New Books

Toril Moi believes literary theory has corrosive consequences. She wants to transform the way we think about language. But her version of literary studies has no literature... more »

Biographers describe Oscar Wilde after prison as a broken man, a spent force. Nonsense. Until his final illness, he “carried himself with a threadbare majesty”... more »

Evelyn Waugh, who dropped out of Oxford, spent much of his life keeping the academy at bay. Now, perhaps inevitably, he’s the subject of a mountain of scholarship... more »

"So far as we love seriousness, as well as life," Susan Sontag wrote, "we are moved by it, nourished by it.” But what does it mean to love seriousness?... more »

A showdown with Pelé, a reconciliation with Edmund Wilson. Nabokov’s dream diary moves from the mundane (lost dentures) to the cosmic... more »

People make music, dance, paint, tell stories, adorn objects and themselves. The creative impulse is universal. Why? E.O. Wilson on the invention of art... more »

Sex and communism. Max Eastman — poet, editor, nudist, suffragist, war resister, socialist, libertarian conservative — lived a life of ideological and personal displacement... more »

Historically, books were read out loud, to an audience — lighting was expensive, illiteracy common, and reading was deemed dangerous... more »

“Let me confess something.” “Let me summarize.” “Let me give a couple of examples.” Writers don't ask permission. It’s your book, do what you want... more »

Clifton Fadiman was desperate to break into the WASP intellectual establishment. His plan: signal refinement by drinking the best wine... more »

What can we learn from a tell-all on literary women of the 1970s? That gossip is gold, and that the literary world is naturally mean, sad, and predatory... more »

“I had no idea that ____ was so interesting!” Canoes, oranges, the Merchant Marine – how does John McPhee get us to care about such subjects?... more »

Utopian ideas are supposed to be unrealistic. So can there be such a thing as a “utopia for realists”? It’s a question of improvement: progress, not perfection... more »

Politics and the prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder "lamented the arrival of the grasshoppers on her land but accepted it as divine retribution for the New Deal"... more »

Modernity makes us forget history. Or so argues a new book. But who or what is “modernity,” and how does it manage such a feat?... more »

Edward Garnett, who launched the careers of Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, was a businessman, critic, and muse — the sort of character unique to literary London in the 1890s... more »

“I’ve taken to eating the occasional date,” writes Alan Bennett in his diary, an exhausting but entertaining catalog of the mundanities and absurdities of contemporary life... more »

Some 165,000 years ago, people on the South African coast started to eat molluscs and to use the shells as adornments. That’s when humans became human... more »

To join the Martin Amis Canon of Approved Writers, you must be a virtuoso at the sentence level. It also helps to be male, straight, and white... more »

“In my poetry a rhyme / Would seem to be almost insolent,” Brecht wrote in “Bad Time for Poetry,” just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. He nonetheless kept crafting quatrains... more »

Techno-optimists once prized testicular material from apes; today they plan to upload human minds. As always, one person’s dream is another’s nightmare... more »

Millennials are portrayed as brittle. But they're not fragile — they're overstretched. "Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools”... more »

Odysseus loses all the men under his command, cheats on his wife, lies, and gets help at every turn from the gods. What kind of “hero” is he?... more »

Zora Neale Hurston co-founded Fire!!, a journal seeking to take down respectable, middle-class black literature. After one issue, its headquarters burned to the ground... more »

Sabina Spielrein was a pioneer psychoanalyst, a student of Carl Jung and also his victim. Her ideas were "borrowed,” and then her memory was defamed... more »

“A landscape of jade, teak, bamboo, fried dog.” So wrote Susan Sontag about China — not that she’d been there. Her fiction was, like all her work, uneven... more »

The history of the book, once the domain of collectors, has been seized by scholars who've built a field around how people used to interact with print... more »

After five decades, it's unlikely that Daniel Dennett will change his views on consciousness. He is a fanatic — an intellectually consistent fanatic... more »

Philip Roth and the meaning of America. “Not only can you go home again, Roth insists. You can only go home again.” Newark was his sensory key... more »

Critics think that David Foster Wallace has been studied too narrowly, and that he belongs in a broader cultural context. But is it geographical, philosophical, or economic?... more »

Does a new biography of Jann Wenner mark the last epic tome devoted to the exploits of mercurial, white, male jerks? Probably not... more »

What if the story of civilization — from savagery to hunting/gathering to the invention of writing and leisure and freedom — is wrong?... more »

Joseph Conrad was a skeptic who believed that civilization was fueled by illusions. He was suspicious of all schemes of improvement. He is a man for our times... more »

Mary McCarthy became a novelist almost by default. She had to be coerced into writing by her husband, Edmund Wilson. Nevertheless, her fiction lives on... more »

In the arts, “outsider” means something specific. But what is an outsider writer? And can Virginia Woolf plausibly be considered one?... more »

Angela Carter found meaning in antagonizing foes, especially Andrea Dworkin. “If I can get up … the Dworkin proboscis,” she said, “then my living has not been in vain”... more »

No sooner had photography been invented than it became inextricably connected with lying. Such deceptions were born from a hope that the camera could transcend death... more »

Whatever you may think about Arturo Toscanini or his interpretation of a specific work, there is no doubt that he changed the concept of conducting... more »

The cartoonish anti-Semitism, the affinity for fascists: "Ezra Pound is a litmus test as much as he is a poet." Is his work proof of his insanity?... more »

Essays & Opinions

Freud’s theories don’t mesh well with modern science. Yet he represents something important for neuroscientists: the possibility that laws govern mental life... more »

Campaigns against "cultural appropriation" are bad for politics and bad for art. To put identity over aesthetics is to render art meaningless... more »

Writing and thinking are intimate activities. Does that suggest brilliant men pay an intellectual price for mistreating women? It's comforting — and certainly false — to think so... more »

“A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution,” wrote Sartre, turning down the Nobel. Thus began the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal... more »

Equality is a modern idea. Its detractors have included Plato and Aristotle; indeed, for most Western thinkers, humanity was marked by chasms of distinction... more »

What is painting? With its increasing complexity, definitions are futile. At heart, though, painting is a means to find transcendence... more »

With Rousseau, it's never quite clear where clever contrarianism ends and brash delusion begins. His intellectual style has found new adherents on the left... more »

The speed of philosophy. Philippa Foot, a “dreadfully slow thinker,” wrote little. The challenge of the field, as she saw it, was to be slow enough... more »

Who was the audience for Mein Kampf? Scribblers and middlemen. Indeed, the disregard of academic readers was essential to Nazism from its inception... more »

To be French is to argue about what it means to be French. At the least, it means a fondness for adversarial politics and abstract notions... more »

Whiteness has replaced racism as the problem that bedevils the world. It's a profound and beguiling change in the intellectual terrain... more »

The Closing of the American Mind, today. As Allan Bloom had it, our society requires elites but demands that they justify their existence in democratic terms... more »

If the birth of states meant disease, famine, drudgery, and bondage for so many, why deplore their collapse? For James Scott, it’s complicated... more »

Whatever you think of Foucault and Rorty, they were genuine scholars with a distinctive vision of reality. Even so, they opened the way to fake ideas and fake emotions... more »

Among the New York Intellectuals, Elizabeth Hardwick was considered a gentile sophisticate. She was, in fact, a master of articulate contempt... more »

The Orwell cult. His lionization as a moral giant and a prophet is overdone. But one thing really grates: the idea that he's a monument to human decency... more »

Narrative-puncturing was a way of life for Joan Didion. Even the reputation of her great-great-great-grandfather, supposedly a snake-slaying pioneer, wasn’t safe... more »

About 95 million images are uploaded to Instagram every day. This behavior seems new. But it was prefigured by an earlier aesthetic movement: the picturesque... more »

What does it mean to be a jerk? It is to be ignorant of the value of others and the merit of their ideas. Maybe you know one. Maybe you are one... more »

We knowingly assert that civilization “collapsed” on Easter Island. The truth is more complicated. After all, history isn’t about conveying neat moral lessons... more »

From hippie fun to shell of its former self: Rolling Stone is a mirror of the baby-boom generation. The reflection isn't pretty... more »

What’s it like to be from “an abstract nowhere”? Midwesterners have a regional identity built on the idea of unqualified normality. But that isn’t as simple as it sounds... more »

How do we engage with the past? Archaeology, art, coins, legal documents, living witnesses. For Thomas Carlyle, however, literary works were unsurpassable... more »

The fortunes of free speech and the fate of universities are intertwined. Expedient attempts to appease students will further weaken the academy's intellectual prestige... more »

Economics, for all its pretensions, envies the hard sciences, while the humanities is just plain embarrassed. In reality, they need each other... more »

We tend to valorize paying attention, but should we? As Diderot had it, distraction allows ideas to strike against or reawaken one another... more »

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is brilliant, readable, and short. It's also bad history, bad economics, and bad theology... more »

Readers of biography, beware. You lean too heavily on anecdotes, and you construct false visions of the past. When you study the dead, tread lightly... more »

The fake machismo, the boozing, the braggadocio -- Hemingway kept up the facade of the hairy-chested artist for as long as he was able. But who was he really?... more »

Stendhal compared Rossini’s reach to Napoleon’s, but life went bad for the composer. He lost his pension, his protégé died, his gonorrhea worsened... more »

"Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean," says Jonathan Franzen. "But it is one good way"... more »

The job of the critic is changing, says Lionel Shriver. It's not to assess a book’s storytelling, but to castigate writers guilty of any crimes of the imagination... more »

Does the pursuit of knowledge trump the pursuit of ethical behavior? That question fueled Foucault's turn from madness and sexuality to politics... more »

Kant thought entire civilizations incapable of philosophy. Derrida said China had no philosophy, only thought. Why did Western philosophy turn its back on the world?... more »

“Alexander Calder wanted to be clear and unfussy, to get straight to the point. At the same time, he liked to linger over life’s oddities and obscurities”... more »

In the era of the quantified self, does the old-fashioned chronicling of passing thoughts and daily minutiae still serve a purpose? Dear Diary…... more »

If Allan Bloom’s surname had been Smith, would The Closing of the American Mind have been written? Probably not, says Jonathan Kay, who reads a lot into Bloom's biography... more »

"Public conversation is overpoliticized and undermoralized,” says David Brooks. "Relationships and mercy and how to be a friend — these are the big subjects of life, and we don’t talk about them enough"... more »

Peer review is essential. That’s obvious. What isn't obvious is that it should be organized as it is — or even that it should be organized at all... more »

Designed by an expert on Swiss phallic cults, the Rorschach test remains influential among Argentines, Japanese marriage counselors, and American courts... more »

John Rawls called it "the best of all games"; Mark Kingwell calls it "the most philosophical of games." What is it about baseball and philosophy?... more »

What makes male characters in Jane Austen so sexy? It has something to do with the taming of the masculine principle. William Deresiewicz explains... more »

In love, there’s no inoculation against betrayal. So think of affairs as a feature of relationships, not a bug. So says Esther Perel, who charges $1,500 a session for such insights... more »

“If the rise of humanism was a sunrise, then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse.” Marilynne Robinson on the value and fate of the humanities... more »

"The fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma," says Jonathan Meades. It is a cult of "puritanical, po-faced, censorious nothingness"... more »

Poor George Orwell. The bare-knuckled revolutionary has been reduced to a cuddly, bipartisan grandpa. Orwell’s deradicalization has a long and shameless history... more »

After a decade of hype, the digital humanities has merely confirmed what should have been obvious all along: More information is not more knowledge... more »

Whether in a scholar’s attempt to live like a badger or in recent nature writing, one question stands out: What is looking back at us through other species’ eyes?... more »

In an age when truth is dismissed as fiction, the novel matters more because we all live by fictions. It’s how we get to the truth... more »

"The infatuation with portents — with the supposed relevance of voices from the past — is neither bread nor circus. It’s an obsession with history that can also be a form of amnesia"... more »