New Books

Paul Gauguin abandoned a wife, five children, and Paris for French Polynesia. "The accomplishments of the selfish are real" ... more »

“All civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear — but, like any repression, waste returns in fantastical forms”... more »

The history of free speech is a history of accidents — reforms that gave rise to unintended consequences... more »

What made Mark Twain so irascible, profound, and unpredictable? A new 1,100 page biography has no clue... more »

Is Trumpism fascism? The question has caused a deep rift among left-wing historians... more »

“I believe in Spinoza’s God,” Einstein said in 1929. What exactly he meant has been debated ever since... more »

At the center of the midcentury literati were the Paget Sisters, identical twins who were courted by Camus and Sartre... more »

In 1691, the Athenian Mercury started soliciting questions from readers. Was this the birth of the modern advice columnist?  ... more »

What Gutenberg wrought. It seems unfair to pin the horrors and glories of modernity on one man, though it won’t stop us from trying... more »

Helen Garner went from being a plagiarist of her own life to an acclaimed celebrator of the poetic quotidian... more »

Cynthia Ozick and the art of the essay: Exactitude and sublimity coupled with melancholy and playfulness... more »

Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and the secret notebook. What does a find in the Yale library reveal about the famous couple and their art?... more »

Ever since the 16th century, reformers have tried to simplify the English language. They've rarely succeeded... more »

The pressure to build a personal brand is one of the great pathologies of the past three decades... more »

The rogue anthropologist David Graeber swung for the fences — and did not let strikeouts deter him... more »

Didion on Zoloft: “It made me feel for about an hour that I’d lost my organizing principle, rather like having a planter's punch before lunch in the tropics”... more »

An age of moral and material panic, of fury and anxiety, requires a shrewd chronicler. Enter David Rieff. ... more »

It's been said that a good book should be interesting, memorable, and re-readable. Which 20th-century novels stack up?... more »

Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »

The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »

In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »

“It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »

Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »

Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »

Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »

The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »

The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »

The evolution of teeth. What began in the ocean half a billion years ago has led us to the dentist's chair... more »

For Agnes Callard, the philosophical life demands relentless self-questioning. But she has little to say about the conditions that make such inquiry possible... more »

James C. Scott called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’” Why were his ideas so compelling to libertarians?... more »

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was both artist and prophet. He was far more persuasive as the former than as the latter... more »

Melancholy need not be understood as fatalism or decadent withdrawal. For W.G. Sebald, it was a form of resistance... more »

"People tell me I get overexcited," Philip Hoare tells us. "Well, bollocks to that." When it comes to William Blake, his enthusiasm knows no bounds... more »

At the Great Siege of Malta, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights were suicidally brave in the defense of a barren island. Why?... more »

The critic Andrea Long Chu gets away with baggy associative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance... more »

Henry James in Palm Beach. “Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand”... more »

The prevailing view of Hegel is that he regarded history as a simplistic march of progress. The prevailing view is wrong... more »

Czeslaw Milosz agonized over whether to defect from Stalinist Poland: “What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile”... more »

There were methods for slowing Big Tech’s overhaul of our social world — but they are too little, too late... more »

Essays & Opinions

Only total, all-consuming maternal dedication will give you a happy, healthy child — and other myths of mothering... more »

“Gone are the days when an insular clique of critics had the ability to make or break artists’ careers — and good riddance”... more »

Poets and parties. Asked at a soiree if he was having fun, T.S. Eliot replied, “Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all”... more »

Demonology. Look back through history, and mankind’s demons all sort of appear the same. Why is that?... more »

“Never leave me alone with poets,” and other demands from the few men who've edited The New Yorker ... more »

How to hop trains. A comprehensive guide exists, but you have to look for it in the right places... more »

“How can we renew the potential of the university to serve as a space that shelters criticism and literary judgment and aesthetic education?”... more »

“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate”... more »

The case for mortality often argues that living forever – the boredom! – is worse than certain death. Nonsense, says Kieran Setiya... more »

The history of the CIA. Agents ate with Mobutu, wrote radio jingles for anti-Communist politicians, and bought cars for Mexican ministers’ girlfriends... more »

Students know that relying on AI is bad for them, but they can’t stop using it. Shortcuts are easy to rationalize... more »

Andrea Long Chu's second thoughts: “The strategy of couching the most challenging claims in the language of outlandish provocation appears dubious to me now”... more »

Since academics started studying science fiction in the 1970s, “there has been a sense that science fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right”... more »

To understand where UFOs come from, look to the collective unconscious rather than another planet... more »

M.F.A. programs were long dominated by evangelists for Raymond Carver. Thank goodness for the overdue recognition of Lucia Berlin... more »

America’s most literary town. In the poetry mecca of Iowa City roughly 1 of every 75 residents is a writer... more »

Concerts of classical music are often long, slow, and even boring affairs. In a sense, that’s the point... more »

Henry James, America’s first international writer, couldn’t leave home behind –— and couldn’t abide it as a permanent home... more »

NASA has spent decades looking for alien intelligence in the far reaches of the universe. But should we be looking much closer to home?... more »

What does it mean to win an award for translation? The International Booker Prize for fiction in translation doesn’t seem to know... more »

Behold, the new Frick. Post-renovation, the museum has nearly twice as much to see. What’s not to love?... more »

Who has written the best American poetry of the 21st century? Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Ocean Vuong... more »

Absorbed in close textual analysis, literary scholars overlook the simple joys of the plot twist and the big reveal... more »

Edward Said gave the Palestinian position its gravitas. Now, at Columbia, his intellectual legacy is under attack... more »

Claire Messud on Lolita: “In this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass”... more »

The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz commemorated suffering. But he never abandoned a fragile sense of hope... more »

A generation of students raised on an ethic of sexual egalitarianism struggles to confront a key theme in Othello: jealousy... more »

Awash in freedom and material abundance, Americans are mired in boredom and intellectual dullness... more »

"The college essay is absurd and unfair," writes Yascha Mounk. "It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny"... more »

Learning for learning’s sake. College is being portrayed through the narrowest, most vocational lens. That’s a travesty... more »

Perry Link: "People who ask me about my blacklisting usually don’t imagine that there are benefits to the status, but there are"... more »

“I like genre fiction for the same reason I like … the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: Things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake”... more »

$10 from The New Leader, $100 from Commentary. James Baldwin’s magazine writing career had humble origins... more »

The most stable repository of civilization worth has long been books. That era is ending. What comes next?... more »

Critics loved Evelyn Waugh’s dark comedy and wicked social satire. Then, to their dismay, Brideshead Revisited appeared... more »

Christ and Campbell’s soup. Did Andy Warhol's faith have more influence over his art than his critics realize?... more »

John Cage instructed his composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” be played “as slowly as possible.” The world’s longest organ recital will take 639 years. ... more »

“My whole life,” wrote Bruce Chatwin, “has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific”... more »

In a famous scene in Moby-Dick, Ishmael encounters “a long, limber, portentous, black” artwork. Could AI recreate it?... more »

Judith Butler: “Is there a proposed criterion by which ‘extremist’ gender ideology can be distinguished from the non-extremist kind?”... more »

We seek rest, yet are wary of its implicit boredom. This dilemma is resolved, perhaps, only by cats... more »

The homogenous, aging American psychoanalytic community has begun emphasizing social injustice. The result: chaos... more »

Hunter-gatherer societies were much more violent than our own, but much of that is due to a relatively small number of prehistoric psychopaths... more »

One early human tool gave rise to our leap in intelligence: not the sharpened stone, but the handbag, for carrying food and babies... more »

For a powerful account of the human condition, writes Marilynne Robinson, turn not to “anemic anthropology,” but to Calvinism... more »

Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »

Today we treat novels as salubrious stress relievers — kale smoothies for the soul. That overlooks their dark, diabolical potency... more »

The necessity of Martha Nussbaum. Her philosophy is never divorced from the messy, complex, and sometimes painful stuff of real life... more »

Alice Gribbin: “Those who deem the nude in art a ‘sex object’ betray themselves as prudish and crass”... more »

What can the memoir of madness accomplish? It can force us to reckon with ugly things, not because they are titillating, but because they are true... more »