New Books

Postliberals agree on little: “They know something has gone wrong, and they suspect the origins of the problem date back several centuries”... more »

The idea of female chastity runs deep in Western culture. "Upon that," said Samuel Johnson, "all property in the world depends"... more »

“Anyone open to the idea of religious belief but uncomfortable with orthodox teachings should read Spinoza” ... more »

The world of scientific publishing is vast, varied, and beset by fraud, bias, negligence, and hype... more »

The art of dark persuasion. What causes sensible people to do things they might not otherwise do?... more »

In the English village of Ockham, around 1287, a boy named William was born. His razor enabled science to blossom... more »

Step aside, internet novel and Instagram novel, there's a new genre ascendant: collective criticism. Is it worthwhile?... more »

Is it possible to write a history of human affairs without any overarching principle? Louis Menand tried... more »

Between 1953 and 1976, private foundations lavished money on orchestras and operas, to the detriment of folk and jazz... more »

A phrase, a rhyme, a play on words: Christopher Ricks has a rare gift for lexical super-sensitivity... more »

“Why do we continue to cling so hard to our work-based identities, in spite of an inner nature that tells us not to work so much?”... more »

Spinoza's philosophy is not antithetical to religion. He was determined to reform religion, not eliminate it ... more »

Why did Jean Sibelius stop composing in his early 50s? Was it alcoholism? Insecurity? The dissipation of his powers?... more »

The new literary memoir is less confessional, less cathartic than its predecessor, and more invested in pushing the form’s limits... more »

Richard Wright's reputation was destroyed by attacks from Baldwin and Ellison. He blamed the white publishing industry for encouraging them  ... more »

When the counterculture becomes the culture, what’s left for The New Criterion to do? Fight on... more »

“Show me a scholar who claims that science can explain all of literature, and I will show you someone who is performing schtick”  ... more »

Good criticism draws out the nuances within the ideas one finds the most noxious, the most difficult to dignify... more »

Thoreau never wanted followers; he didn't even follow his own advice. So what would he make of all these acolytes?  ... more »

Both Louise Bourgeois and Yayoi Kusama were discouraged from making art. Both attempted suicide. Both faced their demons by making phalluses ... more »

D.H. Lawrence’s master theme was the hellishness of home. In the great irony of his life, he was at home everywhere ... more »

In arguing for an anarchist approach to history, David Graeber's last book fired a fusillade, not much of which hit its targets  ... more »

“As long as we can want, we are not yet lost,” says Becca Rothfeld. “Wanting often wounds us, but it can also give us wings”  ... more »

The Dickens style. Trollope called it “jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules.” But rule-breaking was essential to Dickens’s art  ... more »

The book index, a creation of the late Middle Ages, has been causing excitement and trouble ever since  ... more »

The Lake District has long been a mecca for literary tourists. Does it risk becoming an “ecological disaster,” a mere “sheep museum”?... more »

Occam and his razor. Is simplicity always both preferable and closer to the truth?... more »

In an era crying out for radical thinking, George Packer offers only that damp squib of incrementalism - a defense of liberalism  ... more »

In defense of judgment. It is an unavoidable feature of our deepest aesthetic experiences, and it shapes who we are  ... more »

Early epidemiology was infused with racism, bigotry, and an imperial mindset. The U.S. Sanitary Commission is a case in point... more »

Shakespeare is our most recognizable literary cliché. Why do we still read him? Why do we still care? ... more »

Carl Zimmer's science writing is erudite, charming — and impenetrably sealed off from difficult political questions  ... more »

“The problem with the CDC was precisely its prestige: It was determined to say or do nothing that might endanger its reputation”... more »

D.H. Lawrence is considered reactionary, racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Can a new biography by France Wilson salvage his reputation?... more »

Susan Sontag once wrote that photography had become a way of “refusing experience”; porn has become a way of refusing intimacy... more »

Foucault arrived in Warsaw in 1958. A year later, he was ensnared in a secret operation and fled the country. What happened?  ... more »

Book wars. “What happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time?”  ... more »

What springs to mind when we think of Hemingway? “Bullfight,” “war wound,” “shotgun,” “drinking” — but also “craft”... more »

The sins of G.K. Chesterton. He was convivial, generous, sharply intelligent, and unforgivably anti-Semitic... more »

Essays & Opinions

E.O. Wilson evinces a chummy, no-frills view of himself. It's genuine, and crucial to his expansive sense of wonder... more »

What's achieved by liberal and academic calls to "center the most marginalized?" Olúfémi O. Táíwò unpacks standpoint epistemology... more »

"We are all Foucauldians now — in the ways we think about gender, normalization, psychiatry, confinement, surveillance" ... more »

He was a shy college graduate; she was a neurotic 38-year-old mother of two. What was there between Henry Thoreau and Lidian Emerson?... more »

Just how closely related are chimpanzees and humans? A primatologist reflects on a career in ape-language studies... more »

"If you put censors like me in charge, you get a worse situation than if you have people with the freedom to speak up”... more »

Obscure writers squabble, a writer of thrillers makes dubious claims — why are we so enraptured by low-stakes literary misdeeds?... more »

Maggie Nelson’s anti-politics: Her book leaves readers with no permissible action, only a patronizing invitation to manage their own feelings ... more »

The trial of Oscar Wilde tends to be used to distill his character rather than to dramatize its contradictions... more »

Perry Anderson, purveyor of British backwardness, advanced the view that his nation was in perpetual decline. That’s not quite right... more »

If our challenge is to defend liberalism without falling into cynicism or naïveté, Henri Bergson is a thinker for our time... more »

“The sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it”   ... more »

The mystery of smell. Theoretically the human nose can detect up to a trillion smells — yet we struggle to describe them with any precision... more »

A Cambrian explosion in the world of natural-language processing raises a question: How much of what we write is essentially autocomplete?... more »

The ABCs of AOC, Chelsea Clinton's She Persisted - beware the proliferation of didactic and unimaginative political books for kids... more »

As discreet defecation became a mark of civilized refinement, a taboo topic plagued big cities: dog droppings... more »

Ian Fleming said he wrote for "pleasure and money." True enough, but it shouldn't detract from his literary craftsmanship... more »

For readers, E.M. Forster was a stately, mild-mannered bachelor with a staid personal life. When he came out as gay, many felt betrayed... more »

Jasper Johns, today: Many say he's spent the past 30 years in hermitlike conditions and is now part Scrooge, part sphinx. Nonsense  ... more »

Humiliation — why does it hurt so much, do so much damage, twist us so out of shape? Vivian Gornick investigates  ... more »

Literary success is increasingly dependent on cultivating a personal brand. John Ashbery reminds us of the power of remaining elusive  ... more »

What does a fusty old poet like Yeats have to say now? A whole lot. His poems are "like stethoscopes held up to the hum of a mysterious world"... more »

Left-wing orthodoxy from the Einaudi publishing house once dominated the Italian literary landscape. Then a rival emerged  ... more »

In an era obsessed with the political responsibility of the artist, remember what’s lost when art is used for politics. Remember Thomas Mann... more »

When American newsrooms changed “black” to “Black,” was it a radical, substantive shift in politics — or a signal of faux solidarity?... more »

The case for classroom trigger warnings has a significant problem: They don’t seem to work... more »

Novelists once cultivated a distinctive voice. Now they play it safe, embracing precision and betraying authorial anxiety... more »

Simone de Beauvoir's Inseparable has now been published - against her wishes. It's heavy-handed, schematic, and thin ... more »

Workers are tired of finding new ways to optimize their labor - and yet our productivity culture demands ever more  ... more »

When Randall Kennedy enunciates the N-word in class, he does so with a pedagogical purpose in mind... more »

It is sobering to contemplate how the meaning of a word can be corrupted into its opposite. Consider performative... more »

There’s much to dislike about the irascible, virulently anti-Semitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Why do some carry on his defense?  ... more »

Four issues, 104 essays and poems, 1,400 pages: Let us now consider the journal Liberties, uncharitably... more »

Cultural elites are globally minded, liberal, and prone to self-critique. The power elites who make the most important decisions are entirely different   ... more »

Assuming we can’t uninvent social media, we’re left with a question: Can it become a politically productive space?... more »

The Stoics were wrong: A failure to mourn is an act of treason, the violation of a duty. Leon Wieseltier on grief  ... more »

Among the Beethovenites. Upon his death, a creepy fabulist concocted a life  ... more »

We talk about race as closed off to interpretation and social reinvention. And so race talk is apart from the humanities... more »

In the fiction of both Ben Lerner and Sheila Heti, artists fall comically flat. But such “punchline aesthetics” are culturally elite and racially coded  ... more »

Intellectual life is now policed by a new mob justice. If you make a mistake, expect punishment and ostracism - not forgiveness  ... more »

Is reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time a way of merely renouncing the wider world?  ... more »

Exhausted by all the rancor? Try poetry. It restores the value of words in a culture intent on cheapening them  ... more »

When Raymond Williams died, his influence seemed sure to endure. Then it dwindled — disastrously  ... more »

Remember when the Jonathans -- Franzen, Lethem, Safran Foer -- first roamed the earth? Novelists could still have careers as novelists   ... more »

When high culture was in high regard, joining the counterculture meant rejecting its values. Now high culture is the counterculture... more »

Eric Rohmer’s films tend to be all talk and no sex. But embracing restraint, he recovered eroticism  ... more »

“I wonder if, like the church, the humanities can’t really do without overpromising,” says Len Gutkin. “Otherwise people might stop believing in us”  ... more »

How did “Let people enjoy things” evolve from an annoying internet meme to an all-out campaign against negative criticism? B.D. McClay explains  ... more »

The Frankfurt School comprised impotent professors issuing scarcely comprehensible jeremiads. So why is it thought to be so powerful?  ... more »

“The human impulse is to look for order, but there isn’t any,” says Ann Patchett. “People come and go”  ... more »