New Books

Didion on Zoloft: “It made me feel for about an hour that I’d lost my organizing principle, rather like having a planter's punch before lunch in the tropics”... more »

An age of moral and material panic, of fury and anxiety, requires a shrewd chronicler. Enter David Rieff. ... more »

It's been said that a good book should be interesting, memorable, and re-readable. Which 20th-century novels stack up?... more »

Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »

The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »

In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »

“It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »

Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »

Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »

Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »

The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »

The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »

The evolution of teeth. What began in the ocean half a billion years ago has led us to the dentist's chair... more »

For Agnes Callard, the philosophical life demands relentless self-questioning. But she has little to say about the conditions that make such inquiry possible... more »

James C. Scott called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’” Why were his ideas so compelling to libertarians?... more »

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was both artist and prophet. He was far more persuasive as the former than as the latter... more »

Melancholy need not be understood as fatalism or decadent withdrawal. For W.G. Sebald, it was a form of resistance... more »

"People tell me I get overexcited," Philip Hoare tells us. "Well, bollocks to that." When it comes to William Blake, his enthusiasm knows no bounds... more »

At the Great Siege of Malta, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights were suicidally brave in the defense of a barren island. Why?... more »

The critic Andrea Long Chu gets away with baggy associative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance... more »

Henry James in Palm Beach. “Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand”... more »

The prevailing view of Hegel is that he regarded history as a simplistic march of progress. The prevailing view is wrong... more »

Czeslaw Milosz agonized over whether to defect from Stalinist Poland: “What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile”... more »

There were methods for slowing Big Tech’s overhaul of our social world — but they are too little, too late... more »

What is it about brutally inhospitable mountains that can move us so totally and instinctively? Nan Shepherd called it “the tang of height”... more »

The benefits of a bad memory. To remember the important things, we have to forget the inessential... more »

Was Curzio Malaparte — nationalist and cosmopolite, pacifist and bellicist, elitist and populist — the quintessential European of his time?... more »

“A book was like fresh air," said Adam Michnik. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad.” The CIA was deft at smuggling them behind the Iron Curtain... more »

A rarefied gig. Has there ever been a more lucrative place to be a writer than Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair?... more »

The history of AI is dashed hopes and blind alleys. You don't have to be an “accelerationist” or a “doomer" to see that this time is different... more »

House of Albert Barnes. What drove the curmudgeonly collector to acquire so many Renoirs, Cézannes and Modiglianis?... more »

Through binges, bankruptcies, and depressive spells, Edgar Allan Poe knew where the best of him lay: in making art... more »

In the 18th century, hypochondria was a rarefied disease tied to leisure and luxury. Then the laboring classes began to develop it... more »

Dante’s divine… autofiction? The Commedia is not a “memoir” in the conventional sense, yet it’s a deeply personal reflection... more »

Van Gogh, age 32, arrived in Paris a "provincial rube" and “painter of no particular skill." Did the city really transform him?... more »

“The only people who connect ancient and modern Greece are tour guides, Fulbright scholars, and fascists”... more »

When it comes to sexual matters, the Bible is neither clear nor consistent. Diarmaid MacCulloch teases out the contradictions... more »

Many academics tolerate the metaphysical commitments of mainstream religionists. But a belief in the paranormal?... more »

Free speech and its discontents. “We cannot have truth and wisdom without accommodating error and folly”... more »

Essays & Opinions

M.F.A. programs were long dominated by evangelists for Raymond Carver. Thank goodness for the overdue recognition of Lucia Berlin... more »

America’s most literary town. In the poetry mecca of Iowa City roughly 1 of every 75 residents is a writer... more »

Concerts of classical music are often long, slow, and even boring affairs. In a sense, that’s the point... more »

Henry James, America’s first international writer, couldn’t leave home behind –— and couldn’t abide it as a permanent home... more »

NASA has spent decades looking for alien intelligence in the far reaches of the universe. But should we be looking much closer to home?... more »

What does it mean to win an award for translation? The International Booker Prize for fiction in translation doesn’t seem to know... more »

Behold, the new Frick. Post-renovation, the museum has nearly twice as much to see. What’s not to love?... more »

Who has written the best American poetry of the 21st century? Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Ocean Vuong... more »

Absorbed in close textual analysis, literary scholars overlook the simple joys of the plot twist and the big reveal... more »

Edward Said gave the Palestinian position its gravitas. Now, at Columbia, his intellectual legacy is under attack... more »

Claire Messud on Lolita: “In this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass”... more »

The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz commemorated suffering. But he never abandoned a fragile sense of hope... more »

A generation of students raised on an ethic of sexual egalitarianism struggles to confront a key theme in Othello: jealousy... more »

Awash in freedom and material abundance, Americans are mired in boredom and intellectual dullness... more »

"The college essay is absurd and unfair," writes Yascha Mounk. "It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny"... more »

Learning for learning’s sake. College is being portrayed through the narrowest, most vocational lens. That’s a travesty... more »

Perry Link: "People who ask me about my blacklisting usually don’t imagine that there are benefits to the status, but there are"... more »

“I like genre fiction for the same reason I like … the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: Things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake”... more »

$10 from The New Leader, $100 from Commentary. James Baldwin’s magazine writing career had humble origins... more »

The most stable repository of civilization worth has long been books. That era is ending. What comes next?... more »

Critics loved Evelyn Waugh’s dark comedy and wicked social satire. Then, to their dismay, Brideshead Revisited appeared... more »

Christ and Campbell’s soup. Did Andy Warhol's faith have more influence over his art than his critics realize?... more »

John Cage instructed his composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” be played “as slowly as possible.” The world’s longest organ recital will take 639 years. ... more »

“My whole life,” wrote Bruce Chatwin, “has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific”... more »

In a famous scene in Moby-Dick, Ishmael encounters “a long, limber, portentous, black” artwork. Could AI recreate it?... more »

Judith Butler: “Is there a proposed criterion by which ‘extremist’ gender ideology can be distinguished from the non-extremist kind?”... more »

We seek rest, yet are wary of its implicit boredom. This dilemma is resolved, perhaps, only by cats... more »

The homogenous, aging American psychoanalytic community has begun emphasizing social injustice. The result: chaos... more »

Hunter-gatherer societies were much more violent than our own, but much of that is due to a relatively small number of prehistoric psychopaths... more »

One early human tool gave rise to our leap in intelligence: not the sharpened stone, but the handbag, for carrying food and babies... more »

For a powerful account of the human condition, writes Marilynne Robinson, turn not to “anemic anthropology,” but to Calvinism... more »

Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »

Today we treat novels as salubrious stress relievers — kale smoothies for the soul. That overlooks their dark, diabolical potency... more »

The necessity of Martha Nussbaum. Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex, and sometimes painful stuff of real life... more »

Alice Gribbin: “Those who deem the nude in art a ‘sex object’ betray themselves as prudish and crass”... more »

What can the memoir of madness accomplish? It can force us to reckon with ugly things, not because they are titillating, but because they are true... more »

“The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination … may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism”... more »

Technology has long been a boon to creativity, especially in film. But AI and its machine-managed flawlessness are different... more »

What is intuition? The return of a lost memory? An unearned sense of certitude? A physician deals with losing his decisiveness... more »

A victim of his own accessibility. Montaigne’s writing is categorized as “motivational self-help.” Don’t be fooled... more »

Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a “big, huge mistake,” but one we should be grateful for... more »

Social science has a rigor problem, and the common solutions — replication, public critique — are inefficient. It’s time for a new approach... more »

When Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” came out over 35 years ago, it was roundly mocked. But he’s been proven right... more »

Perry Anderson asks: Why is neoliberalism more powerful and pervasive an ideology than the liberalism on which it rests?... more »

A plague of bad essays purports to explain how some distant historical event explains the present. Beware such relevance mongering... more »

The supremacy of finitude: Our lives, our species, and our universe will all someday come to an end. That should galvanize us... more »

If the universe offers us clues to its purpose, the reasonable thing to do is not just pay attention but believe. Ross Douthat’s case for religion... more »

When Shulamith Firestone finally published her second book, it wasn't a memoir of her descent into psychosis. It was something deeper ... more »

AI and the problem of other minds. How can we ever know if AI has subjective feelings? Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT... more »

AI and literature. "Writing it off, ignoring it, assuming it is a slop machine and little more...is a narrow, badly informed, and false view of what is going on"... more »