New Books

At her best, Susan Sontag refused to simplify her thinking for easy answers. At her worst, she was dodgy and noncommittal. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »

Derek Parfit spent most of his life cloistered within a cloistered institution. He sacrificed nearly everything to his intellectual calling... more »

Birth of romanticism. When polymaths, poets, philosophers, and playwrights lived, argued, and loved in the German town of Jena ... more »

For more than 20 years, J.C. presided over the back page of the TLS with wit, weirdness, and waspish provocation... more »

Failure comes in many forms: physical, social, biological. Facing it humbles us, and so we lead better lives. So argues Costica Bradatan... more »

“The problem of the world is this,” Orwell told a friend late in life. “Can we get men to behave decently to each other if they no longer believe in God?”... more »

Elias Canetti was a scholar, but not an academic. He wasn’t a novelist or poet, though he wrote that way. He was many writers at once... more »

Bruno Schulz's stories defy description, explication, paraphrase. And his death — appalling and senseless — defies meaning... more »

No nepo babies and no assholes — in the corny, cheerful world of Tom Hanks, moviemaking is earnest, joyous, well-compensated work... more »

The American idea of continental philosophers as speculative, irrational mystics dates to the 1953 International Congress of Philosophy, in Brussels... more »

Shakespeare's body of work is complex and confounding; so is the task of tracking down his biography. Who was he? Who cares?... more »

Is multiculturalism an oxymoron? In an age of atomization a new book makes a case for cross-cultural transmission... more »

Lauren Berlant’s writing flirts with meaning. Rhythmic and atmospheric, it’s somewhere between incoherence and poetry... more »

“They were accused of doing or saying something awful, and made something great.” What to do about the art of monstrous people?... more »

Speaking, writing, libraries, encyclopedias, newspapers, radio, television, PR, A.I.: How we know what we know, and how that's changed... more »

Too flinty and realistic to be an aesthete, Shirley Hazzard nevertheless pursued a life steeped in aesthetic pleasure... more »

Rorty vs. MacIntyre: One was an ecumenical leftist, the other a powerful critic of liberalism. What matters about their lifelong argument?... more »

Ask a philosopher of a certain age to reflect on the state of the discipline, and the response is generally dour. Philip Kitcher is no exception... more »

Not long before descending into insanity, Nietzsche was moved to tears in Turin at a concert of Beethoven, Liszt, and Bizet... more »

Some of Osip Mandelstam’s poems are frivolous, others gnomic. Most are memorable, and hypnotically musical... more »

For decades, some bright minds have been consumed by a mundane problem: How to go viral on the internet... more »

Bach, Handel, Mozart, Schubert: All of them fell out of favor between their time and ours. But not Beethoven. Why?... more »

The new anti-anti-colonialism. The brutalities of British imperialism spur contemporary denial, guilt, trauma, and silence... more »

Tyler Cowen: "Longtermism is a radical and oft-neglected philosophy, and few people are interested in living by its implications"... more »

Is ballet a relic of outdated patriarchy, a cult-like system that conditions women to be obedient? Or is it “a laboratory of femaleness”? Both... more »

The Derek Parfit scandal. In 1981, Oxford’s All Souls College refused him a promotion unless he wrote a book. Twenty months later, Reasons and Persons was complete... more »

The critic Brian Dillon ponders: What does it mean to have an affinity for something? And is there any rhyme or reason to what catches our eye?... more »

Creativity, as a concept, was not born from the arts. Rather, it’s a product of Cold War capitalism... more »

Freud did not discover the unconscious, and many of his theories now seem absurd. But belief in the Freudian mythology might well have been beneficial... more »

Alfred Russel Wallace unnerved colleagues with his affinity for spiritualism. That iconoclasm produced his greatest insights... more »

George Eliot’s literary marriage: They would work in the mornings, dine at 3, and “read diligently aloud in the evening”... more »

The ultimate prison literature is a 40-foot-long, 4-inch-wide scroll written in the Bastille in 1785. This strange, sublime gem? The 120 Days of Sodom... more »

Zonked, bushed, pooped, hebetudinous — the effect of a new book about the history of fatigue, in excruciating detail, reflects its subject... more »

The future of college is nanocertificates, digital chips, and microbadges. Or so some entrepreneurs would have you believe... more »

“While we can detect gravitational waves, find water on Mars, and grow human organs, we still can’t claim a complete understanding of how our noses work”... more »

The role of Juliet was first played by a teenage boy. Few actors since then have performed the role exactly as written... more »

Dusty book collections make us think of brilliant authors toiling in charming, candlelit chambers. But the story of rare books has a dark side as well... more »

19 ways to look at porn. Middle-aged gay man, straight-married woman, gratingly smug man, bad feminist, burp fetishist... more »

Progressive thinkers make the case for rage — that anger is a legitimate response to oppression. The power dynamics are complicated... more »

Essays & Opinions

"This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble”... more »

Jacques Derrida was fascinated by the idea of secrets — what they are, why we keep them, and what they reveal about us ... more »

More than ever, we need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism. We need Max Weber... more »

Sontag on women. Their oppression, she came to believe, presents a problem that is aesthetic and narrative problem as well as political and economic.... more »

For Emmanuel Carrère, writing about other people is tantamount to torturing them. But representing a life other than your own is what makes human connection possible... more »

Art critics seem less and less interested in art and more and more interested in money. Consider the triumph of Kehinde Wiley... more »

You’ve had to deal with the sulkiness of others. Indeed, you might be a sulker yourself. But what is sulking, exactly?... more »

Parents of young children are rarely alone, and yet they report feeling lonely. How to explain? Donald Winnicott has some theories... more »

The culture industry has gotten very good at reflecting back our taste to us. Art is boring now because we are boring... more »

An extreme figure even in decadent fin-de-siècle Paris, Jean Lorrain was a dandy, Satanist, drinker of ether, and highly paid writer... more »

“Whereas algorithms present personalized recommendations by rank, the blurb is a one-rank system of aesthetic value: utterly awesome”  ... more »

“Female friendships, rather than literary marriages or bros with quills, are a force for the creation and continuation of literary culture”... more »

Hannah Arendt is hardly an icon of gay culture. So how was it that she helped to shape American gay identity?... more »

Critical thinking has been “infected with phraseology” in the form of sanctimonious sloganeering and technical jargon... more »

Even if artificial intelligence is truly intelligent, intelligence and creativity are two different things. Which is why AI can't make good art... more »

Unusual writing can be eloquent writing. It can also be just plain unusual. Consider the essayist Brian Dillon... more »

Style tip from Christopher Lasch: Jettison ostentatious erudition, abbreviations, and acronyms. Initials are for desiccated bureaucrats... more »

The history of the swing. From Greece to Borneo, swinging has been a form of magic, a means of warding off evil, a form of celebration... more »

Semafor, Air Mail, Punchbowl News, Puck, Substack: Making sense of the cacophonous, paywall-inhibited online reading environment... more »

Roger Scruton wasn’t judicious about his associates. Now he’s being used by more-brutish conservatives as a shield of sophistication... more »

Libertarian critics of democracy make several valid points. But there's no evidence their alternatives are better, and much to suggest they'd be worse ... more »

Neutrality might be a fiction, but it is an essential one, says Anthony Appiah. "Performing fairness can make us fairer"... more »

Literary criticism is flourishing, says Ryan Ruby, despite – and sometimes because of – dire economic circumstances... more »

Nations and peoples fall into nostalgic moods just as individuals do. Its allure is as strong as its destructive potential. Mark Lilla explains... more »

“I’ve taken enormous walks and lived on rice and codfish tongues and I feel like a new man.” John Dos Passos was at home on Cape Cod... more »

We like clear-cut rules, but life is full of extenuating circumstances. Enter discretion, an uncomfortable yet necessary virtue... more »

“I was in the right emotional state for a nine-day (yes) wellness cruise from Barcelona to Rome. This is precisely why I really, really did not want to go”... more »

The trouble caused by desire, and by the inability to be good, are familiar problems that Andrea Long Chu explores in new ways... more »

Imagine a future in which serious publications have disappeared, and the cultural discourse is dominated by the progeny of celebrities. Is it that far off?... more »

"I am in a relationship with the internet. It is in my mind, and my mind is in it, and it causes feelings in my body. Good feelings and crazy-making feelings"... more »

What draws contemporary literary critics to Elizabeth Hardwick? Her loose, fragmentary form and resistance to easy answers... more »

“What ought we to do about great art made by bad men?” Engage with it, don't quash it. Judith Shulevitz explains... more »

In this age of instrumentality, what is left to pursue simply because it’s beautiful, good, or true?... more »

It is tempting to view Bruno Schulz's art through the lens of his murder by the Nazis. But that would be a mistake... more »

The sweeping grandeur of clause upon clause, twist and turn, convoluted syntax, elaborate punctuation: In praise of long sentences... more »

The moral of forgiveness: “We should find ourselves ever open to changing our minds about people and their actions”... more »

Dunwich — the city that fell into the sea — was immortalized by Henry James, J. M. W. Turner, and other artists... more »

In 1996, Adam Gopnik shocked the art world by delimiting the scope of Picasso’s genius. His critique has won the day... more »

Joanna Biggs: “Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave”... more »

“I’ve lived nearly all my life with two incompatible ideas in my head: I wish I were dead and I’m glad my suicides failed”... more »

Auden was of the same generation as Elizabeth Bishop, yet she still speaks to us, while he does not. Why?... more »

The “Seventh Letter” could be a gold mine of Platonic thought. But is it the work of one of antiquity’s greatest minds, or of a hack impostor?... more »

What is the role of Christianity in American literature? It leads us to focus on morality and justice, but also on evil and hypocrisy... more »

An essential part of bookselling is cataloging. But it’s a decentralized, unstandardized carnival fire... more »

If magical thinking is core to our sense of self, then our experiences are acts of imagination that can’t be sustained solely by rational thought. Consider coincidences... more »

NIST, the federal agency tasked with the science of measurement, is an acropolis of the average, a Parnassus of the prototypical. Tom Vanderbilt explains... more »

T.S. Eliot and the study of power. The drama that takes place across the span of his poetry seems more vital than ever... more »

What is the proper relationship between art and morality? One answer lies in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, a filthy book about an intolerable man... more »

To take to heart Awakenings, published by Oliver Sacks 50 years ago, is to embrace the possibility of an awakening of our own common humanity... more »

Leonardo was drawn to youth and beauty. He was also obsessed by strange, diseased, "monstrous" faces, which he sketched in caricatures... more »