New Books

Dickens’s fiction drew on the most painful secrets of his life. His gift: turning insecurity into a creative asset... more »

Simone and André Weil devoted themselves to the search for truth. He solved mathematical problems. She died before she could solve the problem of life.... more »

The key to understanding the modern human mind is found in the ancient hunter myths. Or so says Roberto Calasso... more »

The meaning of doubt. "Unbelief needs the believer’s reflecting gaze to better understand itself"... more »

Lydia Davis is a writer for whom the subject is always, on some level, writing itself... more »

John Rawls’s work can take on the quality of a sacred text. Was his appeal related to the declining status of Christianity?... more »

Martin Hägglund’s philosophical blockbuster, This Life, has been widely lauded. Yet for such a liberating text, it’s stunningly parochial... more »

For some “intellectually displaced” women in the 1960s, a haven beckoned — the Radcliffe Institute, feminism’s first think tank... more »

The world is turbulent and tragic, while philosophers are cool and rational. Their field would gain so much if they could be moved... more »

From Knausgaard to Lerner to Heti, we’re plagued by goodness — as if readers were scandalized by immoral characters in fiction... more »

Coffee, “the most grateful lubricant of the human machine,” has made — and destroyed — entire societies... more »

The poetry of Paul Valéry seems the work of a man behind his times. But beneath the old-fashioned veneer is the shock of the modern... more »

The art critic Hal Foster separated “good” from “bad” postmodernism. How real is that distinction?... more »

With his puncturing of ideology and his wild, hallucinatory tales, Robert Stone reshaped what the American crime thriller could be... more »

Shame is about dishonor, vulnerability, and disgrace. It's also a tool of politics and power... more »

The Anglo-Boer War is remembered, when it's remembered at all, for those who improbably played a part: Churchill, Gandhi, Kipling, Conan Doyle... more »

Clive James was perhaps Philip Larkin's best reader. But his Larkin is a projection — the poet that James wanted to be... more »

There are lots of supposed polymaths. They’re brilliant in one field, but mediocre in others. True polymaths are rare... more »

In 1979, Richard Rorty suggested that philosophy was over; graduate students might as well give up. One of his own, Robert Brandom, has now proven that thought absurd... more »

When Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson met, they debated the nature of fiction and griped about — what else? — money... more »

Edward Said and the culture wars. His attempts to woo the American academy into opposing imperialism were as fruitless as “cajoling a cat into altruism”... more »

Franz Boas in 1888: “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave, but what is the use, someone has to do it”... more »

William James’s critics mistake his pragmatism for simple relativism. He endures because he addressed the meaning of life... more »

A memoir that conceals. Rebecca Solnit’s latest book promises intimacy, but it speaks more powerfully on broad, collective problems... more »

Franz Boas inveighed against racism. But did his ideas ultimately help to strengthen its grip?... more »

Frivolous, self-indulgent, and gloriously smutty, Wayne Koestenbaum’s essays are also cerebral celebrations of desire and imagination... more »

Hail Sir Thomas Urquhart, royalist, duelist, self-proclaimed descendant of the gods, and creator of a universal language — not that he bothered to write it down... more »

Ross Douthat is man of many observations, interpretations, and predictions — most of which he's all too willing to back away from... more »

George Scialabba's doctor's notes — both mundane and revelatory — show what it means to be clinically depressed... more »

Kierkegaard saw himself as the “Socrates of Christendom,” but his theology requires some reframing: for one thing, his church was a library... more »

Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is anachronistically modern: secular, tolerant, and kind to women, children, the poor, and animals... more »

William F. Cody — Buffalo Bill — has long shaped Americans’ idealistic sense of the frontier. But look more closely: His biography is full of darkness... more »

When David Pryce-Jones came visiting, Auden downed three martinis in a half-hour and had to be put to bed with a flask of Chianti... more »

Frank Ramsey died at age 26, in 1930. Yet intellectuals still encounter "the Ramsey effect" — you reach a breakthrough, only to realize he got there first... more »

"What does it mean to be an artist in an economy that actually doesn’t allow many people to make their living as artists?"... more »

“Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.” So holds Gerhard Richter, the art world’s great poet of uncertainty... more »

When his "theory of the firm" went bust, the economist Michael Jensen needed a scapegoat. He found one in basic human irrationality... more »

Rebecca Solnit’s writing hits broad feminist notes, avoiding anything difficult or controversial. No one disagrees with her — which is a problem... more »

Thoreau showed how the telegraph could alter our sense of time and space. Howard Axelrod shows us what that alteration now looks like... more »

Essays & Opinions

To Richard Russo, time spent arguing over cultural appropriation might be better spent extolling the triumphs of the literary imagination... more »

We have developed an ill-advised self-seriousness about the novel — so much so, says Dave Eggers, that we have overlooked one of the wittiest books ever written... more »

Literary culture is tactile, embedded in our social environment. When cities go quiet, and intellectual life happens remotely, much is lost... more »

Do aphorisms convey wisdom or merely impersonate it? For Plato, they were enigmatic evasions — the scattered utterances of clever men... more »

After the pandemic. Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, and others try forecasting a dark future... more »

A culinary mystery: Vinaigrette has been hailed as a triumph of French culture — but is its origin actually Italian?... more »

"The trolley-problem problem." Thought experiments are as old as philosophy itself, but are they a useful way to reason about ethics?... more »

As an experience and an idea, solitude is no simple matter. It is both a necessary refuge and a public health menace... more »

Success requires flirting with the public, said George Bernard Shaw. He was more accomplished as a flirt than as a playwright... more »

László Földényi leads an assault on rationalism. In his prosecutorial zeal, is he missing the bigger picture?... more »

The value of science as a credential seems stronger than ever. Is this ubiquity a symptom of its decline?... more »

John Cage stroking bits of wire, Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Ninth: The strangely addictive joy of classical YouTube... more »

The rise of individualism is linked to that of infectious diseases. Leo Robson traces the inevitable effect on literature... more »

For Locke and Rousseau, home schooling was ideal. For many parents now, not so much. What’s the basis of a moral education?... more »

The impulse to compare contemporary political events to the past lives on. But such analogies hinder more than they help... more »

Greil Marcus isn’t afraid, as one reader put it, to let “everything remind him of everything else.” It's both a gift and a liability... more »

“Art breathes from containments and suffocates from freedom,” said Leonardo da Vinci. Contemporary art is suffocating... more »

During London’s Great Plague, Samuel Pepys was resigned to his fate yet found much to rejoice in. Pandemics are complicated... more »

Heiner Müller was a poet, playwright, and Stasi informant. The messiness of his life speaks to the complexity of postwar Germany... more »

Critics once assessed the value of books. Now they use reviews as opportunities to showcase their erudition... more »

According to Peter Turchin and others in cliodynamics, historical material can be used to predict the future. Historians are skeptical... more »

Fiction is no good in a crisis, and it dislikes confronting world events head-on. So you'll have to wait for that coronavirus novel... more »

“Thou art a boil / A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle.” Shakespeare didn’t write much about the bubonic plague, but it did provide good insult material... more »

The word "nostalgia" did not originally mean what it means now. It was coined with a longing for a time when there was no word for what it described... more »

Our reading problem. Yes, we shouldn't idealize the past. But that doesn't mean we have no crisis in the present... more »

The new, quarantined normal means getting closer with your family — too close, in many cases. Agnes Callard explains... more »

“The secret of black intellectuals is that we have other interests.” Darryl Pinckney, Margo Jefferson, and others discuss race and intellectual life... more »

To George Will, conservatism is “more than an attitude and less than an agenda.” It's a way of thinking, not a slate of principles and policies... more »

John Carey has always been a strange critic: an anti-elitist don, avuncular but deadly, amiable yet formidable... more »

Amid the current crisis, memorizing a poem can be a potent talisman — a charm or a balm to help us through this dry, brittle season... more »

In seeking a New Canaan, the Puritans were deeply influenced by the Jewish notion of chosenness. Roger Williams — who rejected this idea — was even exiled... more »

Leaving the academy isn’t easy — especially when you’re drawn partially back in. Spectral conference sightings may result. Lucia Tang explains... more »

Clive James and John Burnside could hardly be more different, except in this: Both are masters of appreciation and models of the poet/critic... more »

Critics fixate on the role of empire in Conrad’s work. For Fredric Jameson, something else — the invention of the steamboat — reveals more... more »

The origins of Shakespearomania. His reputation as an artist of genius was essentially an 18th-century creation... more »

For Manet, in art “you must constantly remain the master and do as you please. No tasks! No, no tasks!” And yet art is a task... more »

Previous epidemics might have prepared us for Covid-19 — if only their histories were better remembered and their victims duly honored. We could have been more like Venice, a city defined by disease... more »

Being friends with Philip Roth. He possessed the terrible gift of intimacy, causing people to tell him things they told no one else... more »

"Cocaine for the masses." The growth of a coffee culture has been trailed, and sometimes advanced, by a coffee literature... more »

Withdrawing from the public leads some artists, like Thomas Pynchon, to fame — and others, like Lee Bontecou, to obscurity... more »

Oxford University Press is a leading publisher. Why has it allowed the pseudo-scientific distortion of Shakespeare's canon?... more »

The Plague is Camus’s tale of illness and quarantine, yes, but its moral is one of inoculation through shared consciousness... more »

Sartre’s Stalinism. His relationship with the grislier aspects of the Soviet regime aren’t as black and white as his critics make out... more »

In the pantheon of Western critics of Communism, George Orwell and Raymond Aron have privileged perches. Rebecca West deserves a spot alongside them... more »

The Naipaul conundrum. What makes him uniquely insightful is intimately connected to what makes him so problematic... more »

“Liberal” is a slippery term that can mean almost anything. It’s also a crucial political weapon, writes Michael Walzer... more »

A global catastrophe has forced a huge, literate, internet-savvy population indoors. This is a test for humanists. Why are so many failing?... more »

A bad book gets a second chance. Vivian Gornick’s history of American communism was praised by none and vilified by all. Now, decades later, it’s caught on... more »

What pulses through the literature of pandemics is the body itself. "The world both narrows and broadens into the body’s suffering”... more »

Was a Ukrainian town overrun by wolves after the arrival of Soviets troops? Paul Auster investigates, with poetic assistance Reply Forward... more »