New Books

In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did these instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »

What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »

The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »

Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »

Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »

To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »

Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »

Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »

The first generation of charismatic leaders. From the start, democracy internalized a new form of Caesarist temptation... more »

To think like Shakespeare, enter the Elizabethan classroom, where curiosity, intellectual agility, and rhetorical felicity were paramount... more »

Meet the Mozarts. Their collective outings were grim and their correspondence scatological. And yet the family was gloriously alive... more »

The first modern philosopher. Kierkegaard's "massive oeuvre can be read as one long, compulsive, maddening attempt to understand who he was"... more »

What's college for? According to Zena Hitz, "much of what counts as education in the contemporary scene is the cultivation of correct opinions"... more »

Andy Warhol's artistic legacy is secure, in part because he recognized the durability of cynicism. Nihilism never goes out of fashion... more »

In the quixotic nature of writing — a craft that gently drives its practitioners mad — lies the reason it matters so much... more »

The Churchills were famously terrible employers — Winston's wandering around naked didn’t help. Many a cook and kitchen maid left in tears; one reputedly went mad... more »

“No serious Black intellectual today thinks anti-Black racism is not a matter of life and death. The question is still the old one: What is to be done?”... more »

What to make of Wordsworth? For every line of his that intones the still, sad music of humanity, another drones the shrill, mad music of inanity... more »

Charles Péguy was neither a modernist nor an antimodernist. Rather, he was something quite distinctive, instructive, and relevant to our times: an amodernist... more »

Believing falsehoods is one problem; not knowing the truth is another. To understand our moment, we must understand the anatomy of knowledge and ignorance... more »

In Martin Hägglund’s worldview, socialism is spiritual. But does that deepen our understanding of politics or distract from it?... more »

The last of the Enlightenment intellectuals. John Maynard Keynes pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design... more »

The business of being Beethoven. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how much tickets should cost, how to attract rich sponsors, how to promote himself... more »

At his best, T.S. Eliot said a lot by saying relatively little. Unfortunately, he was not always — or even often — at his best... more »

As Martin Amis wrote, art “celebrates life,” increasing “the store of what might be lost.” Can art — at the same time — lament what will be lost in climate change?... more »

A pain “unlimited in both intensity and duration.” For George Scialabba, depression seemed as if it would never end, and life became an eternal, excruciating present... more »

Culture, identity, psychology — Instagram takes the content of our private lives to digitize, feed through algorithms, and repackage for our consumption... more »

“She was a good old stick,” said Orwell, when his first wife died at the age of 39. But Eileen Blair’s story was more interesting than that... more »

To read Seamus Heaney is to experience a downward and backward pull. What drew him to bogs, slime, and ritualized violence?... more »

Glamour is a form of persuasion, says Virginia Postrel, and jet-age glamour changed the way people think about the relationship between humans and technology... more »

The bunker is one of the oldest building types made by humans, dating to around 1200 BC. Its dark charisma endures... more »

All is not minimalism. According to Kyle Chayka’s recent book, Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Marx all inform modern minimalist lifestyles. Not quite... more »

Why do people swim? "To witness metamorphosis, in our environment, in ourselves. To swim is to accept all the myriad conditions of life"... more »

The scientist J.B.S. Haldane is best remembered as an example of how someone so smart can be so dumb when enthralled by ideology... more »

How to be alone. Solitude is not about alienation, isolation, or even physical surroundings. It's a state of mind... more »

Innovation is prized but misunderstood. We don't how it happens or how to nurture it. We can't even agree on what it is... more »

Driverless cars are not primarily about saving lives. They are about eliminating contingency and replacing it with machine-generated certainty. That's terrifying... more »

All shall be saved. Hell is a vestige of Christendom, not of Christianity itself. David Bentley Hart explains... more »

For Patricia Churchland, conscience is rooted in evolutionary biology; moral choices are explained away by neuroscience. Raymond Tallis isn’t buying it... more »

Essays & Opinions

In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-Prone Joseph Banks helped it earn that reputation... more »

There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »

Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »

Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »

Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »

Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »

Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »

Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »

John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »

Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult to trace... more »

What exactly distinguishes charismatic democratic rulers from charismatic authoritarians? As a new book reveals, the line is vanishingly thin... more »

We are witnessing a shift in how we think about free speech. Stanley Fish is an intellectual godfather of this moment... more »

E.M. Forster’s funeral was an odd affair. Religion was banned, Beethoven piped in, the procession of cars was halted when a Rolls-Royce got stuck... more »

Intellectual life is beset by a climate of censoriousness and self-censorship; Twitter gets the final say. Thomas Chatterton Williams explains the Harper’s letter... more »

“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »

Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »

Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »

What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »

The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »

Before “prestige” TV, the medium was considered the “idiot box.” With new shows like Floor Is Lava, the pendulum is swinging back again... more »

The plight of the plague specialist. As a pestilence once again rains down on humanity, what good is literary expertise in disease and disaster?... more »

What is this cancel culture? Is it even a real thing? It's complicated, says Ross Douthat, who offers a guide to the perplexed... more »

Irving Fisher and the quantification of everything. The economist died in 1947, but he anticipated the temper of our own times... more »

How did Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, achieve such success as socialism was in decline? He was a master of argument-driven synthesis... more »

Covid-19 has exposed Anglo-America as woefully lacking in crucial ways. In rebuilding, the world will turn to Germany, Japan, and South Korea... more »

YouTube, as Nicholson Baker explains, is an “indispensable, life-enhancing tool, and also a source of poisonous neo-medieval yammering”... more »

“Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.” Patricia Lockwood shares her notes from living with coronavirus... more »

A hunger for auditory escape. Now 40 years old, the Walkman was the device that taught us social distancing. Its legacy lives on today... more »

Gregory Bateson was one of the most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture. His ideas are attuned to the peculiar dysfunctions of our own time... more »

Matisse was a lover of women. Karen Wilkins explains the layered richness of his response to the female body... more »

The melancholy of reading Max Weber resonates today, maybe more than ever, even if he offers little illumination and less consolation... more »

“Britain’s a world/By itself,” says a typically villainous Shakespearean character. The Bard has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet... more »

The miseries of the male libido were obsessions of Bellow, Roth, and Updike. Now, if male novelists take up the subject at all, they force sex into a neat moral framework... more »

Max Weber’s troubles were at least in part sexual — castration was discussed as a cure. That changed when he met Else Jaffé in his later years... more »

Do theoretical asides — like those in The Magic Mountain — happen on the level of plot? The novel of ideas is full of such riddles... more »

"Time exists, as love exists, as a myth: real because contingent, real because constructed, a catch-all term for phenomena bigger"... more »

The Point, n+1, Jacobin — today’s little magazines all suffer from the same flaw: a congenital addiction to seriousness... more »

Henry Fielding, Adam Smith, and other 18th-century intellectuals found no food finer than the potato. It was Enlightenment superfood — the kale of its time... more »

“The cat of the wood,” “the stag of the cabbages” — if there is magic in this world, no small part of it lies with that majestic creature, the hare... more »

Was the chilly stroll by Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929 the moment that analytic and Continental philosophy truly split?... more »

What has the coronavirus revealed? For many, the answer is: “Whatever I thought was wrong with the world before, well, this proves it”... more »

Can American racism be seen in the same terms as the murderous ideology of the Nazis and be similarly discredited? No, such a comparison only confuses... more »

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1965, in words that echo today... more »

In his 90s, Habermas is increasingly consumed by questions of faith and religion. His latest book spans more than 3,000 years and 1,700 pages... more »

Loud, constant parakeet chatter, the squawking of crows – there is no such thing as bad birdsong, a welcome respite from self-absorption... more »

How to decide which statues can remain standing and which should be toppled because they honor racists? Julian Baggini offers a rational... more »

“The intractable problem for thinking beyond the nation-state is that its imputed obsolescence can neither be easily forced nor messianically awaited”... more »

Is an exhausted liberalism being supplanted by a successor ideology that's apparent everywhere? Ross Douthat makes the case... more »

Descartes argued that developing grand philosophical visions requires meditative solitude. Is such work incompatible with being a parent?... more »

“The real point about Communists,” wrote Vivian Gornick decades ago, is that they “were like everybody else, only more so.” Her point is finally sinking in... more »