New Books

Ideology has been likened to halitosis. It’s “what the other person has.” Fun line, but does it explain ideology?... more »

The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, but that it so often denies us the lush joys of physicality... more »

The Village Voice – utopian in origin, dysfunctional in execution – left a remarkable imprint on American culture... more »

A New Yorker staff writer takes a hard look at New York’s rave scene, and develops a cynicism — not of the scene — but of our literary culture... more »

Could it be that the story of money is the story of humanity itself, from 18,000 BC to the present? Not exactly... more »

One hermeneutic to rule them all. With sparring medievalists, Marxists, and right-leaning fans, Tolkienists are a fractious bunch... more »

In the university, philosophy is narrow and familiar. Becca Rothfeld shows that it can be extravagant, imaginative, and ambitious... more »

Culture in the sense we have understood it is eroding. Time to mourn – and to celebrate... more »

To be young when Abstract Expressionism gave way to Pop Art and Minimalism was to know the art world before the art market... more »

“Violence as Fanon conceived it, then, was a cure for the almost incurable. It was a weapon in the hands of non-beings, a way out of nothingness”... more »

Anchovies, a dish of frugality, has represented excess — both “food for the poor” and “the famous meat of drunkards,” circa 1600... more »

James Lovelock upended our understanding of planetary science. Then his contrarianism turned in unreliable directions... more »

Auden’s desire for isolation. The ideas that brought him to the pinnacle of his fame also led him to leave England... more »

Yuval Noah Harari’s take on AI: “a fuzzy batch of misguided animal fables and often-unpersuasive reflections on technology”... more »

Shakespeare and Freud: What is the proper relationship between psychoanalysis and literature?... more »

Gauguin’s wild 1888 visit to Arles came to an end when Van Gogh hurled an absinthe glass at him — then came at him with a razor... more »

East-West trade once went by sea via India, shipping pepper, ivory, cotton, and rhubarb. Is the historical Silk Road a myth? ... more »

Self-help meets the ancien régime in The Habsburg Way, which counsels having lots of children, dying well, and having a memorable funeral... more »

Sponges, corals, and cephalopods are very different from human beings. Do they nevertheless share aspects of our mental lives?... more »

Marilynne Robinson, pillar of moral seriousness, takes on the book of Genesis. Surprisingly, the result is dogmatism... more »

Some academics insist that children’s literature can be written only by children. "Those academics, incidentally, are off their rockers"... more »

Lead and Zinc Ores of Northumberland and Alston Moor does not sound like children’s literature — yet it was for W.H. Auden... more »

What is most indelible about Simone Weil is her mix of cosmic empathy and aggressive intolerance... more »

Monstrous motherhood. What can we learn from women who’ve abandoned their children?... more »

What it means to be a stone. Rocks can behave in ways that defy our imagination, and increase our access to awe... more »

We are all storytellers, certain assumptions embedded in our discursive maneuvers. Has that ability degraded?... more »

Some writers are at their best when denouncing idiocy rather than praising greatness. Consider Christopher Hitchens ... more »

Few poets have suffered more from the early overestimation of critics than Delmore Schwartz. He never quite recovered... more »

The "1812 Overture," Tchaikovsky’s best-known work, is a gaudy monstrosity. One more paradox in a life full of them.... more »

Guy Davenport knew that he was working at the end of a tradition. He was the last high modernist... more »

Equality is at the center of liberalism, or so goes the conventional wisdom. But the relationship has long been fraught... more »

Nietzsche was a vehement critic of every kind of egalitarianism. Odd that his reputation was rescued by leftist scholars... more »

Ideology, totality, utopia, form: Frederic Jameson, now 90, has never wavered in his obsessions... more »

The desire to unite art and life. The Russian and Soviet avant-garde wasn’t a school or a style. It was a mentality... more »

The Sylvia Plath stigma. Why are her female readers portrayed as unserious, depressive fangirls?... more »

Dickinson and Darwin. The poet's and the naturalist’s lives overlapped, as did their desire to synthesize the material world... more »

Fanny and Louis. She was wild and tiny and central to his literary achievements... more »

Cromwell: The name redounds as shorthand for villainy and political skill. The truth is far more interesting... more »

We’re all Faustians now. What’s at stake isn’t so much our souls as our privacy, along with much else... more »

Essays & Opinions

“Theory was among other things the brief afterlife of a failed insurrection.” It was also, Terry Eagleton writes, “exhilarating”... more »

"If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning"... more »

Weird nonfiction has roots in the work of Welles and Borges. But its natural home is the internet, amid disinformation and pissant humor... more »

Bits, cheeky, clever, gutted: Ben Yagoda explains the British invasion of American English... more »

Why does Marilynne Robinson, master of nuanced, humane fiction, clang out vast, hostile, and unprovable assertions in her nonfiction?... more »

Marx made little of it, and Rousseau spoke about it incessantly. Where did the idea of equality come from?... more »

For Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th century saw material, intellectual and moral progress — and the 20th century saw it regress... more »

There’s a deep truth in Thomas Mann’s line: “To be reminded that one is not alone in the world — always unpleasant”... more »

Two decades of n+1. The “dishwater leftism and barbershop snark” of the early years gave way to something else. But is it better?... more »

You know Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Do you know its bizarre backstory?... more »

On knowing and not knowing. Benign self-ignorance and willful self-delusion. Mark Lilla on self-evasion and self-confrontation ... more »

Technicians of trivia. Historians cannot merely compile sterile facts — they must develop theoretical frameworks... more »

Ideas and definitions that Judith Butler resisted as a young scholar have caught up with the author – and us... more »

The collapse of epistemic authority, the rise of “highly incitable” people, and a propensity for online ranting shape our combustible reality... more »

Studying philosophy has been flattened into a single option: academic. What's left if that goes away?... more »

“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism... more »

Every era recreates Mozart in its own image. In our time, he's a scatological imp who loves four-letter words... more »

Blasphemy seems like an anachronistic offense. But Salman Rushdie’s case is thoroughly modern... more »

Disappointments of literary Brooklyn. For one would-be writer, little magazine subculture was alienating and disgusting... more »

A real reader, insisted Nabokov, is a rereader. He was wrong, and so is the high-minded horde of rereading evangelists... more »

C.L.R. James planned a short trip to “dreadful” America and stayed for 15 years, even as his distaste for U.S. politics grew... more »

Dickens was a scoundrel; Tolstoy an exploitative sex addict; Alice Walker an anti-Semite. Still, read them ... more »

In praise of reference books. The best way to satisfy a young and weird mind’s desire for useless knowledge... more »

Grades at American universities are so inflated they’ve become meaningless. Time to do away with them altogether... more »

Is AI-generated writing mimicking us, or are we imitating AI? Resisting the allure of maximal clarity and minimal idiosyncrasies... more »

Behold the strange and wondrous world of plankton, a vast ecosystem giving rise to the idea of the ocean... more »

A funny thing happened to Marxist political philosophers. When they stripped away the BS, there was nothing left but liberalism ... more »

Whitewashing Nietzsche. Generations of academics have tried to argue away his appeal to young men... more »

Our decisions are caused by neural mechanisms and biological processes. Even if uncoerced, are they still freely made?... more »

Literary fame is fickle and fleeting. So what makes a book endure? Lincoln Michel has a few theories... more »

The demand to “decolonize” places and things is ubiquitous. What does it mean?... more... more »

Matthew Arnold thought Chaucer “lacked high seriousness.” But Shakespeare couldn’t have done without him... more »

The venerable lab mouse. Its ubiquity in biomedical research is a bizarre accident of history... more »

Film and philosophy. Stanley Cavell yoked Kant with Capra, Hegel with Hepburn. To what end?... more »

When women turn life into literature and speak rather than remain silent, we call it gossip... more »

“I can feel the neurons in my brain struggling and striving. Yes, I can feel it. Now you think I’m crazy.” Anne Carson has Parkinson’s... more »

When the leading lights of physics gathered in Mussolini’s Rome, they clashed over cosmic rays... more »

“Facts don’t change minds because, most often, it’s the framework through which we analyze them that is at stake”... more »

For Montaigne, cruelty was the worst vice. But being mean, however fraught, has definite social value... more »

When a piece of writing exhibits moral excellence, we naturally assume it reflects the morality of the author. That’s often a mistake... more »

An effort is afoot to rescue the humanities’ relevance by pooh-poohing its founding commitments. That won’t work... more »

Great artists make poor propagandists, says Phil Klay. The activist’s job is activism, and the artist’s job is truth ... more »

Elias Canetti described his polemic against death as the book he was born to write. But he couldn’t finish it. He could barely start it... more »

Tristan Foison flourished as a musical fabulist by revealing exactly how classical music ennobles bullshit... more »

History is full of instances when science was subjugated to ideology, and science suffered. Is that happening now in America?... more »

Unlike computers, humans thrive on ambiguity and equivocation, on double entendre and sophistry, on blunders and embarrassments... more »

Oh, Oblomov! “Follow my example, ye small-time yuppies and wage slaves… brothers and sisters led by the nose by dreary, servile little bosses”... more »

Writers are susceptible to pressure from both market and peers. That’s not to say literary excellence isn’t the result of individual genius... more »

What happens if you commit to memorizing a poem every week? Jacob Brogan on the overlooked pleasures of repetition... more »

Note a conspicuous absence in contemporary literature: the unfiltered voice of raw manhood on the page
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