New Books

Comedy and social theory make an awkward pair. If Andrea Long Chu’s Females is any guide, the problem is that punchlines wear off quickly... more »

Our age is full of decadent art that risks little. But safe aesthetic choices come with grave consequences for society at large... more »

The Cold War wasn’t entirely a clash of opposites. In terms of cultural politics, it was obscured by confusion, equivocation, deceit... more »

Drugs and the golden age of glossy magazines. “Plane highs were usually the best,” says one former editor, “especially in first class”... more »

Infinite jerk. David Foster Wallace was needy, petulant, crude, and creepy. So what was it like to date him?... more »

The woman who gave birth to rabbits. Mary Toft was a fabulist, but her tale reveals much about gender in the 18th century... more »

Ruins are ripe for allegory. They remind us that human achievement is always marked by the inevitability of a fall... more »

Elizabeth Bishop’s life was not long, but she outlived many of her troubled friends. Her suffering was outweighed by her stamina... more »

Employment in newspaper newsrooms decreased by 60 percent from 1990 to 2016. Does the industry deserve a government bailout?... more »

AI’s hollow victory. Computers may beat humans at chess, Go, and Jeopardy. Unlike us, though, they can’t enjoy their success... more »

“Boats, like books, are a means of transport. They allow us to travel and discover worlds whose existence we hadn’t suspected”... more »

Once exhilarated by “the loose embrace of feminism,” Vivian Gornick has turned her back on today’s inclusive feminine solidarity... more »

After taking the London arts scene by storm, John Berger moved to a mountain village and discovered a new joy: shoveling manure... more »

What's the meaning of a hotel? Henry James regarded it above all as a place of public performance — where society came to see and be seen... more »

The science of crying wolf. Our bias for negativity means we're conditioned to see the worst in everything. So what?... more »

Protestantism’s progress. Did liberalism stem from the illiberal upheavals of the English Reformation?... more »

Why are defenses of liberalism so often sniveling and insincere? Because the authors are too concerned with being seen as right... more »

Imagine a time when people believed that what happened in the concert hall and the opera house was inseparable from the destiny of the American people... more »

Ross Douthat is a champion of defeated ideas. The result is a grim equanimity that makes him a sharp, interesting writer... more »

In 1973, David Rosenhan published one of the century’s most influential social-science papers. Was it a fabrication?... more »

“I’ve got a writer’s block as big as the Ritz and as stubborn as a grease stain on a gabardine suit,” admitted Ralph Ellison. It was “like a bad case of constipation”... more »

Getting rid of the king was easy for Oliver Cromwell. Harder was what followed: governing as a dangerously ill-defined “Lord Protector”... more »

“My work is original not only in fact but in spiritual fiber.” Frank Lloyd Wright may have been a genius, but his character was appalling... more »

"Robert Lowell’s poems are at their most unsettling when they disclose his own moral recklessness, offering only themselves — the fact of art — as recompense"... more »

Wendell Berry is probably the best-known and most influential antimodernist alive. His prose is splendid. His political strategy is disastrous... more »

Ivan Turgenev and the birth of cosmopolitan Europe. The Russian-born, German-educated novelist was a one-man impresario of Continental culture... more »

Women writers struggled throughout the 20th century to be taken seriously. To an unusual degree, that struggle played out in London's Mecklenburgh Square... more »

There’s much to loathe about Silicon Valley. So why do even its critics have a hard time indicting it?... more »

How many children did Lady Macbeth have? To read fictional characters as “real” can be a balm for the soul — or an exercise in the absurd... more »

James Wood’s work is stately and professorial, full of close readings. Then there’s the hackwork he wrote under a pseudonym... more »

Randolph Bourne had no time for the well-to-do. His tribe was “the incompetent and the ugly, the queer and crotchety”... more »

Where Greta Garbo discussed how to play Hamlet; Charlie Chaplin discovered his musical ghostwriter; and Arnold Schoenberg chatted with Arthur Rubinstein... more »

From fleuron to frontispiece, the history of book design is odd and fascinating. Who knew that the dust jacket was invented in 1829, or that the epigraph has architectural origins?... more »

Much about Rembrandt is known. But not this: How a miller’s son from a provincial Dutch city became one of the most famous painters in the world... more »

An ironist in a literal time, Malcolm Gladwell takes unending flak from scientists and the self-serious, who miss that he’s OK with being wrong... more »

For Mel Brooks, excess was always the point. His comedy has a manic vitality. In private, however, he's deadpan, sullen, without personality... more »

When Gustav Klimt propositioned Alma Schindler, she quoted from Faust: “Do no favors without a ring on your finger”... more »

Melville became a poet after a decade of writing fiction. It was a midlife turn he pursued with great frustration... more »

“An orderly anarchy of words.” Can a new book accomplish the nigh-impossible: making learning Greek seem sexy?... more »

Essays & Opinions

Judith Butler: Opening up possibilities requires radical imagining, which can embarrass you or make you seem a little crazy... more »

Are literary men abhorrent? Indeed so, says Adrienne Miller, former literary and fiction editor of Esquire, who counts the ways... more »

Bertrand Russell found prison life agreeable — plenty of time for reading and writing. The only problem was a guard shushing his laughter... more »

In the early 20th century, Newyorkitis was a disease. Its symptoms? Egotism, pompousness, greed, and “a circumscribed mental horizon"... more »

"The decline of the novel’s prestige reflects a new crisis born of our culture’s increasing failure of intellectual nerve and its terminal doubt about its own progress"... more »

Scientific authority never conveys moral authority. So why do economists, posing as philosopher-kings, claim insight into matters of right and wrong?... more »

"What is the correct response to a ruinous history? What, if anything, is the artist’s “duty”? Zadie Smith on Kara Walker... more »

Why is pop music so depressing? Fifty years ago, it was all about love, joy, and happiness. Now, it's hate, sorrow, and pain... more »

Ross Douthat is not sold on Silicon Valley: “The farther you get from that iPhone glow, the clearer it becomes: Our civilization has entered into decadence”... more »

“Philosophers should strangle their wives,” and other dubious thoughts — an evening with the charming, monstrously narcissistic George Steiner... more »

Against Althusser. The theorist was an out-and-out wacko who composed oracular gibberish... more »

Academic literary criticism is mired in the formal, modernist project of the 1930s. The persistence of this orthodoxy is baffling — but perhaps now it will change.... more »

T.S. Eliot and Emily Hale traded painful and ecstatic love letters for decades. When they were finally free to marry, he demurred... more »

"How does the once unthinkable become not only thinkable but self-evident?" asks Lorraine Daston. "How does the unthinkable become something we cannot think away anymore?"... more »

Far from the hater he's made out to be, James Wood is an enthusiast. And when he does write a pan, "his disapproval is only a correlate of his abiding love"... more »

As a student, de Beauvoir experienced love as injustice and suffering. She dreamed of a freer, fairer love, and then theorized it into being... more »

Khmer Rouge, Ground Zero, melting ice caps: Tragedy began as a form of art, writes Terry Eagleton. It is now a way of life... more »

Minimalism can be a spur to action and political innovation. But that requires philosophical engagement, not the KonMari method... more »

The hatred of literature, "almost unheard of among the general reading public, has become the default mode in the upper reaches of our literary culture”... more »

Intellectuals have been so busy ignoring or dismissing self-help that they've failed to recognize its impact. We are living in self-help’s world... more »

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb was a nuanced parser of the Enlightenment. When it came to Modernism, however, she could only recoil in horror... more »

What is the enemy of writing today? Fear — of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. The mob has the final edit... more »

Allan Bloom argued that a generation out of touch with great music, literature, and philosophy is a diminished generation. What's gleaned from reading him today?... more »

Anger, grudges, revenge — philosophers dismiss them as backward-looking and unhelpful. But there’s a moral case to be made in their favor... more »

Howard Jacobson confronts his Russianness: “The only reason my father never wrestled a bear is that there were none on the streets of Manchester”... more »

D.H. Lawrence's dark methods: Pseudophilosophize, free associate, conceal deficits of logic with phrases like "of course"... more »

The philosophy of small talk. Behind our pleasantries lies an existential query: Just who do you think you are?... more »

Consider hysterical critics: They point out some obvious moral lesson from art, then pivot to something more important: themselves... more »

For a time, doing philosophy meant grappling with the thought of Avicenna. Among his notable contributions: proving the existence of God... more »

How college became a commodity. Once-fringe libertarian ideas are now at the heart of how academe understands itself. That’s a travesty... more »

For Hume, poets were “liars by profession.” For Sir Philip Sidney, the poet "affirmeth" nothing and "therefore never lieth.” When, exactly, does literature lie?... more »

You've seen the studies: Reading fiction makes you more compassionate and generous. The bookish lap it up — and miss the bigger point... more »

Rock ’n' roll died between December 14, 1979, and October 17, 1980, a period bookended by London Calling and The River. It died of natural causes — mostly... more »

Most people think inequality is bad. But when asked to define what kind of equality is best, frustrations and complexity emerge... more »

Harold Bloom was deranged, oracular, and arrogant. Is it even possible to create art with his musings in mind?... more »

“The vehemence against yesterday’s martini-swilling, sport-coat-wearing taste-makers can lose sight that criticism is a discipline, not easily mastered”... more »

Nell Zink: “Dead writers are open yet thick-skinned, supreme angels of self-assurance, impossible to scare off — just the kind of friends I like best”... more »

“Own less stuff. Find more purpose.” Minimalism is a banal, saccharine exercise in faux epiphany... more »

How the restaurant review — "a journalistic luxury liner, designed to exalt lavish spending and indulgent dining" — became a vehicle of political protest... more »

Thanks to social media, celebrities now out-paparazzi the paparazzi. But self-surveillance comes at a steep cost... more »

Minority writing is suffused with the agony of being misunderstood. What happens, Hua Hsu wonders, when it joins the cultural mainstream?... more »

From youthful radicalism to middle-aged centrism, Daniel Bell never found a political project that did not disappoint him. Yet he avoided cynicism... more »

Jokes are exploratory as well as playful. In Stalin's Russia, though, they were no laughing matter. "The jokes always saved us," recalled Gorbachev... more »

From Spotify to Netflix, we consume culture that has been algorithmically shaped to our taste. But art is most potent when unexpected... more »

For Allen Ginsberg, mescaline brought ecstasy. For Walter Benjamin, philosophical irritation. For William James, vomiting and diarrhea... more »

The problem with letters of recommendation: A teacher’s vision for her students is blinkered by her own limitations. Agnes Callard explains... more »

Dictatorships conform to type. “We can control him,” for instance, is the perennial belief of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator... more »

Before “narrative nonfiction” or even Pulitzer Prizes, McClure’s magazine invented long-form journalism almost from scratch.... more »

From Hermes’ conical helmet onward, a rich historical lineage helps explain that mystical fashion, the magic hat... more »

Reading poetry aloud can be curious and complicated, says Philip Pullman, recalling the first time he read Paradise Lost — with his eyes, but also with his voice... more »