New Books

In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... more »

Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »

For Hebrew to become a modern language, it first had to become a flexible instrument, a religious language put in the service of a secular literature ... more »

The first musical note on earth was sounded 165 million years ago. It was an E natural. What did our ancestors use music for? ... more »

Though sometimes celebrated by liberals, cognitive meritocracy has eroded social solidarity, increased inequality, and precipitated right-wing populism  ... more »

Covid-19 is “the great reset,” argues a new book — humane, techno-elite Davos Men will save the day. Cue the nightmare scenarios  ... more »

Joyce, Picasso — when we think of Modernism, we often think of men. But as a new book shows, there may well have been no Modernism without lesbians... more »

Derrida's insights are fundamental to many fields: literature, law, film theory, theology. But he was a specialist in a subfield of his own design  ... more »

The semicolon is odd but impressive, the interrobang a good idea that never got traction. The hashtag was dead until some guy at Twitter revived it ... more »

The power of Elena Ferrante’s fiction is in chaos and terror — a magma of dread that infuses her novels with energy... more »

What Van Gogh read. "For him, it was not important to physically possess books, but to make them his own."  ... more »

Frantz Fanon has become a near-mythical figure in antiracist discourse. The cost of that achievement: a watering down of his political commitments... more »

As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” Indeed, the history of the idea of freedom is one of paradox and contradiction   ... more »

If life exists on any of the Milky Way’s other 100 billion planets, Darwinian selection would be at work there, too ... more »

Helen Frankenthaler and the mainstreaming of the avant-garde. In 1950s New York, painting's culture looked like pop culture  ... more »

While autofiction asserts a kind of apolitical license, the bar for ethical fiction keeps getting higher and higher  ... more »

Defending Derrida against his critics is easier than defending him against his followers  ... more »

One of Francis Bacon’s lovers burned down his studio; another threw him out of a second story window. For Bacon, pain was indicative of true emotion ... more »

Novels are increasingly autobiographical, which puts reading at the risk of becoming a tiresome test of authenticity  ... more »

Will the pandemic hasten the use of gene-editing technology? Engineering our bodies to resist disease might not sound so radical right now   ... more »

John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald were two men who struggled to make it as writers. Does the connection go deeper?  ... more »

Life is awful, or so said the cynical and perhaps nihilistic Graham Greene. But art — that could at least make life seem worthwhile ... more »

Does the future of postcolonial thought necessitate a return to Indigenous epistemologies, or can at least some modernist ideas be salvaged?   ... more »

Humanists should be skeptical of our increasingly analytical world. Unfortunately, Lev Manovich’s new book is full of gee-whiz-ism   ... more »

A sense of so-called “decency” long kept women out of art studios. Indeed, the history of art is "the history of many women not receiving their dues”  ... more »

Robin Dunbar’s science of friendship: Human beings can sustain at most 150 acquaintances, of which only five are intimate  ... more »

The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »

High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies  ... more »

Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »

How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »

What can we learn from Philip Roth, master careerist? Lawyer up early, listen to critics while scorning them publicly, sell out whenever possible  ... more »

What Freud got right. According to a new book, his ideas weren’t just ahead of his time — they are ahead of ours  ... more »

At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon... more »

René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »

More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie... more »

Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew  ... more »

Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more »

When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes... more »

A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more »

Essays & Opinions

In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »

Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »

Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not  ... more »

American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign  ... more »

Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too  ... more »

Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough?  ... more »

David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »

Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness  ... more »

“Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing?   ... more »

“Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away”   ... more »

There is something mildly shameful about literary pilgrimages. They are a kind of emotional and intellectual junk food. And yet...  ... more »

Evelyn Waugh on being interviewed by Jacques Barzun: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He... gave me a viva in history”   ... more »

Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive... more »

The birth of the audiobook dates to the 19th century, when Tennyson and Browning recorded poems for phonographs  ... more »

The new literary moralism. Is this frenzy for censure and the expansion of the definition of harm how we’ll correct the inequities of our time?  ... more »

Polymaths are one thing, freaks of intellect quite another. Even reading about these monsters of learning can leave one exhausted  ... more »

From the Aztecs' “divine food” to the 18th-century smoke enema, the history of smoking is odder than typically presented ... more »

A consensus has emerged on the right and the left, among the regressive populists and the progressive populists: liberals are the villains... more »

Literary studies argues wrong. Because scholars value critical style over substance, academic culture grows misguided  ... more »

Many people are committed to the idea that they’re biologically superior. Does social-science genetics give them scientific cover?   ... more »

Being overshadowed by genius has destroyed many literary careers. For the Canadian critic Robert Fulford, something like the opposite occurred  ... more »

College admissions is one of the few situations in which it’s rich people scrambling for a scarce resource. The result: our insane system of private schools... more »

Liberal and center-left political parties — once champions of the working class — have become home to meritocrats, hence the party of the new aristocracy... more »

When Robert Lowell left Elizabeth Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood and England, Hardwick decried his infidelity — both to her and to American literature   ... more »

Remember the televangelists? We now have the Instavangelists, hawking a blend of self-care, wellness, astrology, and left-wing politics  ... more »

Lolita’s greatest champion? Véra Nabokov. She saved it from fire and thought to publish it abroad, decrying domestic “strait-laced morality”  ... more »

The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned   ... more »

Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality”  ... more »

Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province  ... more »

We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »

"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it"  ... more »

A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »

Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress  ... more »

Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors   ... more »

Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification?  ... more »

“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman”  ... more »

Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »

In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »

In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust   ... more »

Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »

"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »

Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »

Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system  ... more »

Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist”   ... more »

Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances  ... more »

Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind... more »

Criticism is often a cycle of destruction, a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own  ... more »

In the 1950s, writers began to formulate a critique of technology. Since then we've rushed into an uncritical embrace. What now?... more »

A biography paints Tom Stoppard as unfailingly kind. The playwright’s reaction? He is “not as nice as people think”   ... more »

On pop futurism. The genre's method? Sketch out possible future, highlight emergent trend, and promise way for reader to benefit  ... more »