New Books

The conglomeration of publishing explains some of our literary culture. But does it really explain all of it?... more »

Virginia Woolf likened her to a “giant cucumber” with “the freakishness of an elf” — but does Margaret Cavendish deserve a closer look?... more »

Katherine Mansfield flirted with the Bloomsbury set at their parties — then plotted how to crush them... more »

“Although the concept of equality may seem intuitive, it is surprisingly difficult to pin down with any precision”... more »

Can a poet with no experience of combat or trenches capture the reality of a frontline soldier in WWI?... more »

Ostriches beheaded, horses made into consuls. Embellishing the scandalous tales of Roman Emperors doesn’t make them useless... more »

Jill Lepore: “The internet is an astonishing product of human ingenuity and an incredible archive. But … it has not realized the promise of democratization”... more »

The way to get ahead in economics, Robert Solow quipped, is to provide a “brilliant argu­ment in favor of an absurd conclusion.” Has anything changed?... more »

Wokeness, anti-wokeness, and the enduring allure of victim status. Geoff Shullenberger on why identity politics isn’t going anywhere... more »

Christian Wiman’s religious vision. God is more than us, more than we can ever know, and in that unknowing we find freedom... more »

Allen Ginsberg seems to have kept everything, even letters to the American Nazi Party. “I heard you want to kill me, can we meet and discuss it?!?”... more »

America’s founding philosopher? John Locke is central to the nation’s political thought, however historically dubious his place is... more »

The Russian Revolution changed the lives of a third of humanity for better or for worse. Robert Service is its indefatigable chronicler... more »

Sly Stone and the ever expanding influence – funk, fusion, new wave, pop – of one of the world’s most notoriously unproductive people... more »

During the Renaissance, beauty secrets were democratized, and women strove to become works of art... more »

Despair is painful, miserable, to be avoided. But as Kirkegaard understood, it is also essential... more »

Can you determine if a Warhol is an authentic Warhol? Depends on whom you ask... more »

Goo, gunk, gloop, slime. Whatever you call it, it is as fundamental to living beings as oxygen and sunlight... more »

Pessimistic fatalist that he is, John Gray sees new Leviathans, dangerous Leviathans on the march... more »

Willa Cather, who loathed biographers and critics, placed every trap, pitfall, and barrier in their path... more »

Notebooks by any name – rapiaria, zibaldoni, memoriali, giornali – represent a history of thinking on paper... more »

Falsehoods proliferate online because the history of human culture is a history of fake things... more »

The history of Marxism is written as either triumph or tragedy. Both approaches prevent an honest reckoning... more »

James Whistler wasn’t one to turn the other cheek. When John Ruskin panned his painting, Whistler sued... more »

The topic of how one’s life connects to one’s aesthetic judgments is a fraught one. Consider Sasha Frere-Jones... more »

“We can understand a culture by what it calls monstrous; the monster stands for everything a society attempts to cast out”... more »

Why did Janet Malcolm, late in life, confess to a prolonged extramarital affair with her New Yorker editor, decades after the fact?... more »

“As the centuries passed, what men of erudition had once considered ‘magic’ increasingly began to look like ‘technology’”... more »

Derek Parfit believed we should live more impersonally. By ignoring his friends and family, he lived up — or, rather, down — to this principle... more »

In 1966, Philip Rieff labeled and lambasted “therapeutic culture.” It is ever more apparent he was on to something... more »

How four women – Arendt, de Beauvoir, Rand, Weil – concluded that philosophy had to be utterly reimagined... more »

Schoenberg, stigmatization. The argument that classical music took a wrong turn in the middle of the 20th century is downright wrong... more »

The chapter. It dates to 13th-century narrative units in the Gospels, before the separation of sentences and even of words... more »

Humans make machines, and machines remake humans. Small devices have revolutionized humanity in big ways... more »

For the 11th-century Benedictine monk Saint Anselm, reading was a form of communion. It still is... more »

Who was the greatest writer of the Latin American Boom? Not Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, but José Donoso... more »

The liberal’s dilemma. Are they suffering from their own success, or from the fact that liberalism has never been tried?... more »

Dickens the devious? A new biography stretches credulity to portray the writer as pathologically deceitful... more »

Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more »

Essays & Opinions

Once you enter Guy Davenport’s labyrinth of learning and imagination, you never get out. John Jeremiah Sullivan explains... more »

“No one can really believe in an apology until after it happens,” says Agnes Callard. “That’s the telltale mark of a miracle”... more »

“Critique is not against reason; it is the very practice of reason.” Peter Gordon lays to rest some misconceptions of critical theory... more »

Tom Wolfe was less an inventive journalist or mediocre novelist − though he was both – than a grand theorist of American life... more »

Planning to give up alcohol, smoking, or chocolate? Behind such self-sacrifice lies the despair of just wanting to give up... more »

Samuel Moyn laments liberalism’s lack of an aspiration to perfection. But that never was a liberal tenet, and shouldn’t be... more »

Amid calls to “decolonize” everything from hipsters to universities, one wonders: Where did this jargonized swagger originate?... more »

“The abandonment of ornament has levied a heavy toll on the practice of architecture, tantamount to misplacing a crucial instrument of one’s toolbox”... more »

We never tire of trying to live better lives. For better results, consult better thinkers. Start with John Stuart Mill... more »

The chief risk facing elite higher education isn’t financial, but that its authority will grow brittle and its appeal sectarian... more »

We are witnessing a highly fractious workplace dispute at the heart of the American culture industry. Andrea Long Chu explains... more »

The two Chomskys. How did the political activist reconcile a lifetime spent in close proximity to the US military?... more »

Pissarro’s Jewishness has typically been treated by biographers as a minor matter. That is a mistake... more »

What turns serious people into comedic figures? For some, it’s the rigidity of their thinking. Consider Christopher Hitchens... more »

A year into ChatGPT, what’s the verdict? AI is simultaneously impressive and pretty dumb... more »

When Mala Chatterjee was most broken and vulnerable, only one thing could soothe and sustain her: Infinite Jest... more »

Tyler Austin Harper: “Humanists today need to reckon with the fact that the only thing our politicking is accomplishing is hastening our own demise”... more »

As a child, Kathryn Schulz heard rumors that she was related to the Polish novelist Bruno Schulz. Is it true?... more »

An open society is based upon the malleability of opinion. So what happens when persuasion is no longer possible?... more »

When a library's entire digital footprint is stolen by a ransomware gang, what remains? The British Library is finding out... more »

Moral clarity is rarely clear, and simplistic certitudes have no place at institutions of higher learning... more »

A great poet, such as Robert Frost, affords misreadings, "perhaps even welcomes them, and is misread anew by each successive generation”... more »

Philosophy and pseudonymity. Why do so many philosophers write under so many names? Consider Kierkegaard... more »

Humans have always wanted to become like Gods. Francis Bacon understood this desire better than most... more »

Flaubert was once described as a “martyr of literary style.” His letters reveal just how apt that assessment was... more »

The art world is full of grifters, fakers, thieves, and critics on the make. Monet knew instinctively how to play the game... more »

Critics' lives are deskbound, confined to their thoughts and other people’s art. What drives them to it?... more »

“Ideology,” a word coined during the French Revolution, was declared dead by Daniel Bell in 1960. Now ideologies are roaring back to life... more »

Objective measures are our most effective weapon against racism and sexism, says Steven Pinker: blind auditions, traffic cameras, SAT... more »

Are there objectively correct answers to the big philosophical questions? A meta-ethicist makes the case that there are... more »

“You’re not allowed to be whiter than him ... And you cannot wear a hat because that is his thing.” Patricia Lockwood meets the pope... more »

Susan Sontag and George Steiner could be extraordinarily ill-mannered. But their critical ardor remains infectious... more »

A best-selling philosophical text on Amazon is the decade-old dissertation of a writer best known as Bronze Age Pervert... more »

Rescuing Pushkin from commemoration and co-optation: He “deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath”... more »

Censorship is a widespread problem among scientists. It’s most often driven by the scientists themselves... more »

Do animals need complex brains to experience consciousness? New work on scallops, jellyfish, and crabs suggests not... more »

When Gawker went girly and created a home for radical self-disclosure and all-abiding contempt. Moe Tkacik looks back... more »

My queue, myself. Ordering DVDs from Netflix served as a kind of biography of the various phases of my life... more »

Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more »

George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more »

The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more »

No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more »

Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more »

The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more »

Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more »

Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more »

Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more »

Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more »

In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more »

“A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »