New Books

The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity,” wrote Horkheimer and Adorno. Is enlightenment necessarily accompanied by darker forces?... more »

Why conducting matters. Whether the approach is mystical shaman, tyrant, or traffic cop, how to make sense of this most mysterious of musical professions?... more »

No theater-going experience is as tedious as being forced to listen to ideas now taken for granted. Just try to sit through A Doll’s House... more »

Schadenfreude is surreptitious and subtle. It is not, as a woeful book on the subject has it, simply the range of small, everyday miseries... more »

The earliest limerick did not come from Limerick. It was in Latin and, far from being dirty, it was a call to prayer... more »

Believed to be dead in 1937 although he lived until 1943, Henrik Pontoppidan, author of the great Scandinavian novel, has been overlooked... more »

Leonard Cohen is remembered as a troubled troubadour and talented songwriter. Should he also be remembered as a great poet?... more »

Nietzsche, self-help guru? Is a man known for bleak hilarity the sort of guide you want in a crisis?... more »

How did “Zionist” become a dirty word to the international left — “akin, say, to ‘racist,’ ‘pedophile,’ or ‘rapist’?”... more »

Overload! We live in an age of too much information, of an overabundance of news. Will slowing down help us regain our sense of what’s going on?... more »

Socialisme et Liberté. Sartre started a nonviolent anti-Nazi group in occupied Paris, reaching out to prominent intellectuals to join. No one was interested... more »

An all-boys “club” including Johnson, Boswell, and Burke met weekly to drink and gossip. Anxiety, neurosis, and venereal disease followed... more »

Behold the unbearable tedium of lyric poetry: oversensitive souls wandering the world, logging every detail, however inane... more »

Heroes, antiheroes, loyalty, honor: The Old West may be dead, but the Western lives. How an old-fashioned genre maintains its seductive appeal... more »

A period of piety. After World War II, interested swelled St. Thomas Aquinas, Simone Weil, and especially the books of Thomas Merton... more »

George Bernard Shaw on Henrik Ibsen, Vladimir Nabokov on Nikolai Gogol, Henry Miller on Arthur Rimbaud, Nicholson Baker on John Updike, Karl Ove Knausgaard on ... Edvard Munch?... more »

The history of blue. The color wasn't used to describe water until the 17th century. Then it became linked to melancholy, sadness, and a genre of music... more »

“The criterion for poetry is very romantic again, filled with the witnessing of personal pain and suffering,” says Marjorie Perloff. “It’s just not a great moment for poetry”... more »

Flann O’Brien’s hard times. After losing a civil-service job, he turned to freelance literary writing, a career imperiled by his scathing attacks on the local literati... more »

What's with the persistent and tedious confusion of male authors who mistakenly regard their own quotidian horniness as windows into existential wisdom?... more »

Sex lives of the modernists. The racy relationship of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe — nude portraits, pet names for sex organs, etc. — was mimicked but never matched... more »

A Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard — an appealing concept. And yet a “sphere of infinite depth” turns out to be a poor model for lucid writing... more »

Sluicing through the sludge of paperwork. Collectively, we spend billions of hours filling out forms. Is there any hope for reducing the tedium and monotony?... more »

Bret Easton Ellis, the thinking man’s shock jock, has made his first foray into nonfiction. The result: a rambling, self-aggrandizing mess... more »

Andrea Dworkin's frizzy hair, dumpy overalls, and uncompromising positions came to epitomize radical feminist hostility. Is her work less threatening today?... more »

Frederick Douglass, a kind of Old Testament prophet, was a pragmatist who never abandoned his radicalism. His quest for freedom gave rise to a heroic literary style... more »

Early modern alchemists feared that their research would trigger social collapse. And so they employed an obfuscatory jargon not rivaled in complexity until postmodernism... more »

Was Shakespeare a “punk poet,” a “proto-rockstar,” a “16th-century Russell Crowe,” and also a talentless middleman? Indeed so, says a new book... more »

The genre of books about growing old is nearly as old as old age itself. They fall into three categories: the scientific, the personal, and the political... more »

Pamela Hansford Johnson was romantically involved with Dylan Thomas and C.P. Snow. Naturally, she developed a talent for depicting conceited men... more »

Has the internet changed the way we think? At the least, it convinced fans of Brain Pickings to confuse a grab bag of mildly cool factoids for real insight... more »

Autism was not a new term, but Hans Asperger gave it new meaning. He identified a spectrum and urged "proper understanding, love, and guidance." But his benevolence went only so far... more »

Part of the allure of the British Empire was the promise of exotic thrills in distant lands. But the age of pith helmets was mostly just boring... more »

In Indonesia, where it’s apparently cool to quote Hitler, the newsstands offer magazines devoted to U-boats: evidence of German excellence. The weird afterlife of Nazism... more »

Mikhail Sholokhov drank to escape Stalinism, which displeased Stalin. Sholokhov’s reply: “From such a life, Comrade Stalin, anyone would turn to drink”... more »

Charles de Gaulle, intellectual. He hated Proust, enjoyed the work of Henri Bergson, and, even as president, read two or three books a week... more »

After Eve Babitz dropped a lit match on herself while driving, she gave up writing. Now she stays home and listens to conservative talk shows... more »

Intelligent design has been dismissed by scientists and courts as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” But its advocates persevere. They're just getting dumber... more »

The “Invisible College,” a secret brain trust of scientists and billionaires, is embracing a new religious mode: belief in UFOs... more »

Essays & Opinions

Influence and its discontents. The condition of being influenced is rarely a happy one. Shakespeare knew this. But will “social-media influencers” listen?... more »

Problems at the painter’s guild. Rembrandt was insolvent and thus banned from the group. Only through some legal chicanery could he find work... more »

Nearly 40 years ago, George W.S. Trow lamented what television had done to intellectual life. Imagine what he'd say about social media... more »

Both Tolkien and Lewis experienced World War I’s Western Front. But it’s not clear how this formed either Middle Earth or Narnia... more »

Lévi-Strauss at his peak. He was featured in Playboy and Elle. Even the French soccer team was reorganized along his principles... more »

We admire law and order, embrace reasons and causes, seek predictability. Except when we don't. This tension is evident in modern aesthetics... more »

Philosophy demands refutation and disputation, not kindness and empathy. Fighting, done right, is a form of inquiry... more »

"The time of two balls has passed. The age of one ball has begun." Colm Tóibín confronts cancer, chemo, and months on the sofa... more »

To use words like “fugacious,” “crepuscular,” and “chthonic” is to invite accusations of pretentiousness. But that's better than language austerity... more »

What's happening with Hans Blumenberg? Long eclipsed, the late German thinker is having a moment. On metaphors, history, and lions... more »

Putting sounds into words. "Writing about food is hard; writing about perfume must be even harder; but writing about music is difficult enough"... more »

From life hacks to digital-detox schemes, the pressure to be more efficient is everywhere. Maybe it's time to try something else: Doing nothing... more »

The problem with satire is not that it mocks and belittles; that's the point. The problem is that social media has rendered it both quaint and futile... more »

Intellectual promiscuity, of the sort Nathan Glazer epitomized, is discouraged in higher education today. His death underscores troubling changes in American life... more »

Our age of suspicion. Why are the most impressive intellectuals suspected of harboring the darkest reactionary thoughts? Consider the case of Alain Finkielkraut... more »

We don’t get to choose our influences. Yet it still comes as a surprise to learn that the book that caused Harold Bloom the most "anxiety of influence" is a little-known 1920 fantasy novel... more »

Prose over everything. William Gass’s indomitable lyricism obliterates the plot and ideas in his works. To read him is to surrender to style... more »

A hideous history of skin. In the 16th and 17th centuries, flaying caught the notice of Titian and Sir Thomas Browne, whose attentions went beyond morbid curiosity... more »

Ian Buruma on his tenure at the New York Review: "Editors should be able to take risks. Denunciation, instead of debate, will result in a kind of fearful conformity”... more »

In old age, Ingmar Bergman grew exasperated with filmmaking and turned to a mode of expression that he pursued with startling intimacy: novels... more »

How to appreciate bad books. Works that appear devoid of value — a 17th-century history of medicine, a trashy romance novel — often contain surprising depths... more »

The digital humanities are doomed, victimized by shoddy logic and bad math. Maybe. Or maybe they promise a sunny intellectual future for a suffering field... more... more »

"I’ve never thought about death in my entire life," says Vivian Gornick. "The people I know who talk about death are very banal and bore me to death"... more »

Toni Morrison’s writing refuses to comfort, to seduce, or to pander to our expectations. Instead she is unabashedly, unapologetically difficult... more »

Tchaikovsky, futurist? Though deeply conservative in life and in art, he embraced avant-garde concepts in order to counter them... more »

Philosophy's anti-Semitism problem. To what extent has the field's history, as well as its professional habits and pieties, been shaped by religious intolerance and other forms of bigotry?... more »

Literary parties are generally awkward disasters. This holds in fiction and in life. As John O’Hara put it, they are about “terrible people” getting “gloriously drunk”... more »

Hannah Arendt knew that being human in inhuman times is hard, occasionally impossible work. She is a thinker of the difficult, a thinker for now... more »

“I detonate around him.” It’s easy to mock bad sex writing — especially that of Lawrence, Mailer, or E.L. James. But does that get us any closer to good sex writing?... more »

J. Edgar Hoover sought to destroy Nelson Algren’s career — and was largely successful. Now Algren’s proletarian literature is back in fashion... more »

A history of the color black. From Goya’s terrifying “black paintings” to Tristram Shandy’s entirely black page, the color has a singular power... more »

Who has the gall to tell the entire human race how to feel? Philosophers, that's who. Their counsel: Calm down, be rational. Is anyone listening?... more »

The cheery, bland age of “books coverage.” Reviews have been replaced by listicles, gift ideas, and promotional Q&As. We deserve better... more »

Call it what you want – the fix, the bunco, the gyp, the sting – what exactly is it that we find so compelling about con artists?... more »

We celebrate foreignness in literature — but only the sort that we recognize in our own lives. A true acceptance of international writing requires more... more »

A scourge has taken hold of English departments: niceness. Where once political criticism thrived, fandom now reigns... more »

Were John Ruskin to see our society, he would find its two most notable features to be hatred of beauty and worship of machines. Alan Jacobs explains... more »

In defense of Instagram poetry. As Samuel Johnson said, “to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer”... more »

Murdering to Mozart. Once, classical music was the backbone of popular entertainment. Now it's portrayed as a handmaiden to sadism and psychopathic violence... more »

Vonnegut’s moral clarity. More than any other writer, he cut through cant and sophistry to expose self-deceptions for what they are... more »

Richard Rorty took a therapeutic approach to philosophy. Indeed, he wanted to transform it into therapy. We're still dealing with the political implications... more »

The idea of a "good death" is commonplace, as if death were something at which we succeed or fail, something to achieve. Better to think of a "fitting death"... more »

Art forces us to consider the experience of others — but it that a good thing? For Paul Bloom, empathy is selfish and shortsighted. For Knausgaard, it's banal... more »

It's been said that if nature could write, it would write like Tolstoy. It's his unsurpassed realism that makes reading War and Peace unlike reading any other book... more »

The rise of the pedantic professor. When academic self-regard becomes an intellectual style, no nit is too small to pick... more »

The “female Byron.” With her amorous poetry and drug addiction, Letitia Elizabeth Landon was ill-suited for her increasingly Victorian times... more »

Philosophers tend to speak to one another. But so-called public philosophy aspires to liberate the field from the academy. Is that a good thing?... more »

Lionel Trilling is known foremost as a critic and professor. Turns out he didn't want to be either. He yearned to be a novelist... more »

Jordan Peterson’s collection of Soviet-era artworks, comprising more than 300 pieces, has taught him something: "Nothing is powerful enough to stand in the way of art"... more »

The film project Dau began simply enough, as a biopic about a physicist. It became something else entirely — either a work of genius or total madness... more »