New Books

Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived  ... more »

Nathalie Sarraute is remembered as a “boring formalist” within the insipid “new novel” movement. She was much more than that   ... more »

When William James gave up on religion, he went in search of a new avenue to save his life. Can his approach help you save your own?   ... more »

For more than a century, Wagner's music has been a "drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans"   ... more »

The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them?   ... more »

Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so   ... more »

"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack   ... more »

The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker  ... more »

Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars"   ... more »

Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that  ... more »

Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »

For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible  ... more »

A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception   ... more »

Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others  ... more »

When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history  ... more »

How did we go from the techno-utopianism of the ’90s to the digital cesspool we’re left with today? A new book explains   ... more »

The least read masterpiece of 20th-century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23... more »

Boredom has been around since modernity, and now boredom studies is a thriving field. Can its scholars tell us anything new?   ... more »

The literature of white liberalism. In books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, white people try to read their way out of trouble. Does that work?... more »

People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »

Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »

Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality... more »

There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. It was his literary strength — and his moral failing... more »

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. So held Paul Valéry, endless tinkerer, perfectionist, and pain to his publisher... more »

In the face of tyranny, most join the oppressors or remain silent. A few resist. This is the story of Berlin's intellectuals... more »

In the aftermath of World War I, four philosophers set about studying the same fundamental question: “What does language do to us?” They had four different answers... more »

How did a Harvard divinity scholar fall for a clumsy archaeological fraud? She had every reason to believe... more »

How to follow a perfect novel? After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison found events conspiring against his second act... more »

“There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.”... more »

We remember the Italian Renaissance for its artistic brilliance, but it came with a dark side: slavery, rape, and slaughter... more »

Described as a “monk and ragamuffin,” Francis Poulenc was a composer who melded the incompatible... more »

In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did so many such instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »

What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »

The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »

Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »

Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »

To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »

Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »

Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »

Essays & Opinions

A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested?  ... more »

Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be?   ... more »

Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »

Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »

Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result   ... more »

Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it   ... more »

Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »

Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue  ... more »

We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »

In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious?  ... more »

What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself."  ... more »

Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking?  ... more »

More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »

Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »

John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »

Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »

Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »

Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology   ... more »

Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »

Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »

Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »

Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »

Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »

Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... more »

How should historians approach the here and now? As a rule, they are wary of “presentism.” But that’s changing... more »

Susan Sontag famously wrote about Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism. What does an antifascist aesthetic look like?... more »

Arguments about Ezra Pound’s odious politics seem like ways to skirt the question of his literary merit. Is he any good?... more »

An allegation of systemic racism against a university is serious, says Randall Kennedy. Why is the evidence in some cases so flimsy?... more »

The mystery of the Vikings. We know of their heroism and cruelty, their riches and inequality. But their psychology remains unknowable... more »

Shame has been under scrutiny in America for more than 200 years. No emotion is at once so ubiquitous and so disputed... more »

In his work, William Faulkner could not escape the Civil War’s aftermath or its meaning. Neither can we... more »

In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-prone Joseph Banks helped earn it that reputation... more »

There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »

Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »

Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »

Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »

Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »

Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »

Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »

John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »

Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult to trace... more »

What exactly distinguishes charismatic democratic rulers from charismatic authoritarians? As a new book reveals, the line is vanishingly thin... more »

We are witnessing a shift in how we think about free speech. Stanley Fish is an intellectual godfather of this moment... more »

E.M. Forster’s funeral was an odd affair. Religion was banned, Beethoven piped in, the procession of cars was halted when a Rolls-Royce got stuck... more »

Intellectual life is beset by a climate of censoriousness and self-censorship; Twitter gets the final say. Thomas Chatterton Williams explains the Harper’s letter... more »

“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »

Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »

Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »

What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »

The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »