New Books

Intellectuals and the cult of seriousness. Sontag and Steiner made a performance of omniscience and moral solemnity that no one could honestly sustain... more »

To escape from boredom, we seek distraction and endless stimulation. A better path forward is leisured contemplation... more »

Progressive political thinking has fallen into the identity trap, where race, gender, and sexual orientation trump all else... more »

Margaretta Hare Morris and Elizabeth Carrington Morris transformed 18th-century natural science. When will the sisters get their due?... more »

Mom rage seems to be all about power — who has it, and who is denied it. But it is also about shame... more »

As a young man, Amos Oz discovered his literary identity on a kibbutz. “The more provincial you are, the more universal you get”... more »

“Loneliness,” Walter Benjamin wrote, is “a process of self-poisoning, whose anti-toxins lie in the creative attitude”... more »

AP courses are mechanistic, superficial, and they fail to live up to the liberal, humanist ideals on which they were founded... more »

Ulysses, Don Juan, The Power Broker. What’s the book that you’ve been meaning to read for the longest time?... more »

What is “woke”? Bashing vague, undefined concepts is easy. It’s harder to unpack them in philosophically serious ways... more »

Angsty novels by cool girl novelists reflect the student condition, not the human condition. It’s time to leave the quad behind... more »

How to lie with statistics: “In politics it doesn’t really matter what the numbers are, so much as whose they are”... more »

Martin Peretz, who helped define the liberal establishment even as he tweaked it, is at 84 persona non grata. “It’s a sodden coda”... more »

For the Bloomsbury set, clothing conventions – like other customs– were meant to be broken... more »

For W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay’s fiction was "filth" and made him feel like taking a bath. Now a McKay renaissance is afoot... more »

“Aside from the fact that they’re all dead, the women of Surrealism have had a banner couple of years”... more »

Whatever you have heard about trauma — from clinical definitions to literary uses to gauzy oversimplifications — probably stems from the work of Judith Herman... more »

What happened to Naomi Wolf is what happened to wellness culture: Its principles gave way to paranoid individualism... more »

J.L. Austin, military man. How the Oxford philosopher became one of the most consequential British intelligence officers of World War II... more »

The trouble with genealogy: Fragments of evidence do not cohere into ironclad facts... more »

The quest for pocket parity. Long ago, everyone carried a purse. Then came a new feature of male dress... more »

Don DeLillo, long anointed as a prophet, is surely “anticipating the involuntary mutations that await the posthumous"... more »

Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence, 20th-century Oxford: Why do certain places and times produce a clustering of philosophical genius?... more »

Kafka’s notebooks contain homoerotic passages, dreams of sausages, and his repeated self-flagellation: “Wrote nothing”... more »

Is authoritative criticism a problem? No, criticism is not a passive medium of arbitration. It is an act of creation... more »

In combating fascism, 20th-century theologians like Oskar Goldberg strove for a “politics of immortality” ... more »

Forgiveness, messy and ambiguous, encourages an expansive moral imagination. To understand it, turn to literature... more »

Chasing Agnes Martin. The painter declared that “artists must of necessity be alone” — but also that “asceticism is a mistake”... more »

“The basic error of liberalism, according to the post-liberals, is its conflation of freedom with the absence of limitation or constraint”... more »

“Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity”... more »

In 1450, an Italian monk began work on a map that took several years to complete. It was the most accurate map of the known world... more »

August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences was his most financially successful. It was also his least favorite... more »

Was it Orwell’s wife, Eileen, who persuaded him to turn an anti-Stalinist essay into an allegory?... more »

Is Jonathan Israel's decadeas-long argument for the importance of Spinoza the work of a prophet or a zealot?... more »

Kierkegaard’s engagement crisis. His philosophical career began when he broke up with his fiancée, Regine Olsen, in 1841... more »

How Harry Smith, a gnome-like polymath with a compulsive urge to document, mined his collection of folk-music records to feed the imagination of a generation... more »

If marriages are "hideously private," as Iris Murdoch said, can the study of one relationship reveal a grand theory of intimacy?... more »

“On the American right, there is a growing intuition that the problem with liberal democracy is not just the adjective. It is also the noun”... more »

From writers like Sylvia Plath and Ottessa Moshfegh, sad-girl literature presents a smorgasbord of unlikable protagonists... more »

Essays & Opinions

“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »

The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »

“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »

“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »

Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »

Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »

Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »

In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »

“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »

“Impressive, patched, gilded and preposterous.” What do the clothing, decor, and stylistic choices of the Bloomsbury set mean?... more »

“If some writers are hypersensitive to critique, there must be others who are hypersensitive to praise”... more »

For Alasdair MacIntyre, doing moral philosophy from the margins is a necessary condition to seeing things clearly... more »

In today’s novel, identity can be leveraged only to confirm that fiction speaks from experience; confession trumps imagination... more »

Hunting for lost books. It’s possible to find them on the internet, of course, but that robs us of one of the things that gives life purpose... more »

Slow songs used to inspire slow dancing. Now they are more commonly the soundtrack for the sad and lonely... more »

The case of the Crusoe Cabana. Why a lawsuit over a Miami nightclub hinged on the testimony of a scholar of 18th-century literature... more »

When it comes to DEI, it’s Ron DeSantis or Robin DiAngelo, whitewashing or wokeness — and nothing in between. There’s a better path... more »

What gives authority to a literary critic? Wit, discrimination, judgment, and advocacy, for starters. Merve Emre elaborates... more »

Andrea Long Chu: “White Teeth remains by far the best thing [Zadie] Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24!”... more »

"Stories are indispensable, nourishing and delightful,” says Ian Leslie. “They are also attacks on the rational immune system"... more »

With the right input, ChatGPT can write a strong college essay. Is this the end of take-home writing assignments?... more »

What is the responsibility of art criticism? Is it directed at social justice? Enriching one’s sense of identity? Surrendering to the mysticism of art?... more »

Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe for liberalism, and yet its cause is championed again and again... more »

In a culture devoted to work, leisure is a lofty, slippery goal. Its fulfillment requires the cultivation of habits... more »

“We are keen to nestle into a nice category,” says Matt Feeney. “This is a lot of things besides funny, but it’s also funny”... more »

“ChatGPT and identity politics are two sides of the same coin — both represent bankrupt versions of what literature is and is meant to do”... more »

Iris Murdoch on Simone Weil’s notebooks: “To read her is to be reminded of a standard”... more »

Flaubert, the ultimate perfectionist, wrote at five words per hour, the legend goes. Perhaps he was just prone to distraction... more »

Why do we turn to psychoanalysis? For Adam Phillips, “the patient goes to an analyst to find out why he has gone to an analyst”... more »

Covid, climate change, geopolitical drama — we’re living in a “polycrisis,” we’re told. But is that just short for “history happening”?... more »

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine lamented having not enough time to figure out how to live. He, like us, is of two minds about leisure... more »

“Gen Z-ification,” “S.U.V.-ification,” “old man-ification” — we live in convoluted times, beset by the “-ification” of everything... more »

A tale of two Naomis — Klein and Wolf. The appearance of one’s double is paranoia-inducing. Especially when she's paranoid... more »

The impoverishment of our interracial imagination: Social events are now marred by white anti-racists seeking “uncomfortable conversations”... more »

The twin pillars of Gen X identity are authenticity and irony, accompanied by the belief that rock and roll will never die... more »

Dissident scientists historically have faced ostracism, censorship, and worse. As the Covid lab leak saga shows, little has changed... more »

From “A Crop of Cocks” to tales of defecation, bestiality, incest, and cuckoldry, obscene folktales thrived in Russia... more »

The subject of all great literature is either redemption or its loss, says Ed Simon. That’s also the story of his own sobriety... more »

The libraries of imperial Rome were awe-inspiring and open to all. They were also distinctly autocratic... more »

The literary marriage: Can one find a better example of the tension between larger-than-life aspirations and the banalities of everyday existence?... more »

George Orwell’s private mores are of his time. His dedication to truthfulness and public writing is eternal... more »

John Milton seems the oldest, deadest, and whitest of old, dead, white authors. Yet his radical, lyrical beauty will blow you away... more »

The new historical divide is neither academic vs. popular nor scholarly vs. presentist. It’s hagiography vs. iconoclasm... more »

Why was the pioneering analytic philosopher E.E. Constance Jones forgotten? It didn’t help that Bertrand Russell demeaned her as "motherly" and "prissy"... more »

Does Barbie’s existential crisis disrupt her brand or simply consolidate it? Leslie Jamison makes the case for the latter... more »

Milan Kundera and the dream of absolute authorship. He worked obsessively to control his writing, and to distinguish between the work and the person ... more »

How did Ian McEwan go from being a risk-taking enfant terrible to the grandfather of the well-plotted English literary novel... more »

Part sex cult, part art world coterie, the Sullivanian Institute “combined the worst of Marxism, psychoanalysis and the musical theatre”... more »

We ought to disagree about books. We ought even to get in heated fights about books! And now we have a venue to do that: Goodreads... more »

Is beauty an achievement or a natural endowment? If we are responsible for our own beauty, what obligations does that impose? Becca Rothfeld investigates... more »