New Books

Was Curzio Malaparte — nationalist and cosmopolite, pacifist and bellicist, elitist and populist — the quintessential European of his time?... more »

“A book was like fresh air," said Adam Michnik. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad.” The CIA was deft at smuggling them behind the Iron Curtain... more »

A rarefied gig. Has there ever been a more lucrative place to be a writer than Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair?... more »

The history of AI is dashed hopes and blind alleys. You don't have to be an “accelerationist” or a “doomer" to see that this time is different... more »

House of Albert Barnes. What drove the curmudgeonly collector to acquire so many Renoirs, Cézannes and Modiglianis?... more »

Through binges, bankruptcies, and depressive spells, Edgar Allan Poe knew where the best of him lay: in making art... more »

In the 18th century, hypochondria was a rarefied disease tied to leisure and luxury. Then the laboring classes began to develop it... more »

Dante’s divine… autofiction? The Commedia is not a “memoir” in the conventional sense, yet it’s a deeply personal reflection... more »

Van Gogh, age 32, arrived in Paris a "provincial rube" and “painter of no particular skill." Did the city really transform him?... more »

“The only people who connect ancient and modern Greece are tour guides, Fulbright scholars, and fascists”... more »

When it comes to sexual matters, the Bible is neither clear nor consistent. Diarmaid MacCulloch teases out the contradictions... more »

Many academics tolerate the metaphysical commitments of mainstream religionists. But a belief in the paranormal?... more »

Free speech and its discontents. “We cannot have truth and wisdom without accommodating error and folly”... more »

Here come the pedagogy gurus, with their gaseous abstractions and bureaucratic proceduralism... more »

Experiencing an obscure, hyper-specific emotion? In some language, there’s probably a word for that... more »

What is "woke"? An abundance of zeal, a lack of proportion, and self-interest masquerading as general interest... more »

Stanley Fish goes to the movies. At 86, the "totalitarian Tinkerbell" is still at it, yoking legal theory to Hollywood production... more »

The debate over privacy has bogged down in stalemate between user agreements and opt-out buttons. We've lost sight of what privacy is for... more »

Social psychology is a field in crisis. What’s the main problem: bad methods or bad ideas?... more »

A faithful pet, some liquor, books stacked just so — since Montaigne’s time the private library has been a place of quiet joy... more »

As three recent books show, “arguing about criticism is far less pleasurable than arguing about books”... more »

The medieval mob. Crowds broke political regimes just as quickly as they made them... more »

What makes a “monster”? Human boundaries are always shifting, redefining what constitutes monstrous abnormality ... more »

In every age, diet advice reflects the perennial and the faddish, the sensible and the ludicrous. The ancients were no exception... more »

Épater la bourgeoisie. Artists once sought to disturb the conventions and the complacency of polite society, but no more... more »

In 1945, Olivier Messiaen split the Parisian music scene: Was his work modernist genius? Or hopelessly lost in idolatry and kitsch?... more »

R.E.M. had a sound that was "sonically sui generis and abnormally normal" and a knack for cashing in without being seen as selling out... more »

The misadventures of Augustus the Strong include an epic drinking bout with Peter the Great and an obsession with the crown of Poland... more »

The paradox of Marx’s popularity: His genius is widely acknowledged precisely as the political horizon of Marxism has diminished... more »

Simone Weil adored her parents and refused to let them into her inner life, especially once Christianity began to engross her... more »

We have little to fear from machine-generated art, argues David Hajdu, citing the player piano. But generative AI is not like the player piano... more »

As a critic, W G Sebald produced something rare in German: criticism that functions between academic study and journalistic discussion... more »

Bibliophobia presents occasionally as a literal fear of books. More often it’s an anxiety about reading for those with deep connections to literature... more »

When Isaac Newton broke white light into colored rays, he did not find pink. But it was evident in nature, and rapidly became fashionable... more »

A prodigy of Renaissance Italy, Pico della Mirandola devised his grand unified theory of mystical learning at the age of 23... more »

For Flaubert, Balzac “was no writer, merely a man of ideas and of observation; he saw everything, but he didn’t know how to express anything”... more »

The evolution of Jonathan Haidt: He used to be open-minded and humble; now he’s polemical and grumpy ... more »

Cellphones, social media, AI. “The more we communicate, the worse things seem to get,” says Nicholas Carr... more »

What’s the result of endless music, organized into playlists seamlessly optimized just for you? Aural wallpaper... more »

Essays & Opinions

We seek rest, yet are wary of its implicit boredom. This dilemma is resolved, perhaps, only by cats... more »

The homogenous, aging American psychoanalytic community has begun emphasizing social injustice. The result: chaos... more »

Hunter-gatherer societies were much more violent than our own, but much of that is due to a relatively small number of prehistoric psychopaths... more »

One early human tool gave rise to our leap in intelligence: not the sharpened stone, but the handbag, for carrying food and babies... more »

For a powerful account of the human condition, writes Marilynne Robinson, turn not to “anemic anthropology,” but to Calvinism... more »

Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »

Today we treat novels as salubrious stress relievers — kale smoothies for the soul. That overlooks their dark, diabolical potency... more »

The necessity of Martha Nussbaum. Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex, and sometimes painful stuff of real life... more »

Alice Gribbin: “Those who deem the nude in art a ‘sex object’ betray themselves as prudish and crass”... more »

What can the memoir of madness accomplish? It can force us to reckon with ugly things, not because they are titillating, but because they are true... more »

“The alternative to a recovery of the liberal imagination … may be neither illiberalism nor the neoliberal status quo but a new barbarism”... more »

Technology has long been a boon to creativity, especially in film. But AI and its machine-managed flawlessness are different... more »

What is intuition? The return of a lost memory? An unearned sense of certitude? A physician deals with losing his decisiveness... more »

A victim of his own accessibility. Montaigne’s writing is categorized as “motivational self-help.” Don’t be fooled... more »

Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a “big, huge mistake,” but one we should be grateful for... more »

Social science has a rigor problem, and the common solutions — replication, public critique — are inefficient. It’s time for a new approach... more »

When Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” came out over 35 years ago, it was roundly mocked. But he’s been proven right... more »

Perry Anderson asks: Why is neoliberalism more powerful and pervasive an ideology than the liberalism on which it rests?... more »

A plague of bad essays purports to explain how some distant historical event explains the present. Beware such relevance mongering... more »

The supremacy of finitude: Our lives, our species, and our universe will all someday come to an end. That should galvanize us... more »

If the universe offers us clues to its purpose, the reasonable thing to do is not just pay attention but believe. Ross Douthat’s case for religion... more »

When Shulamith Firestone finally published her second book, it wasn't a memoir of her descent into psychosis. It was something deeper ... more »

AI and the problem of other minds. How can we ever know if AI has subjective feelings? Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT... more »

AI and literature. "Writing it off, ignoring it, assuming it is a slop machine and little more...is a narrow, badly informed, and false view of what is going on"... more »

Dostoevsky's faith. Belief, doubt, and hypocrisy preoccupy both his fictional characters and his own agonized quest for understanding... more »

A new literary genre — call it the Hot Divorcées Club — has arrived with an unmistakable whiff of emancipation... more »

“Make your own job.” The slogan of the 19th-century New Thought movement has been embraced by contemporary self-help gurus... more »

Fredric Jameson left us with a slogan (“Always historicize!”), a weighty best seller on postmodernism, and an aversion to sentimentality... more »

"The use of a review is not to force talent, but to create a favorable atmosphere,” said T.S. Eliot. the transatlantic review cultivated just such an atmosphere... more »

University presses are flourishing as they move beyond monographs to put out big, bold, and often award-winning books... more »

Sam Kriss goes in search of "alt lit" and finds that its hyper-sincere, hyper-vulnerable, hyper-personal writing is indistinguishable from the literary mainstream... more »

A century's accumulation of cliché leads us to associate The Great Gatsby with gin, jazz, and the Roaring Twenties. That misses its point... more »

Capitalism may be the best economic system, but the price for all that prosperity was always going to be at the cost of high culture... more »

What differentiates translation from the other literary arts? The way translators read. Damion Searls explains... more »

Socrates was poor, ugly, boastful, kind of a jerk. He was also, of course, a timeless genius. But is he a man for our times?... more »

Paul Krugman has a question for the New York Times. Given its “push toward blandness,” “why even bother having an opinion section?”... more »

Agnes Callard: "Where once children were instructed to be saintly, or at least virtuous, or at least ordinary, now they are invited to be weird"... more »

In bohemian New York, a vibe shift is underway. The avant-garde is advancing no more than a series of poses and affectations... more »

Writers like Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe conveyed moral, practical, and proverbial wisdom. But now “the communicability of experience is decreasing”... more »

We no longer read long books but seem to have no problem with long movies or narrative TV. The “attention crisis” isn’t what you think it is... more »

“In the age of abundant digital information, materials libraries offer something scarce: hands-on experience with the stuff that makes the world”... more »

Questions of taste are freighted by uncertainty and ambiguity. In the arts, what distinguishes good from bad?... more »

“It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised”... more »

James Longenbach’s poetry occurred in “the lyric now” — a “state of constant mutability … always happening, always having happened”... more »

A cenotaph for Newton would be taller than the Pyramids. Paris was to have 17 extravagant tollhouses. 18th-century architecture had a flair for the dramatic... more »

“A tissue of horrors” telling of “an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity” —  19th-century France reviled (and was hooked on) newspapers... more »

No matter how rigorously philosophical Hannah Arendt’s prose is, it makes space for something like mysticism... more »

Fifty years of luminous painting in Sienna — largely of saints and martyrs — ended abruptly, with the plague... more »

“The widespread caricature of Adorno as a scowling contrarian or snob continues to inhibit our understanding of his work”... more »

“Tradwives” boast hobby farms and $300,000 old-timey ovens to go with their polka-dotted aesthetics. Paging Thorstein Veblen... more »