New Books

Cockroaches, crummy days, and lousy lakes. For Grace Paley, every part of life was worthy of literary attention. There was beauty in banality... more »

The essay, that most elegant and slippery of forms, resists being pinned down. Its strength derives from a “combination of exactitude and evasion”... more »

The brief rise of "prince poo." How the Enlightenment's sensory awakening reached its apex (or nadir) during a French craze for garments the color of baby poop... more »

Even Bach, musical savant and master of counterpoint, did not escape critique. For one journalist, his work contained “too much art”... more »

After decades of literary labor, Bulgakov had published little: some short stories, part of a novel. The problem? His failure to understand what was wanted from his work... more »

Mickey Mouse, Jack the Ripper, Proust, mutton chops, ghost stories, comics: Joachim Kalka can write interestingly about almost anything... more »

What's the meaning of red? It's the first color. It has the most powerful poetic and aesthetic associations. It warns, prohibits, condemns... more »

For Terry Eagleton, culture is “the opium of the intelligentsia.” To understand this, along with his other epigrams, consider his anti-philosophical stance... more »

At least since Orwell, bad writing has been linked with bad politics. But is good writing really a panacea for social, economic, legal, and political ills?... more »

Why we act as we do: neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, teachers, peers, and society. Yet every “cause” of our behavior is linked to dozens of other variables... more »

“Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed,” wrote Stuart Hall, founder of cultural studies. Do his reflections on his identity help us understand our own?... more »

Inside Wagner's head. The composer's essence was self-dramatization wrapped in contradiction. He was, himself, an all-embracing work of art... more »

After decades of research and dozens of excellent books, is there anything new to say about Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick? Yes, quite a lot... more »

"Having won California, self-esteem conquered the world. So here we are, living with the first generation raised entirely on the intoxicating mantra of its own excellence"... more »

In an 1888 diary entry, Thomas Hardy reflected on a church service. His stream-of-consciousness style was a harbinger of modernist techniques to come. We are Hardy's heirs... more »

What it’s like to be known as the man defeated by a machine: Garry Kasparov, an early enthusiast of chess-playing computers, rethinks Deep Blue... more »

Those mean-spirited New York Intellectuals. “Everyone around Partisan Review,” wrote Diana Trilling, “had his licensed malice.” But she could be as vicious as any of them... more »

Why is world literature dismissed as deracinated and dull, representing what’s wrong with the culture industry? Adam Kirsch defends a maligned genre... more »

The boredom boom. New books defend silence and solitude, pushing back against society’s endless demands to be entertained. Has the study of boredom become boring?... more »

The flip side to Goethe's self-confidence was melancholy. Writing was an exercise — often unsuccessful — in cheering himself up... more »

Social media is a boon to social protest. Marches grow, solidarity spreads, and movements scale quickly — too quickly to enact significant political change... more »

Exophonic writers, who write in a language other than their native one, are an odd bunch — perhaps none more so than the Surrealist, spectral Leonora Carrington... more »

“An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was 23... more »

Philosophers agonize over AI but largely ignore nonhuman intelligence in front of us. Consider the stupendous mental abilities of honey badgers and elephants... more »

Armed conflict could go the way of slavery. But war won't become a rarity if we think of it in biological terms or treat it as a disease... more »

When sports meets philosophy. Want to test ideas about mutualism and self-interest? Try succeeding inside a cycling peloton... more »

In 1940, Czeslaw Milosz had to choose between Nazi and Soviet occupation. Nazism threatened the body, while Communism threatened the soul. For Milosz, the latter was the greater sacrifice ... more »

The Midwest wasn't always written about as a second-class culture of yokels and rednecks who lack intellect. Blame Mencken and The New Yorker... more »

How the Nazis pursued a new aesthetics for a new political order — and showed how swiftly liberal principles can be hollowed out... more »

Evelyn Waugh has been viewed as chiefly a comic writer. And he was funny, in his dark and malicious way. That's not to say he was amusing... more »

Margaret Wise Brown avoided witches, trolls, glass slippers, and sleeping beauties. Instead she revolutionized picture books, even prompting Gertrude Stein to write one... more »

Diana Trilling was key to her husband's literary success. But did it come at the expense of her own? “People will celebrate one member of a household but not two”... more »

In the mid-'60s, Edmund Wilson was living alone in the house he inherited from his mother. He was in decline. Meanwhile, Vladimir Nabokov was flush with Lolita royalties. Did envy cause their feud?... more »

Post-truth and its discontents. What is and what isn’t a fact has never been obvious or uncontroversial. There was no golden age of truth... more »

Norman Podhoretz was everywhere: Arendt’s New Year’s Eve party, Capote’s Black and White Ball. He was the wonder boy of the name-dropping circuit. Then he was cast out... more »

Douglas Coupland gave Generation X its name and became its voice. Then he suffered the fate of most voices of generations: He became irrelevant ... more »

Forget “less is more.” History shows that “more is more” — a saying attributed to an architect, a fashion designer, a novelist, and Dolly Parton ... more »

What comes from a 79-year-old French Maoist lecturing young people about being young? Some genuine insight, surprisingly... more »

It's not that Heidegger was a windbag with nothing to say. His appeal stemmed from how he said nothing with a capital “N.” In emergencies we listen for capital letters... more »

Essays & Opinions

The life of a ghostwriter. Don't argue with clients, however repulsive. And remember, you'll probably receive no recognition — which may be a good thing... more »

The search for ecstasy. In 1960 an estimated 20 percent of Americans said they'd had a mystical experience. Now it's 50 percent... more »

If economists aren't questioning the effectiveness of economic theory, they should be. Simply put: Their claim to scientific expertise is no longer tenable... more »

Fraud, lies, and the importance of the group. Via attachment theory, Arendt, and Milgram, a former cult member considers the psychology of brainwashing... more »

Orchestras of the Third Reich. Austro-German musicians’ admiration for Hitler strains any belief that high art is ennobling to the spirit... more »

Whose bohemia? Ida Nettleship married the painter Augustus John, had five children, competed with his 21-year-old muse, and went unmentioned in his memoir... more »

A.E. Housman was a classicist-poet and voice of England. He was gaunt, gray, fond of isolation. For fun he wrote caustic takedowns of other scholars... more »

Literature enriches the public sphere but speaks most powerfully in private. Andrew O’Hagan asks: What future does literature have in an age drenched in social media?... more »

Neuroscientists working on the “hard problem” of consciousness may be doomed to fail. But there is meaning — even pleasure — in the Sisyphean task... more »

In 1965 a young New Yorker writer’s story ideas were rejected, one after another by the editor. Finally he said, “Oranges.” “That’s very good,” replied William Shawn... more »

Virginia Woolf's diary includes her thoughts on other people’s diaries. She read lots of them, seeing them as a valuable literary genre... more »

Eric Hobsbawm became, perhaps, the world’s most-read historian. Still, he was puzzled over: How did a scholar so perceptive fail the test of anticommunism?... more »

Futurists dismiss religion but anoint “evangelists” of technology and “oracles” of artificial intelligence. Are futurists really as atheistic as they think?... more »

Austro-Hungarian modernists like Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, and Joseph Roth were anti-utopian and anti-ideological. What were they for? Irony... more »

Philosophical writing is pedantically precise. It's not much fun and doesn't much influence people. The problems are hard to settle. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it... more »

Quick: Think of a novel devoted to climate change. Tough, right? What explains this failure of imagination involving the fate of the world?... more »

In the end, it's been said, authors write for professors. But the scholarly fate of Thoreau is uncertain; the 7,000 pages of his journal still await full study. It is the great untold secret of American letters... more »

Published 50 years ago, One Hundred Years of Solitude has become a trendy text. Frederic Jameson considers its cultural, political, and aesthetic ascendance... more »

Where tarot cards come from. Not ancient Egypt, but a place almost as mysterious: Paris, in 1781, with its occult-obsessed secret societies and private clubs... more »

The personalized internet curates our social-media feeds and individualizes our search results. It's a marvel. It's also caused an explosion of intellectual arrogance... more »

Churchill and Orwell, different in so many ways, shared a determination to confront unpleasant realities. They also had a tragic understanding that their views were unlikely to prevail... more »

W.G. Sebald is famous for his Holocaust writing, depiction of vacant landscapes, and sense of drifting melancholy. But comedy was key to his brilliance... more »

"One can be taught—and one needs to be taught—how to look," says Philippe de Montebello. "This is why I am so impatient with those who want to position their museum as a form of entertainment"... more »

Why we need Thoreau. His critics note that his moral vision was linked to self-righteousness. But who hasn’t felt self-righteous? His frustrations are ours as well... more »

After the “Midcentury Misogynists,” male American writers tended to avoid writing about sex, lest they be seen, like Updike, as “a penis with a thesaurus”... more »

Of all the biographers who have written about Hemingway, not one was a woman. Now comes Mary Dearborn, immune to the writer's hairy-chested legend... more »

What is a library? If you think it's just a place where society stores books, then you have a dangerously impoverished view of what knowledge can be... more »

Einstein hated beets. Hitchcock wouldn't eat eggs. Colson Whitehead can't stand ice cream. We are what we eat, but what's the significance of what we don't eat?... more »

Fifty years after her genteel verse graced the Yale Younger Poets series, Adrienne Rich had become a dissident. She hadn’t exactly chosen poetry in the first place... more »

Martin Luther, unfiltered. He lived in a bachelor’s chaos and hated Jews, papists, and Calvinists, among others. Then he married a runaway nun who brewed excellent beer... more »

There will be cats. Murakami novels feature felines, detective heroes, and creepy sex. Readers are so hooked on the formula that the variations hardly matter... more »

For modern interpreters, Greek tragedy boils down to lessons of power — how to get and keep it. And sexual politics, of course... more »

Imagination, idealism, an urge for self-transcendence: Why prominent intellectuals have been so willing to support terrible regimes ... more »

Graduate school is unkind to mind and body. To retain some health, go on dates. Have sex. Come to think of it, the world of online dating is a lot like to the academic job market... more »

The Passion of Michel Foucault. He was a surrealist, masochist, militant, Maoist, reformist, structuralist, comrade, and lover. He was also suicide-obsessed and hard to ignore... more »

Veronica Forrest-Thomson wrote one volume of criticism before dying at 27. Her ideas are so central that we’ve lost sight of her... more »

Laura Kipnis goes in search of that rare thing, a memoir of midlife with no epiphanies and no life lessons. Nothing’s figured out and nothing gets better ... more »

Though seen as titans of the literary left, Jameson, Eagleton, and Raymond Williams were more concerned with scholarship than with social intervention. Do they belong to the right?... more »

Anger is a popular emotion. It is seen as an engine of progress, a check on injustice. But it also pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law, says Martha Nussbaum... more »

How cool is cool itself? Not very. It's been the preoccupation of less-than-first-rate writers, shoddy thinkers, and poseurs in general... more »

Since Hegel, philosophers have declared the end of art, meaning that no further progress is possible. In that sense, it’s a good thing: Art is now free to be anything... more »

Why do Japanese audiences adore Woody Allen films? Because Jewish humor has become a marker of elite sophistication... more »

Writers once sought silence, exile, and cunning. Today they seek dialogue, community, and workshopping. What's lost when writers are afraid to stand alone?... more »

Canons are formed through critical consensus. Yet consider this: None of the five most profitable films are canonical. You've probably seen them, but don't feel guilty... more »

Satan's emissary, cunning fox, cold-blooded destroyer: That's the conventional view of Machiavelli. But was his advice in The Prince really meant to be followed?... more »

Edgar Allan Poe is known for his supernatural horror and detective stories. But in his final major work, Eureka, he turned to cosmology — and was uncannily prescient... more »

Art is rooted in emotions. So what happens when algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Mozart, Picasso, or Shakespeare? ... more »

Nostalgia used to be considered a disease; causes, symptoms, and cures were debated by doctors. Now it's a cultural condition, but no less dangerous... more »

"As a writer, my principal observation about why other writers fail is that they are in too much of a hurry," says Malcolm Gladwell. "I don’t think you can write a good book in two years."... more »

That $1,200 margarita? Blame late capitalism. A $400 internet-connected juicer? Also late capitalism. Fancy lettuces? You guessed it. It's the buzzword that explains everything — or nothing... more »