its social and cultural capital are valued and coveted by all. They’re not   ... more »

Almanacs strike a balance between practicality, poetry, and serendipity. The reward is a wonderfully freeing randomness   ... more »

“If you call for a bookstore not to stock your enemy’s book or rejoice when a problematic classic is taken out of print, your enemy will do the same”  ... more »

Ibram X. Kendi: The freakout over critical race theory isn’t a culture war with two sides — it’s CRT’s critics arguing among themselves   ... more »

Will future generations read The Dream Songs? John Berryman makes an easy target in today’s cultural climate   ... more »

A “Cat Person” quandary: How to feel when your relationship, rewritten and memorialized, becomes the world’s most viral short story... more »

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s political writings were a sort of fugitive polemic — an attack on everything from a vantage point of nowhere   ... more »

Alice Neel’s career as a struggling typist, stenographer, and painter raises a question: How do broke, self-supporting female artists do it?   ... more »

Knowledge, truth, justice — why do we spend so much time arguing over grand abstractions? The answer is rooted in pragmatism   ... more »

“The yeoman farmer as patriot and model citizen.” Did the influential books of early America contribute to cultural homogeneity?... more »

A matter of taste. All responses to art are fundamentally personal, but not all are equally valid  ... more »

Orwell's “Politics and the English Language” has been assigned to millions of students. We're doing them a disservice ... more »

For Kant and Nietzsche, complaining and whining were weak, lowly actions. But Simone Weil saw beauty and magic in them... more »

Harold Rosenberg ran with no packs and subscribed to no schools. He remained an individual amid collective credos and styles  ... more »

As Adorno’s war against unthinking, nihilistic students shows, radical intellectuals should not always support leftist revolutionaries  ... more »

Great storytellers are rarer than great writers, says the agent Morton Janklow. Was Jackie Collins a great storyteller?  ... more »

Pablo Neruda’s memoir is stunningly vain, morally abhorrent, yet beautifully written. A new version renders it complete — or does it?... more »

New Black satire. The Dave Chappelle fatalism of the early 2000s has given way to sincerity and demands for action   ... more »

A recurring pattern: Simone Weil acted solely on conviction — while in the background her parents made sure she survived her attempts to live out her ideals... more »

Does having views typical of one’s time absolve one from the judgment of future generations? Consider the example of Winston Churchill... more »

The hopeful pessimist. For half a century, Wendell Berry has been a portrait of how to live without despair when losing is likely  ... more »

Historical fiction has long been the fusty domain of mothballed characters using words like “Prithee!” No more  ... more »

For Charles Taylor, the politics of recognition were central to modern identity. Now concerns over online reputation risk supplanting that principle  ... more »

David Hockney has known only fame and adulation. Why? His images are bright, breezy, decorous, and a bit boring... more »

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on those who “do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy”... more »

In Joan Didion's writing, she doesn't quite tell us what she means. But we know how she feels... more »

Art galleries and auctions can feel like intimidating, insular places. Here’s how to successfully buy art... more »

Philosophy barely progresses, but what impedes it? Perhaps the solutions to the problems it takes on generate their own problems  ... more »

When a writer declines to such a degree as Naomi Wolf has, we need to ask: Was she always full of shit? ... more »

Why have English departments fallen on hard times? Because professors stopped speaking the truth about literature  ... more »

Retrospectives at the Tate and the Met, a five-volume catalogue raisonné, many biographies: Is there anything left to say about Francis Bacon?... more »

“The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism”  ... more »

If theology, science, and philosophy once shaped souls, a new power has superseded them: HR, the central organizing power of society... more »

A clock is not just a clock. It was created for social and political purposes, and it has a distinctive hold on our lives  ... more »

Rachel Cusk’s “tribute” to Mabel Dodge Luhan does not not so much update her story as erode its complexity  ... more »

For progressives, Foucault can no longer be “the ‘unsurpassable horizon’ of critical thought.” So what comes next?   ... more »

Coming out of a long depression, William James made a study of habits. The healthiest ones, he concluded, are those we manage to break... more »

The antagonistic relationship between writers and critics has produced a rich literature of trolling. Both parties are vulnerable to humiliation... more »

Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think  ... more »