New Books

It’s tempting to think that enchantment ended with the Enlightenment. But what of Isaac Newton’s alchemy, the Frankfurt School’s occult leanings, Americans’ belief in demonic possession?... more »

A strange first job. After Oxford, Anthony Powell joined perhaps the only publishing house run by someone who hated books and considered authors “a natural enemy”... more »

The literature of identity can be self-obsessed, isolating, and overwhelmingly aggrieved. But it can also rally us to the cause of individual freedom... more »

Cy Twombly fell for Robert Rauschenberg, an Italian heiress, and, reportedly, his own assistant. His art, like his love life, was inscrutable... more »

George Scialabba is a mind out of time. His temper — a radical who demonstrates the virtues of conservatism — is the very opposite of what passes for serious thought these days... more »

Gandhi: Behind the cuddly icon was a relentlessly counterintuitive thinker — self-sacrifice over self-interest, obligations over rights, dying over killing... more »

The Iliad and Odyssey shaped behavior in the Greek world. How so? One example: they tarnished the reputation of daytime sex for well over a millennium... more »

Unambiguous identities – and the politics of identity – may be illusions. But when they are widely accepted, illusions become very powerful social facts... more »

Life has sped up. We ruthlessly divide our time into efficient units. We even walk faster than we used to. Time to slow down... more »

Work: The Greeks reviled it; the Judeo-Christian tradition thought it could lead to redemption. We think it’s simply what one does... more »

For Marilynne Robinson, the culprit behind our ills is disbelief, which neatly fits her theological disposition. But are we really suffering a surfeit of rationality... more »

The average person consumes 100,000 words a day. But are we paying close attention to what we read?... more »

Translators should themselves be artists, argues a new book. The goal: not just to accurately recreate a work of literature, but to enhance it... more »

“I did not feel guilty,” said Doris Lessing of the children she abandoned in Africa. But she also compared guilt to an iceberg, with “ninety-nine hundredths hidden”... more »

Young Oscar Wilde: Physically unprepossessing – overgrown, clumsy, “slab-faced” – he was nonetheless magnetic. But his talent was to annoy as much as to amuse... more »

The reluctant genius and the relentless promoter. Though Max Brod turned out his own books, his life was defined by the items he seized from the late Kafka’s desk... more »

Lionel Trilling's letters reveal a man who was deft, a bit dull, and often depressed. Above all, a man exquisitely attuned to small slights... more »

Yes, utopian projects deserve deep suspicion. Moral progress is, after all, fragile. But can our highest aspiration really be a purpose-free life?... more »

For 25 years, Irad Kimhi has perfected the résumé of an academic failure. Or is the philosopher a hidden giant hampered by his perfectionism?... more »

Plennie L. Wingo set out to walk around the world backward. He thought he’d strike it rich. Instead he got $4 and calves in the front of his legs... more »

Mike Davis: trucker, scholar, Marxist, expert on Turkish cinema. Now he's turned to the environment. His question: Who will build the ark?... more »

The history of the book does not begin with books. Chinese tortoise shells inscribed 3,000 years ago; Sumerian clay tablets with cuneiform scripts; knotted string records by Incan officials... more »

The advice column wasn’t born in America, but it flourished there. It's a kooky genre, coming with the promise — at least the hope — of setting ourselves right... more »

Jill Lepore has told a story of America — its sunny ideals and its darker realities. She rejected the urge to moralize but can't resist making stern judgments... more »

Bruce Lee's life was singular, abbreviated, and politically vacant. In the five decades since his death, he's become a multifarious symbol... more »

The battle over Kafka’s literary remains, fought by reasonable people with reasonable claims, never became a dark parable befitting the man himself... more »

Old age confers a certain freedom to say what one thinks. Donald Hall, who died this year, took full advantage... more »

Overconfident, often drunk, a foe to feminism, Norman Mailer is an odd fit for our time. As his work comes back into print, what does it mean for our culture?... more »

A publishing romance. James Laughlin was 6-foot-6, a handsome champion skier. Tennessee Williams was hunched over and wore dirty gray pants. The rest was history... more »

Nietzsche aimed to terrify rather than instruct. If his philosophy can be used as therapy, it’s through the ability to deliver an electric jolt to our souls... more »

Across nearly 50 books, Terry Eagleton has proven the adage that being usefully wrong is often better than being trivially right... more »

John Steinbeck was a bad husband. How bad? On his wedding night, he spent more than an hour on the phone with his mistress... more »

The aggression of Anthony Burgess. He skewered John le Carré, Stephen Hawking, and Umberto Eco. He even skewered himself... more »

Pretentious historicizing and sophistry on nearly every page. When Knausgaard writes about himself, it’s transcendent; when he writes about Hitler, it’s a train wreck... more »

Eleven-year-old Sally Horner was kidnapped in June 1948 and spent two years as the captive of an older man. Was this Nabokov's inspiration?... more »

A biographer’s plight: Philip Larkin was observant, romantic, and tender. He was also selfish, vulgar, and intolerant... more »

Every age offers its own cures for the previous generation’s supposedly poor parenting. The corrective du jour: Keep kids safe, but not too safe... more »

After the fall. What happened after jazz lost its cultural dominance, after it was sealed behind glass and rendered safe? It became more relevant... more »

Ancient Rome and Silicon Valley. In the former, a decline in power corresponded to a decline in ethics. In the latter, moral decline is accompanied by rising assets... more »

Essays & Opinions

An orthodoxy has taken hold of intellectual, cultural, and academic life. Its hallmarks: moral preening, lazy attitudinizing, and grim-faced virtue-signaling. The remedy: Marxists against wokeness... more »

"The university has nurtured many partisan causes to which its members can devote themselves, but there seem to be few partisans of the university itself left"... more »

What happens when our writers and thinkers express themselves through Facebook instead of on the page? Imagine Herzog in the era of the status update... more »

Precision "pervades our lives entirely, comprehensively, wholly," says Simon Winchester. But does the abstract concept have a precise history? Yes. It begins in 1776... more »

The pernicious social dynamics of the internet. We overshare about our personal lives and fail to understand those of others. Narcissism spreads; empathy vanishes... more »

What is the point of a bookish life? It's not to become knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. It is to become wiser... more »

When his aged father and newborn son died within a few years of each other, William James took an interest in "ghosts and clairvoyances and raps and messages from spirits"... more »

Women do the lion’s share of the book reading, editing, agenting, and buying. Still, we live in a literary culture that ignores women... more »

What was the Frankfurt School? Twentieth-century Europe had exposed civilization’s dark impulses. Did the new reality demand a new style of critique?... more »

Are you charming? (Hint: If you think you are, you’re probably not.) But what is charm? Easier to determine what it isn't... more »

Is the “grievance studies” hoax an effort to spotlight fashionable nonsense in the academy, a salutary correction, or a reactionary hit job?... more »

To be called a plagiarist is arguably the most existential accusation a writer can face. But perhaps borrowing is simply part of art... more »

The painter Sam Rothbort’s pacifist ideals led him to open a no-kill egg farm in the 1920s. His unlikely past: fighting in an armed resistance... more »

Soft murmurs, the shuffling of papers, the groan of book carts. Libraries have a steady, timeless feel, as if there we can live forever... more »

A new culture war. The moralizers are young, and their quest is for representation and social justice. The result? Dull art... more »

The apostle of pastiche, Leonard Bernstein flitted between high and low, sacred and profane, romanticism and kitsch. He was music’s public intellectual... more »

“It was tedious & futile & fatiguing. I found I was not at all frightened; only very bored & very weary.” Evelyn Waugh at war... more »

Alarmed at the progress of his research, the German nuclear physicist Felix Houtermans sent a secret telegram to America: “Hurry up. We are on the track”... more »

Most novels include one or two mediocrities flitting about. Those are B.D. McClay's people. She writes in praise of books that linger on the unattractive and uninteresting... more »

The demise of the Village Voice underscores the end of Greenwich Village bohemia — which invites a question about the beginning... more »

Banned Book Week is upon us. Does this annual orgy of inaccuracy, overstatement, and self-righteousness serve any purpose? Yes... more »

For some students, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is their introduction to what it means to think historically. It is a work of unalloyed certainty — and danger... more »

Does Ian Buruma's abrupt departure from the New York Review of Books mean that editors will be reluctant to take risks? Laura Kipnis is concerned... more »

Requiem for the Gutenberg mind. The cognitive virtues of reading on paper have developed over centuries. But now the practice is in its last gasp... more »

Books just keep getting longer. We conflate physical heft with artistic or intellectual merit. Thus our new golden age of the doorstop... more »

As a genre, horror has been with us since cave paintings. Why? It speaks to the darkness that haunts the human condition... more »

For Elizabeth Bishop, solitude was bliss. It meant comfort, adventure, and jaunts around “the islands of the Imagination”... more »

The death of the celebrity profile. It’s been supplanted by Instagram and the first-person essays of the famous. The loss to public culture is real... more »

Remembering the Village Voice. Drugs were delivered to the office, writers stabbed one another in the back, headlocks were occasionally employed... more »

An accursed genre of personal essay has now emerged: “My Year of Being Held Responsible for My Own Behavior”... more »

Maeve Brennan had lost it. She was sleeping next to a bathroom at The New Yorker and was giving away her money. All William Shawn would say was, “She’s a beautiful writer”... more »

When we are young, we are taught that art comes from lofty places — the pursuit of truth, beauty, sublimity. Nonsense. It comes from antipathy, insecurity, jealousy... more »

Literary biography is a strange addiction. Reading a life is like reading a poem — full of ambiguity. This is rarely truer than in the case of Pablo Neruda... more »

“Please be kind to Muriel.” A love affair gone wrong, intimate letters leaked — blackmail and betrayal hovered over both Muriel Spark’s fiction and her life... more »

The number of scientists is growing at a faster rate than the human population. Why haven't more scientists produced more discoveries?... more »

The aphorism is rhetorical algebra, an elevated and ambitious format. Too bad the genre’s current state is one of disgrace... more »

1968 and the fate of radical protest. The counterculture evaporated into New Age bromides and identity politics. But the core of resistance never entirely disappeared... more »

Higher education has historically been a bulwark against authoritarianism — or its pawn. What will it be this time?... more »

Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work, “Artist’s Shit,” featured 90 small, sealed tins. After they exploded in market value, poor autoclaving produced some literal explosions... more »

Self-help and the apostles of positivity. Why do we demand the most conspicuous happiness from people with the greatest reason to be unhappy?... more »

Modernism and the middle class once ruled the art world. No longer. The firewall between art and money has been abandoned... more »

Immortality can sound appealing, but what would it really entail? Tedium and banality — like being trapped in a never-ending cocktail party ... more »

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.” So explained Willa Cather, who, through uncompromising effort, wrote the Great American Novel... more »

When genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital Ronell’s grow like moss, or mold... more »

The Nietzsche wars have raged for more than a century. When a sunny, happier, and more literary Nietzsche threatened to take hold, the bad Nietzsche was never far behind... more »

Romanticism vs. romance novels. For Wordsworth, the genre was “sickly and stupid”; for Coleridge, it merited reading only in indolence... more »

Writing and reading online is an exercise in willful misunderstanding, impatience, and hostility. The result? The op-edization of everything... more »

As politics has become an exercise in drawing a bright line between those on the right and those in the wrong, Meghan Daum falls back in love with an old flame: nuance... more »

For some, socialism conjures the Soviet Union and the gulag; for others, Scandinavia and guaranteed income. What do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about socialism?... more »

For a rare group — Witold Gombrowicz, Anaïs Nin, perhaps Franz Kafka, especially John Cheever private diaries comprise their finest writing... more »