New Books

H.G. Wells was short and stocky, sporting a comb-over. He looked like a seedy groper. He was irresistible ... more »

The unbearable mawkishness of Michael Ignatieff. He is never so platitudinous as he is regarding consolation ... more »

Socrates scoffed at grief. The Stoics regarded it as a messy distraction. Why has this central experience been overlooked by philosophers? ... more »

Black power and Black arts were “so twinned and joined at the hip that it is impossible, really, to tell where one begins and the other ends”  ... more »

Ali Baba, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: These fairy tales endure because they respond to a deep human need ... more »

Pablo Picasso, emotional monster. His genius was rivaled by his talent for manipulation — as is evident in his art ... more »

“Hobbes’s story is still our story.” For David Runciman, the state — not democracy — is central to modern political experience ... more »

An emphasis on “relevance” in art is troubling Jed Perl. Where does the threat come from? He won’t say ... more »

In the critic Harold Rosenberg’s hard-drinking milieu, cultural and political sparring sometimes erupted into fistfights ... more »

Jane Austen had six novels published in six years. But her writing life was spread across three decades... more »

Is Slaughterhouse-Five evidence of Kurt Vonnegut’s undiagnosed PTSD? Wrong question ... more »

“As inventive and inspiring as Emerson and Thoreau often were, their zeal for ‘individual freedom’ has curdled into a socially destructive force” ... more »

Is Gauguin redeemable? Probably not. Would he want to be redeemed? Almost certainly not ... more »

Consulting psychology and data, Jonathan Gottschall has determined that storytelling is everything. Timothy Snyder begs to differ ... more »

What does it mean to consult the papers of a person or institution when they're stored not on paper but in digital flotsam? ... more »

Duels that didn't prove fatal often gave rise to friendship. "Facing death together prompted a mutual respect"... more »

John Tierney raises a glass to the civilization-building power and distinct hedonic satisfaction of a stiff drink — or two... more »

What to read in 2022? W Magazine... FT... WSJ... Time... Vogue... BuzzFeed... Guardian... NYT... more »

John McWhorter’s Woke Racism caricatures antiracist thinking and reads like an extended Twitter rant ... more »

A critic’s lament: Too many books, too little time. Michael Dirda on 12 overlooked titles... more »

When men are mistaken for gods, what follows are questions of identity, myth, and intellectual inferiority... more »

Often overlooked for contemporary novels like Lolita or Catch-22, Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge is a quiet masterpiece... more »

"I can't tell if it's ignorance or cynicism, but for Andrew Sullivan to condemn tribal thinking is like watching an arsonist call the fire department"  ... more »

As interviewer, essayist, editor, or critic, Donald Hall produced prose that was always supple, probing, funny... more »

Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, as different as “a sea creature and a land animal,” kept up a 30-year correspondence... more »

When it comes to the stickiness of economic ideas, what matters more: stories or theories? ... more »

In 1792, Francisco Goya went deaf. He found a new language through sketching in pen and ink ... more »

It’s fashionable to think that the writing life is built on nothing but shallow notions of fame, success, and ambition. Why? ... more »

Among today’s Goth, New Age, and Wicca cultists, the monstrous has acquired a new seductiveness ... more »

We live in infantilizing times. Let us at least drink like adults. Eric Felten explains ... more »

“Babies among all that turpentine and paint rags.” The women of abstract expressionism suffered the most and were celebrated the least ... more »

Richard Rorty's optimistic genius. He could identify genuine philosophical progress in other people’s work. Daniel Dennett explains ... more »

Tom Stoppard’s politics: He opposed trade unions, supported the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and ignored boycotts of apartheid South Africa... more »

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight, despite what professors of “Great Books” courses may claim ... more »

Antonin Dvorak predicted that Black music would be the foundation of American classical music. What happened? ... more »

On the road with Borges. Polymathic and passionate, he dispensed anecdotes, literary advice, and, Quixote-like, meandered into mishaps  ... more »

Johnny Cash was neither an inscrutable saint nor an enigma. He was mostly just plain weird ... more »

Donald Antrim’s rhetoric of despair: generic descriptions, repetitive adjectives, worn-out declarations. Somehow, it works ... more »

Postmodernism, the propaganda wing of neoliberalism, has made it impossible to see politics as a communal activity. Or so goes a very mistaken argument ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Once, “vibe,” “mood,” and “energy” were watchwords of the counterculture. Now everyone uses them — and they have lost their force   ... more »

A literary injustice: The ambitious, serious Russell Hoban is best remembered for his children’s books about Frances the Badger  ... more »

“Art’s not a commodity,” held Donald Judd, a mainstay of the art town Marfa, Tex. Now the place confronts the NFT craze... more »

Has the Thomas Mann revival trivialized him, reducing the Great Ambiguator to an op-ed columnist? Alex Ross makes the case ... more »

The hatchet job is back, made for internet virality. These book reviews have even given rise to a new literary mode ... more »

“Thou shalt not…” “To be or not to be?” “I would prefer not to.” Words of negation like “not” have a mysterious power   ... more »

Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? Such questions promote a narrow view of what art can do... more »

David Hume and a footnote. In one sentence, he forever tarnished his reputation. What lesson do we take?... more »

Martha Nussbaum: “With humor, with science, with kindness, let us resist the ignoble and damaging project of disgust”  ... more »

In praise of tackiness: Cheesecake Factory, Guy Fieri, the band Creed — where would we be without such low aesthetics?... more »

Louis Menand and Roosevelt Montás clash over the purpose of studying literature. Their disagreement is both interesting and important ... more »

W.E.B. Du Bois’s masterly “Black Reconstruction” got a vitriolic reception in 1935. The vitriol lingers on... more »

Secularism has given rise to substitute religions — Romanticism, communism, social crusades. Each has failed in turn ... more »

“While death can be an astute career move for underrecognized writers, it proved critically disastrous for T.S. Eliot” ... more »

What explains Amia Srinivasan’s popularity? Perhaps her tendency to avoid hard conclusions, argues Katha Pollitt ... more »

Even an obscure book by a great writer should never be considered obsolete. Consider the newfound relevance of Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man... more »

In 1865, Dostoevsky suggested a story idea to his editor and asked for 300 rubles. Thus Raskolnikov’s inauspicious origins... more »

Forget “blast!” or “confound it all!” Sometimes, as new research shows, proper swearing is what we need... more »

The history of the tractor. John Deere’s Model D squared off against Henry Ford’s Model F and an ingenious “Tractivator” ... more »

Once you are attuned to it, disgust is everywhere. But does it really define — and explain — humanity? ... more »

Hannah Arendt’s work is fundamentally about the discovery of human freedom and its gradual disappearance... more »

“In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status — our red badge of courage?”... more »

"If art ... performs any form of moral service, it does so by alerting us to the difficulties of being moral"  ... more »

Who needs English or political science, universities are wondering, when there’s engineering and computer science ... more »

Wittgenstein, who regarded philosophy as a “kind of magic,” noted more than a few parallels linking conjurers and philosophers ... more »

Robert Zaretsky is a professor devoted to reading in a world where his students are not. How absurd, right?... more »

Graydon Carter: “The Christopher Hitchens I knew and adored wouldn’t be like the majority of us, huddling in our trembling silence” ... more »

Confessions of a crossword constructor: The puzzle “acts as a window into our fantasies, tastes, and unyielding fixations” ... more »

Suicide has long been a concern of theology, philosophy, and, more recently, medicine. But what of the things no medicine can cure?  ... more »

George Steiner didn't give rise to a distinctive school of criticism. He was foremost a critic of critics  ... more »

Exhaustion, cynicism, a sense of ineffectiveness or diminished accomplishment — are we all burning out?... more »

Twitter encourages vulnerability among close-knit communities. It then rips such musings out of context, causing all hell to break loose  ... more »

Literature professors adopt a new humility but still must make their case: Why literature as opposed to, say, lawn care?... more »

Can a survey of philosophers’ views indicate the truth of philosophical ideas? Or does it yield just misleadingly tidy data points? ... more »

“People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing,” said Dave Hickey, who died last month   ... more »

A great novelist requires a capacity for "determined stupor," an ability to retreat from the world. But the world never stops making demands... more »

Campuses get riled up about all sorts of things. But the university’s competence at educating students does not seem to exercise us at all ... more »

“Many of us today are in the grip of nostalgia for moral clarity, and so we hold onto unambiguous stories of injustice and resistance like planks from a sinking ship” ... more »

From his Byzantine Catholic upbringing to being anointed the Pope of Pop, what did Andy Warhol make of religion? ... more »

Is it possible to survey the state of philosophy? Despite a recent attempt, the field doesn’t neatly conform to a multiple-choice quiz ... more »

Even if you don't know what meta-ethics means, it can reveal a new way of understanding ourselves and others ... more »

“If self-care is a revealing cliché of the times, it may be about the amount of chatter that can be generated around questions of human need” ... more »

Late in a life of great loss, Robert Frost sought audiences to read poetry to late into the night - but never his most revealing work  ... more »

In the Age of Amazon, literature-as-culture has converged with literature-as-commerce ... more »

On being depressed. Instead of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” you’re left with “I can’t go on” ... more »

When corporations, hippos, gorillas, and rivers can all, legally, be classified as people, has personhood lost its meaning?... more »

The irony of the harpsichord: It produces delightful subtleties that can be heard only by the person playing it ... more »

According to Adam Phillips, what we need to be cured of are our cures, and our hankering for them. “There is no cure”  ... more »

Jasper Johns was an art-historical fixture at the age of 35. No wonder he entered his late style prematurely  ... more »

Philosophy cannot anchor politics. So held Richard Rorty, dashing the hopes of a long line of political philosophers ... more »