New Books

"There are two ways to write didactic fiction: with a straight face or playing it for laughs. Rushdie has always gone for the laughs"... more »

The “Outrider” tradition of peripatetic experimental artists extends from Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to the poet Anne Waldman... more »

Was John Keats a thinker similar to Karl Marx, but working in a radically different mode? Jacobin makes the case... more »

What constitutes an act of mourning? For Jonathan Lear, it is an attempt to turn loss into gain by imaginative alchemy... more »

Hemingway had four wives, Bellow five, Mailer six. Not all literary marriages are alike; each is unhappy in its own way ... more »

Epicurus was no debauched hedonist. The greatest pleasure, he thought, wasn't fame or fortune, but freedom from anxiety... more »

The modern man is struggling. Do his below-par outcomes deserve attention and policy solutions?... more »

Chekhov's stories have small titles — “A Trifle,” “A Misfortune,” “A Trivial Incident" — but carry big stakes... more »

Taking African agency seriously. Exaggerating the influence of colonialism, Olúfemi Táíwò argues, can disrespect Africans... more »

Demon of distraction. For early monks, inattentiveness was an original sin of the mind. The war to concentrate was a primordial struggle ... more »

For transhumanists, the replacement of humanity by a better, more intelligent species would be a worthy upgrade... more »

Surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, theosophy, Jewish mysticism: Kafka managed to transcend any philosophical movement... more »

Why did European music thrive in the 19th century? Because it wasn’t yet overinstitutionalized or overcredentialed... more »

Kathy Acker’s writing is allergic to any stable narratives about how women, artists, or outsiders might “find their identity”... more »

Heinrich Päs’s “monism” combines quantum physics, general relativity, hallucinogens, and the Book of Genesis ... more »

Cormac McCarthy’s latest work ditches his liturgical, ecstatic style for a more demanding and heartless mode of inquiry... more »

Mozart and Beethoven were freelance musicians. Two centuries later, they would have disappeared into a university and never heard from again ... more »

Janet Malcolm, masterly interviewer and cagey interviewee, was uniquely aware of the dangers of a tape recorder... more »

“I’m not here to demonize the petroleum industry.” So begins a fundamentally misguided work of environmental history ... more »

Kafka the diarist reveals a tormented man with a robust appetite for living... more »

A new biography skewers Norman Mailer as unreadable and hilariously terrible, but it ignores his best work... more »

Goethe, Schiller, and the practical realities and frequent absurdities of philosophizing amid the inescapable messiness of life... more »

Every Janet Malcolm story is, in a sense, the story of the construction of the story. Such is the case in her posthumous memoir... more »

Historians rightfully challenge misconceptions of America. But the nation’s myths can play a positive role, too... more »

The exclamation mark has been around for centuries. But we have not always known how to use it... more »

Lost languages. Linear Elamite was finally decrypted last summer. But being able to read a script is not the same as understanding the language itself... more »

How did Agatha Christie take the detective story to a new level? By injecting it with playfulness and intrigue ... more »

Joseph Roth, a writer in perpetual motion, was most at home in a Viennese cafe. And most at ease when drunk ... more »

The artist's studio, that "noisome cockpit of lust, crime, and virtuosity," has rarely been a place of serene creativity... more »

The search for paradise, where the domestic and the divine appear to meet, has a long history here on earth ... more »

“Acknowledging that we are designed to fail might lead us to live more joyfully and meaningfully, whatever our … ultimate fate”... more »

As a critic of the militarization of U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War and beyond, George Kennan had few if any peers... more »

Roman London. From the years 43 to 60 AD, it went from a backwater to a prosperous city to a burnt ruin... more »

The culture of the dandy and the flâneur also gave us the feuilleton. Joseph Roth was a master of the form... more »

For your ideas to succeed, said Friedrich Hayek, you have to outlive those who hate them. He died at the height of his fame... more »

What makes a book a book? Durability. Prophecies the book's demise have always given rise to new kind of books ... more »

Dickens and the rock star Prince shared a striking fashion sense, verbal lyricism, an addiction to audiences, and a lifelong engagement with Christianity. Does it matter?... more »

What are the best scholarly books of 2022? Anthony Grafton, Martha S. Jones, Matthew Desmond, and others make their picks... more »

Conceived as a vanity project, the library of Alexandria acquired a personality of its own ... more »

Essays & Opinions

The real controversy behind the film The Woman King? The poor state of our knowledge of African history... more »

How does the Philippines — a nation with at least 150 languages — read José Rizal, the national poet and novelist? In English... more »

Some clever-seeming, rich young men have renounced reading books. Their moral vision is severely lacking... more »

ChatGPT has prompted hand-wringing that "the college essay is dead." The obit is late: The college essay died years ago... more »

Full of architectural fantasies, the plans for Neom, a new city in Saudi Arabia, reveal a dystopia in the desert... more »

Vsevolod Garshin, Russia’s most underrated writer, was both an incorrigible idealist and a skeptic paralyzed by doubt ... more »

The archive mole toils in obscure used-book stores, poring over sad-looking, dog-eared paperbacks... more »

“Matisse beguiles and bewilders. He renders tree trunks in incandescent primary colors or turns the view out a window into a black void” ... more »

Most kids’ books uplift and delight, or at least instruct. Then there’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day... more »

Step aside, Sartre. It is not an exaggeration to say that Karl Jaspers is the forgotten father of existentialism ... more »

Thomas Kuhn highlighted the differences among scientific communities — and then emphasized the similarities within those differences... more »

Do not fear ChatGPT. It won’t replace human intelligence, but it might provide new starting points for our thinking... more »

The workaholics of Jewish Currents magazine ponder a difficult question: What is the Sabbath for?... more »

“To hell with culture,” argued Herbert Read. In a “natural society” there would be no artists, only workers ... more »

Literary criticism has professionalized. Its reward? The pettiness, narcissism, and insecurity of its practitioners... more »

Public spitting, defecation, urination, masturbation — shamelessness was part of Diogenes the Cynic’s philosophical strategy ... more »

Anyone who cares about the origins of ideas must take an interest in mathematics. Yet on this front, the willful ignorance of intellectuals passes for cultivation ... more »

Enter the conductrice. Male conductors claim physical, forceful authority over a symphony. Does having women in the role change that?... more »

English prose used to be ornate and elegant. Now it is simple and minimal, denuded of nuance, elegance, intricacy, and originality... more »

How to win a poetry prize: Get a B.A. from Harvard, an M.F.A. from Iowa, and befriend Carl Phillips and Robert Pinsky... more »

"Our language is entangled with our living," says Joseph M. Keegin. "Learning how to read — in the fullest sense of what literacy entails — means learning how to live"... more »

"We write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us," said Italo Calvino, who spent a large part of his life in the written world... more »

Reading great literature sent a shiver between Nabokov’s shoulder blades. You won’t get that thrill out of reading from a sense of obligation... more »

Universities are now governed by “learning outcomes” and box-ticking bureaucracies. What education is for can’t be so neatly defined... more »

Achilles tore at his hair; Edvard Munch painted blank faces. The aesthetics of pain have varied enormously ... more »

Upon graduation from the École Normale Supérieure, Simone Weil was poised to join the intellectual elite. Then she took a job as a factory worker ... more »

For Christopher Lasch, progressive optimism was merely a form of wishful thinking. But he wasn't without hope... more »

Annie Ernaux's work suggests that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction matters less than how literature interprets memory ... more »

Lionel Trilling's prose could be maddeningly vague, underscoring the difficulty of discerning his politics ... more »

Mathematical models are ubiquitous and widely persuasive. Do we lean on them too heavily?... more »

When Caroline Schlegel fell in love with the much younger Friedrich Schelling, her husband didn’t mind: “Her next lover is still wearing a little sailor suit!”... more »

Is Emily in Paris one of the most insipid pieces of television ever devised — or a self-aware and withering work of media criticism? ... more »

Ode to booze: Singing in groups has long had something to do with good drinking. Or drinking to the good... more »

The indiscriminate embrace of figurative painting is not without undesirable consequences, notably artists who cannot in fact paint... more »

Terry Eagleton rereads the Biblical story of Christmas, savoring the anomalies, oddities, and joys ... more »

Heidegger warned of how technology imposes a particular order on reality. What would he make of AI-produced culture?... more »

"We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities." Russell Jacoby explains... more »

Paul Tough: “Education is always a political act, but its politics can be complex and tangled, and they are often hidden from view” ... more »

What’s up with Cormac McCarthy’s literary emphasis on food? It’s a reminder we’re all linked to “the meat wheel of life”... more »

The overlap between masturbation and fascism has a definite genealogy. Matthew Crawford traces it ... more »

Philip Rieff, doom-mongering prophet, was also attuned to inner life's pleasurable intensities... more »

Justin E.H. Smith, well into midlife, has had his last swallow of alcohol. That particular search for transcendence is over... more »

Readers of literary biographies, beware: Authors can be so much smaller, so much less interesting than their fiction... more »

Isolation, loneliness, and a “friendship recession.” Robert Putnam was right to worry about the decline of social community ... more »

“The morality and lifestyle of the Cynics are one big show of the middle finger to social convention. They are the punks of the ancient world”... more »

A myth of modernism: The books are great because they're difficult, and difficult because they're great ... more »

Elite universities are bastions of wokeness. Or: Elite universities are finishing schools for the upper crust ... more »

Old age is full of physical and emotional burdens. But for some artists, it's a period of creative liberation ... more »

The Lady Chatterley myth. The sexual revolution, which drove D.H. Lawrence’s story to prominence, is under attack... more »

Ikea particleboard, gray sweatpants, ergonomic gaming chairs — “we live in undeniably ugly times,” argues n+1. But why is that?... more »