New Books

The history of psychiatry is the history of our beliefs about our own minds. Breakthrough and disappointment, dogmas and counter-dogmas... more »

It cannot be the fate of the book to become tweetlike. The book must stand above. A case study in what happens when it doesn't... more »

How Islam shaped Western thought. The relationship led to a flowering of political philosophy, thought experiment, and polemic... more »

As Oliver Sacks wrote, between mania and depression lies “a narrow ridge of normality.” Despite his best efforts, he sometimes slipped off that ridge... more »

In the last decades of the 19th century, séances abounded, and austere sects speculated about geology. Darwin’s world was awash with spiritualized science... more »

“Tonight I have achieved a fresh perspective on myself. I now understand my sexuality." Foucault on LSD... more »

The problem with eternity: it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. Can this realization be liberating?... more »

Being Einstein meant people asking your opinion even about stupid things. "Why is it that no one understands me and everyone likes me?"... more »

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote Allen Ginsberg. "When do I get the manuscript?" Thus began the effort to publish Howl, a landmark case of attempted censorship... more »

When political failure leads to intellectual success. “Losers,” said Eric Hobsbawm, “make the best historians.” He was an embodiment of that principle... more »

Reading Catcher in the Rye in Moscow. For Soviet audiences, imbibing Western culture — and misinterpreting it — was an expression of a freedom... more »

For Samuel Johnson, the value of sociability was a life lesson. "I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance"... more »

In 1940, thousands of Polish officers, writers, and artists were shot. The painter Józef Czapski survived to contemplate a question: Why him?... more »

Liberty, morality, exceptionalism, xenophobia, oppression — Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen makes the case that American history is intellectual history... more »

You may have heard that Richard Holbrooke was a monstrous egotist. "It’s true," writes his biographer. "It’s even worse than you’ve heard. He lets us ogle ambition in the nude”... more »

The afterlives of philosophers. Nietzsche’s reputation fell almost immediately into disrepute; Kierkegaard, on the other hand, became an inspiration for “mindfulness.” Why?... more »

In 1958 a curious academic impostor entered Hugh Trevor-Roper’s life. He found the man hilarious. Then he got fooled himself... more »

In 1942, Ian Watt was instructed to defend Singapore Zoo from the Japanese. From the perspective of the animals, things did not go well... more »

The tragedy of Martin Buber. He had hoped to provide European Jews with a sustaining connection to their tradition. Then most of them were killed... more »

Shakespeare was many things, but not — inconveniently for a new book on the subject — a great classicist. As a drinking partner put it, the Bard had “small Latin and less Greek”... more »

For Mary Norris, the comma queen, an early encounter with Greek mythology initiatied a lifelong infatuation with the magic of the ancient world... more »

The Larkin wars. Tedious academics debate the humdrum details of the poet’s life, right down to his socks. Less examined: his genius... more »

The business secrets of messianic socialists. From mop factories to property scams, communistic cults in America have been surprisingly entrepreneurial... more »

Sexual solicitations, quid pro quos, and drunken brawls. At the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, professors thought that “free booty was part of their compensation package”... more »

The brain on deadline. In the sports pages of the 1910s and ‘20s is a master course on what it means for a writer to improvise, compress, contrive... more »

"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 »

Essays & Opinions

"How much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement.” Lucian Freud’s brute nudity... more »

The web is awash in tips from successful women writers — here’s what they’re reading, their Sunday routine. Does it help us understand them?... more »

“A monster of arrogance and inconsideration.” Susan Sontag cut through received wisdom — an approach sorely missing today... more »

New books reinterpret Homeric poems toward feminist ends. But in advancing a 21st-century politics, do they rob readers of ethical ambiguities?... more »

One notable thing about Stefan Zweig’s writing is how varied the reactions to it have been — in his own time and our own... more »

Make philosophy great again. The field has been reduced to bland Continental and analytic variants — a trend that must be reversed... more »

Humor is often lost in translation, especially if it's being translated from German. Yes, the jokes are ponderous. But they're funny, too... more »

The myth of advice. Successful people want to be helpful. But their advice sounds empty and canned — because it is... more »

Today’s intellectual mode: “Learn an attitude and inquire no further.” Marilynne Robinson on why certain ideas, like economic “associationism,” have vanished... more »

The cultural contradictions of Daniel Bell. He never could quite reconcile the Jewish conservative and the Yiddish radical within him... more »

E.H. Carr and the fate of facts. “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation”... more »

Wit, mockery, joking, buffoonery: The oldest monastic rule we know of forbade joking. Laughter has long had a dangerously democratic quality... more »

Adam Gopnik and the limits of liberalism. Is a defense of moderation and incrementalism really evidence of a refusal to look at reality?... more »

Podcasts are the internet for our ears; they allow us to drift into a soothing, saturated state, distracting us from loneliness. Maybe loneliness is better... more »

More than 7,000 pages of his letters, 8,000 pages of prose, 12,000 pages of Criterion, the magazine he edited. How much T.S. Eliot is too much T.S. Eliot?... more »

Making ends meet as a book reviewer: $250 here and there, $1,000 from The New Republic. Jacob Silverman on the “foolish pursuit of an intellectually engaged life”... more »

The history of cheerfulness. It evolved from a Greek virtue aligned with patience and justice into a self-helpy brand of American nonsense that borders on psychosis... more »

The rise of the literary critic as pre-eminent cultural arbiter was a fluky aberration of the 20th century. The role was always going to be temporary... more »

When ancient battles seem modern. The Epicureans were outraged when their school was bought as a retirement home for an amateur pornographer... more »

John Berger occasionally went awry in evaluating individual artists (like Picasso), but his bullshit detection and skepticism of fashionable ideologies were nonpareil... more »

"The habit of seeing universities as the main or even sole custodians of humanistic culture isn’t just inaccurate; it is bad for universities themselves"... more »

From Gordon Lish’s severity to Michael Pietsch’s maximalism, editors invisibly shape literary trends. That bodes ill as we enter publishing’s Conglomerate Era... more »

Audiobooks and the ethic of efficiency. Increasingly, we don't read so much as listen. It’s an instinct born of a mania for optimizing every minute... more »

Writer, weightlifter, defender of Oscar Wilde. A literary legacy seemed assured for the now-forgotten Frank Harris, who ranked his own genius with Shakespeare’s... more »

Against podcasts. They are tedious and samey and sedative. Don’t waste your precious hours on them. A music critic makes his case... more »

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 »