New Books

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 »

The downward trajectory of Robert Walser. Why did the Swiss modernist writer come to revile his own work?  ... more »

For John Keats, literature was life. For F. Scott Fitzgerald, everything alive became literature. From both, literature exacted a high price... more »

Artificial intelligence attracts megalomaniacs, inspiring both overblown promises and existential angst. Enter Jeannette Winterson ... more »

If America is in the grip of an epistemological crisis, is there any evidence that philosophy can help? No ... more »

In 1470, a printer in Cologne published a short sermon and changed everything. He included page numbers... more »

Marie Aymard, born in 1713, was a shopkeeper's illiterate daughter. Can her story tell the story of France? ... more »

The romance between Sartre and Beauvoir was haunted by the friend whom she wrote about again and again  ... more »

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was no lovesick confessional poet, passive victim, or weak invalid. Quite the contrary  ... more »

1851 was a turning point for Charles Dickens and how he thought of the novel.  ... more »

What makes a WASP a WASP? Patrician bloodlines, political and cultural influence, and, it seems, neurosis  ... more »

What would Richard Rorty say about America’s political predicament? Some new translations offer our clearest account   ... more »

It was Richard Feynman’s belief that no one understands quantum physics. Perhaps explaining it is even more difficult than understanding it  ... more »

Building an art collection is akin to building an identity. What happens when that collection is looted?  ... more »

Francis Fukuyama is no prophet. “The end of history” is just so grand that it endures as a theoretical piñata   ... more »

Vlad Dracula, Corneliu Codreanu, Nicolae Ceausescu: Why has Romania had so many crazy leaders?  ... more »

When modernist art embraced abstraction, the insane had a head start. In Germany, the status also made them a target   ... more »

America is a country of émigrés, innovators, searchers for fountains of youth. It is also the society least predisposed to the genre of tragedy... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

In a just world, says Jonny Thakkar, the college where he teaches wouldn’t exist. “The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene” ... more »

How to run a collective fantasy racket: make outrageous promises, woo and criticize followers, frame everything in apocalyptic terms... more »

Does philosophy make progress? The contributions of women to questions of knowledge, ethics, metaphysics, suggest that it does... more »

The manifesto is an inherently quixotic genre — “spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure”  ... more »

“If there is a problem with book reviewing, the problem is that those of us who are good at it aren’t good enough” ... more »

What is bookishness? It’s Jane Austen-themed leggings and book-themed cellphone covers. But also so much more   ... more »

Climate change, nuclear war, a deadly pathogen: Catastrophe feels near. Would extinction really be so bad?  ... more »

The problem with book reviews isn't that they're too mean or too nice, too long or too short. The problem is much bigger   ... more »

An outsider with the breeding of an insider, John Cheever sought rarefied air but resisted joining the ranks of the well-to-do... more »

Step aside, Marie Kondo. Interior style is a pendulum, and it’s swinging back to maximalism... more »

$181,000 for an M.F.A. in film from Columbia? That’s a terrible idea, as are other indefensible master’s degrees in the fine arts, drama, and theater... more »

If Twitter is a hellsite, is it like Milton's hell? Katie Kadue on misunderstanding, mutual contempt, and the Devil... more »

We are everywhere enlisted in campaigns, told we must be “with” this or “against” that. Can an apolitical political tradition be revived?... more »

Analytic philosophy is "degenerating"; particle physics is "irrelevant"; math may die "within a generation." Why are so many disciplines hitting dead ends?... more »

Anaïs Nin, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, and George Barker all partook in a struggling-artist tradition: writing literary erotica... more »

Sometimes a misspelling is just a misspelling. But sometimes it illustrates how cultural practices emerge and stabilize... more »

For the academic left, neoliberalism’s conspicuous failure suggests the failure of liberalism tout court... more »