New Books

Evelyn Waugh has been viewed as chiefly a comic writer. And he was funny, in his dark and malicious way. That's not to say he was amusing... more »

Margaret Wise Brown avoided witches, trolls, glass slippers, and sleeping beauties. Instead she revolutionized picture books, even prompting Gertrude Stein to write one... more »

Diana Trilling was key to her husband's literary success. But did it come at the expense of her own? “People will celebrate one member of a household but not two”... more »

In the mid-'60s, Edmund Wilson was living alone in the house he inherited from his mother. He was in decline. Meanwhile, Vladimir Nabokov was flush with Lolita royalties. Did envy cause their feud?... more »

Post-truth and its discontents. What is and what isn’t a fact has never been obvious or uncontroversial. There was no golden age of truth... more »

Norman Podhoretz was everywhere: Arendt’s New Year’s Eve party, Capote’s Black and White Ball. He was the wonder boy of the name-dropping circuit. Then he was cast out... more »

Douglas Coupland gave Generation X its name and became its voice. Then he suffered the fate of most voices of generations: He became irrelevant ... more »

Forget “less is more.” History shows that “more is more” — a saying attributed to an architect, a fashion designer, a novelist, and Dolly Parton ... more »

What comes from a 79-year-old French Maoist lecturing young people about being young? Some genuine insight, surprisingly... more »

It's not that Heidegger was a windbag with nothing to say. His appeal stemmed from how he said nothing with a capital “N.” In emergencies we listen for capital letters... more »

Is pop music poetry? Adam Bradley has a compelling answer: “Pop is a poetry whose success lies in getting you to forget that it is poetry at all”... more »

In 1927 the Mississippi River flooded, spreading 80 miles wide at points. One byproduct of the catastrophe: the beginning of the literary careers of Faulkner and Richard Wright... more »

Addicted to opium and always in debt, Thomas De Quincey fled his own child’s wake to escape a creditor. And yet he maintained a curious optimism... more »

For 50 years, William F. Buckley Jr. policed the boundaries of conservatism, casting out extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites, and racists. Or so he thought... more »

How Martin Luther King Jr., who married a black sound — a rhythm, a style — to flawless Standard English, helped make "black talk" America's lingua franca ... more »

With the exception of Jesus Christ, more books have been written about Martin Luther than about any other person. What can a new biography add? Quite a lot, actually... more »

Walt Whitman, lifestyle guru. To cultivate "manly health,” he advised: Get up early, wash with cold water, climb trees, grow beards... more »

Flaubert lived in revolutionary times. It left him with scorn for political movements and the chronic delusions that enable them ... more »

Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil: Critics saw them as "pitiless," "icy," "clinical." They pursued heartlessness as an intellectual style... more »

Conventional, proper, unthreatening: That's the Jane Austen we think we know. But modern readers misunderstand her. She was a radical, and not a secret one... more »

In September 1939, the first days of World War II, Londoners slaughtered 400,000 of their own pets. A curious moral logic was at work... more »

Ever get the feeling that tech companies took your solitude and monetized it? They have. We've forgotten the value of being alone... more »

Hemingway, the spartan minimalist, and Dos Passos, the cinematic maximalist, became friends in 1923. They parted as enemies at a train station in 1937... more »

We think we know more than our ancestors, but as individuals we know less. We comfort ourselves with an illusion of knowledge... more »

Why did Les Misérables, a 500,000-word novel composed over 16 years, conquer the world? Because Victor Hugo, who believed in progress, told a story of irrepressible optimism... more »

Stalin once thought that under Communism alcohol could be abolished because people would be so happy they wouldn’t want it. Moonshine flourished in the USSR... more »

Arthur Krystal isn't so much literary critic with theories to peddle as an enthusiast with pleasures to share and enemies to fend off... more »

Czeslaw Milosz, who witnessed Stalinist repression firsthand, is remembered as a political writer. Yet he always chafed against the label... more »

Snobs: we hate them, but can we live without them? Insolence, ostentation, and the cultivation of arbitrary superiority help make us all who we are... more »

More than Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford, it was Norman Bel Geddes, a theater designer turned industrial designer, who invented 20th-century America... more »

Merriam-Webster's offices aren't velvet-curtained or oak-trimmed. They're less refined: drug deals in the parking lot, bullet holes in the safety glass ... more »

Behold the Thought Leader, a thinker so deft and deluded he can flatter great wealth even as he pretends to challenge it... more »

Good monsters, like good art, replace conventional ideas with something weird, troubling, and potentially heroic... more »

In Making It, Norman Podhoretz, consumed as much by the qualities of failure as by his own success, came to realize what he was against: "losers"... more »

How biography works. It isn't merely a mode of historical inquiry, “but an act of imaginative faith,” says Richard Holmes, who has spent his life pursuing subjects through the past... more »

Jürgen Habermas has devoted his career to the study of democracy. But is his version of it premised on naïve, idealized, unrealistic notions?... more »

The barfly turned graphomaniac, the hoarder turned diarist. “When an ordinary person writes exhaustively about her own life, it can be something of a nightmare”... more »

Charles Ives envisioned an eclectic gathering of diverse sounds. A century later, it's come to pass: rock, gamelan, hip hop, salsa, jazz, classical, klezmer: It's all one playlist... more »

When critics look in the mirror. Memoirs from Lee Siegel and Daphne Merkin show that book reviewers, too, can suffer from debt and depression... more »

Essays & Opinions

For the Third Reich, dominance culturally was as important as politically and economically. The Nazis pursued a new aesthetics for a new order -- and showed how swiftly liberal principles can be hollowed out... more »

Fifty years after her genteel verse graced the Yale Younger Poets series, Adrienne Rich had become a dissident. She hadn’t exactly chosen poetry in the first place... more »

Martin Luther, unfiltered. He lived in a bachelor’s chaos and hated Jews, papists, and Calvinists, among others. Then he married a runaway nun who brewed excellent beer... more »

There will be cats. Murakami novels feature felines, detective heroes, and creepy sex. Readers are so hooked on the formula that the variations hardly matter... more »

For modern interpreters, Greek tragedy boils down to lessons of power — how to get and keep it. And sexual politics, of course... more »

Imagination, idealism, an urge for self-transcendence: Why prominent intellectuals have been so willing to support terrible regimes ... more »

Graduate school is unkind to mind and body. To retain some health, go on dates. Have sex. Come to think of it, the world of online dating is a lot like to the academic job market... more »

The Passion of Michel Foucault. He was a surrealist, masochist, militant, Maoist, reformist, structuralist, comrade, and lover. He was also suicide-obsessed and hard to ignore... more »

Veronica Forrest-Thomson wrote one volume of criticism before dying at 27. Her ideas are so central that we’ve lost sight of her... more »

Laura Kipnis goes in search of that rare thing, a memoir of midlife with no epiphanies and no life lessons. Nothing’s figured out and nothing gets better ... more »

Though seen as titans of the literary left, Jameson, Eagleton, and Raymond Williams were more concerned with scholarship than with social intervention. Do they belong to the right?... more »

Anger is a popular emotion. It is seen as an engine of progress, a check on injustice. But it also pollutes democratic politics and is of dubious value in both life and the law, says Martha Nussbaum... more »

How cool is cool itself? Not very. It's been the preoccupation of less-than-first-rate writers, shoddy thinkers, and poseurs in general... more »

Since Hegel, philosophers have declared the end of art, meaning that no further progress is possible. In that sense, it’s a good thing: Art is now free to be anything... more »

Why do Japanese audiences adore Woody Allen films? Because Jewish humor has become a marker of elite sophistication... more »

Writers once sought silence, exile, and cunning. Today they seek dialogue, community, and workshopping. What's lost when writers are afraid to stand alone?... more »

Canons are formed through critical consensus. Yet consider this: None of the five most profitable films are canonical. You've probably seen them, but don't feel guilty... more »

Satan's emissary, cunning fox, cold-blooded destroyer: That's the conventional view of Machiavelli. But was his advice in The Prince really meant to be followed?... more »

Edgar Allan Poe is known for his supernatural horror and detective stories. But in his final major work, Eureka, he turned to cosmology — and was uncannily prescient... more »

Art is rooted in emotions. So what happens when algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Mozart, Picasso, or Shakespeare? ... more »

Nostalgia used to be considered a disease; causes, symptoms, and cures were debated by doctors. Now it's a cultural condition, but no less dangerous... more »

"As a writer, my principal observation about why other writers fail is that they are in too much of a hurry," says Malcolm Gladwell. "I don’t think you can write a good book in two years."... more »

That $1,200 margarita? Blame late capitalism. A $400 internet-connected juicer? Also late capitalism. Fancy lettuces? You guessed it. It's the buzzword that explains everything — or nothing... more »

Science succeeds because it's evidence-based, which has built public trust. That's now at risk, for reasons technical and cultural... more »

George Steiner grew up trilingual, soaked in high culture. Few critics or scholars have been as wide-ranging or provocative. He is the last of the great elitists... more »

In 1973, Jerry Saltz was 22, full of himself and making art obsessively. He battled self-doubt and lost. But he learned how to be a critic... more »

The idea that free speech is contrary to social inclusiveness represents a pernicious shift in Western culture. Stifling hate speech does not safeguard the oppressed. It empowers the oppressors... more »

"To believe that change is driven by technology, when technology is driven by humans, renders force and power invisible," says Jill Lepore... more »

In 2010, Google said it would scan all 129,864,880 books in the world, building the greatest library that's ever existed. It failed, sort of  ... more »

Nabokov was self-involved, even callous. His fiction isn't praised for its compassion. But was he so uncaring as to leave a wounded man to die?... more »

Why are we still interested in the story of the Benson family? Sure, it includes eccentrics, Victorian patriarchs, and repressed sexuality. But also: That clan couldn’t stop writing... more »

We suffer from “nature-deficit disorder” and the accompanying pretenses of citified life. Take a cue from Hobbes, Rousseau, Einstein, Dickens, and Hazlitt: Take a hike... more »

Once upon a time, a bar-brawling but talented malcontent could make a career as a professor. Consider the improbable 30-year employment of Harry Crews... more »

Transhumanists tend to see religion as a threat. But the movement's appeal is fundamentally religious, a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology... more »

A dyspeptic crank? The music critic Virgil Thomson slept through performances, dismissed beloved works, and reviewed his own compositions. Yet he changed classical music for the better... more »

When Empson went East. The literary critic, booted from Cambridge after condoms were discovered in his room, left for Japan and China. It was a professional calamity that proved fortunate ... more »

Against celebrity profiles. They’re manufactured, devoid of connection between subject and writer, and fail to reveal the self-delusions and rationalizations that make people interesting... more »

What makes a critical judgment true? It's a question that preoccupied T.S. Eliot, whose case for the proper function of criticism is brilliant, angry, and unsatisfying... more »

"We’re in a culture with very few real friends, and an enormous number of unctuous sales people who will adopt the language of friendship, care and help.” Mark Greif on our dishonest times... more »

The marketplace of ideas is now the Ideas Industry. This has empowered "Thought Leaders" and undermined public intellectuals... more »

“Dead of the world, unite!” urged the Russian school of cosmism in the 1920’s. How dissimilar is today’s refrain from Silicon Valley: “Immortality now!”?... more »

In 1961, a Vienesse bibliophile purchased a mysterious text for $24,500. The Voynich Manuscript remains an enigma. It isn't a modern forgery, but it may be a medieval hoax... more »

Long ago the ideas of equality and a common humanity were unthinkable; today they are the default position of almost all of us. How did that happen?... more »

Is style ancillary to an artist’s genius or fundamental to it? Consider Georgia O’Keeffe’s silk dresses, blouses, shoes, along with her self-crafted persona... more »

The writing of John Berger can seem kitschy, deluded, masculinist, creepy. But in his strangeness were kindness and sincerity. He sought above all to help us see more clearly... more »

How to think like a philosopher: Consider contrary cases, test grandiose claims with extreme examples, accept that it’s rare to prove anything conclusively... more »

Freud envisioned civilization’s advances bringing not happiness but unassuaged guilt. That's one explanation for the prestige of victims in the contemporary world... more »

Granta asks, Is travel writing dead? Silly question, says Geoff Dyer. Dickens, Dickinson, and Dillard can all be placed in the genre. What writing isn’t travel writing?... more »

Darwin worked a few hours a day. Trollope wrote only between 5 to 8 a.m. — and published 47 novels. They weren't accomplished despite their leisurely schedules; they were accomplished because of them... more »

Picture your ideal cultural critics. Can they weigh in on poetry, film, literature? Speak multiple languages? Write with wit and a political edge? Didn’t think so... more »