New Books

The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »

Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »

In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »

“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »

Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »

“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »

Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »

What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »

Jackson Lears is among the most original historians of our time. He chronicles cranks and conjurers... more »

Perry Anderson, pillar of Britain's Marxist left, tackles a thorny question: What really caused World War I?... more »

Many atrocities have been committed in the name of communism. But communism is not an atrocity. It is a tragedy... more »

Nostalgia, greed, and streaming have taken hold of the music industry. Do we even want new music anymore?... more »

The power of ignorance. “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Mark Lilla explains... more »

Walter Benjamin in Capri. An extended holiday helped shape one of the most influential diagnoses of modernity... more »

Nostalgia began not as an emotion but as a disease. Now it afflicts us all, with great political consequence... more »

Richard Dawkins has long been the doyen of grandiloquent science writing. His new book feels like the end of an era... more »

America’s “Bone Wars”: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns... more »

In the absurd guise of Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire took devastating aim at his real foil: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz... more »

Milton, dismembered. In 1790 his coffin was pillaged. Several thousand people bought what they believed to be one of his teeth... more »

The love affairs of Thomas Hardy followed a pattern: He would give his beloved a ring and then break off the engagement when he met someone else... more »

No matter how brilliant or original their work, environmental historians face a challenge: Are they just doomsayers?... more »

“Gluttony is the forechamber of lust.” In premodern Europe, how to eat was a way to answer questions about how to be... more »

“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Joan Didion infuriated Eve Babitz... more »

Plunder and provenance. The origins of many museum collections are scandalous, criminal, and impossible to reduce to any one story... more »

The bubonic plague’s origins were in the Tien Shan mountains in modern Kyrgyzstan. It spread not via rats and ships, but with gerbils... more »

Cynicism and despair make one seem sophisticated. David Graeber taught intellectuals a riskier commitment: hope... more »

The Grimm brothers, living under French occupation, despised the Gallic plagues of industry, development, and general effeteness... more »

The political theorist Richard Tuck tells progressives: Instead of condemning opponents, resolve to live with them more humbly... more »

Oxford at war. The town’s inhabitants, “dim and wildly eccentric and totally out of touch with all reality,” were essential to victory in World War II... more »

“Why can’t you be funny again?” Dorothy Parker chafed at her reputation as a reliable wit... more »

Life in a rock band. “Today I feel like a tired old whore. Some days I feel like a god. Most of the time I feel like an ambitious T-shirt salesman”... more »

Need a jolt? Read the songs of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th-century mystic who wrote rapturous, erotic descriptions of receiving the Eucharist... more »

Babitz and Didion. Making sense of the contentious bond between "fastidious, frigorific, bony Joan" and "heedless, hot, voluptuous Eve"... more »

Henri Bergson's present-day obscurity is inversely proportional to his contemporaneous fame. He transformed not just philosophy but also literature and art... more »

“Brevity has never been a quality of mine,” wrote Oliver Sacks. Indeed, excess was a hallmark of his life and his literary style... more »

What has 1,192 pages, weighs four pounds, and endorses the singular “they”? The latest version of The Chicago Manual of Style... more »

“If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing?”... more »

“If the stomach was long considered ‘the most enigmatic of organs’ by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals”... more »

Where the monsters come from. As a genre, horror emanates from the conflicting perils of community and solitude... more »

Essays & Opinions

“Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »

Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »

The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »

We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »

Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »

When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »

AI and democracy. Had early technologists paid attention to John Dewey, we’d be in a much better place. Evgeny Morozov explains... more »

Literature professors gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to traditionalists and provocateurs... more »

“In search of solid ground, any number of artists have opted to return to first principles: technique, color, and, above all else, visual pleasure”... more »

Thirty years ago, Sven Birkerts derided digital reading. He was dismissed as a curmudgeonly Luddite, but he was right... more »

An array of contradictory modern movements claims the mantle of decolonization, seeking moral authority from the now-distant 20th century ... more »

“Appreciationgiving” doesn’t have the same ring to it but might be a more philosophically accurate approach to the holiday... more »

Whether cancel culture is a moral panic or a genuine scourge, are the words and deeds of American colleges students really so consequential?... more »

In place of the the monastic cell of the Middle Ages, Renaissance-era scholars had the studiolo — a place to converse with the dead... more »

The Duolingo delusion: It’s fun — but absurd — to think that five minutes of language-learning a day will make us fluent... more »

Barre, Pilates, the Alexander technique: Is our quest for straighter spines a moral panic or a legitimate concern over back pain?... more »

The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas, yes, but also a fairy-tale of illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy... more »

Art is about selection and omission. Melville goes on and on about whales; another writer would sum it up with “etcetera”... more »

“When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?”... more »

Democracy dies in darkness? Journalists’ aspiration to save democracy is counterproductive, argues Yascha Mounk... more »

Modern museums are designed to focus attention. But now our attention is fractured, and our art is changing... more »

The hard problem of dark comedy. “When I laugh with Céline, is my open mouth a gate to the Holocaust?” Michael Clune explains... more »

We live in the age of the internet novel, with its dispassionate, deadening style and lack of formal innovation... more »

To calm the identity wars, don’t underestimate the power of thinking in the third person. Kwame Anthony Appiah explains... more »

Margaret Fuller had “a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory”... more »

At the age of 10, Henri Bergson was left alone in Paris — amid violence, destruction, and the fall of the Second French Empire... more »

A family of fascists. The Mitfords were downwardly mobile aristocrats living in great ignorance and fear... more »

How did the world’s most famous swear word earn its status? Early evidence points to the role of a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele... more »

The Emily Oster riddle: Would you rather take pregnancy advice from a pediatric epidemiologist or an economist?... more »

In 1939, W.H. Auden left England. He rarely returned, but his self-conception as a poet remained bound up in his Englishness... more »

The real fertility question: Why has the ratio of childlessness to childfulness changed so little?... more »

Unlike data sets, the human mind isn’t trained. It experiences and learns and invents and thinks. No computer can do that... more »

In early modern England, numbers were tactile: Three barleycorns made an inch; four saltfish made a warp; tallies were made on wood... more »

“What afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity”... more »

Charles Taylor synthesizes moral reflection and intellectual history. His writing is difficult to follow, but worth trying... more »

Dickinson and Kafka could hardly seem more dissimilar. But the biographical overlaps are too numerous to dismiss... more »

Zero has been called the “eccentric uncle in the family of numbers.” It's also one of mankind's greatest achievements... more »

In 2017, 14 letters written by Sylvia Plath resurfaced. They claim abuse by Ted Hughes. What do they tell us about Plath?... more »

To write an essay is to erect an architecture of thinking, to build the place where a certain thought is possible... more »

Who was Evelyn Waugh? A clever sophist, a racist, a snob — yes, at times — but also a remorseful Catholic... more »

MAD magazine’s golden era. From the 1950s to ’80s, its goofball nonsense and cackling satire skewered cows both sacred and profane... more »

Out with cosmology and in with astrobiology and “complexity science,” which holds that life is based on physics, but beyond physics... more »

A paradox at the heart of education: Independence of mind can be achieved only by submission to authority. Matthew Crawford explains ... more »

Epigraphs have inspired many metaphors – “apéritifs,” “a spritz of fragrance in a large room” – but there's little consensus on their value... more »

Academic quit-lit is the bemoaning of a rarified class of students at elite colleges. In the hinterlands, grad school is a different proposition... more »

The blockbusterization of literature: At any given time, there is just one major book. Today, it’s Han Kang’s... more »

Wuthering Heights is an anti-romance shot through with sadomasochism. If it depicts love, there’s nothing pleasant about it... more »

“Nothing in excess,” “know thyself” — why do pithy philosophical sayings feel so antiquated and pat?... more »

What constitutes a writer’s space? A desk or office or cafe, sure, but also an inner region of the mind — a sacred aura... more »

The vexing Saad Eddin Ibrahim. The Egyptian sociologist spent his life advocating for democratization, but became an apologist for authoritarianism... more »