New Books

A new biography of Faulkner is “among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist” ... more »

Dürer prepared the way for modern art in two ways: by embracing existentialism, and by maniacally self-publicizing... more »

The 20th-century American novel is stuffed with stuff: baseballs, red wheelbarrows, and other bric-a-brac. What’s the point?... more »

Traversing the internet, Patricia Lockwood finds a surfeit of self-righteousness recorded for posterity  ... more »

The tragedy of Edward Said: By his life’s end, the causes for which he fought had been defeated... more »

Thorstein Veblen’s reputation for adultery has been exaggerated. But his relations with women did affect his career... more »

Simone Weil produced a fragmentary oeuvre, almost none of which appeared in her lifetime. Her posthumous mythology makes her hard to pin down  ... more »

Do terrible photographs make us feel real empathy, or make us more apathetic toward misery? ... more »

The New Journalism style long ago gave way to the cult of the personal essay. Rachel Kushner is bringing it back  ... more »

Consider the strongman. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s new book on dictators elides the political and cultural conditions that allow for their rise   ... more »

Stephen Hawking’s elusive character, revealed: self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think  ... more »

In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... more »

Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »

For Hebrew to become a modern language, it first had to become a flexible instrument, a religious language put in the service of a secular literature ... more »

The first musical note on earth was sounded 165 million years ago. It was an E natural. What did our ancestors use music for? ... more »

Though sometimes celebrated by liberals, cognitive meritocracy has eroded social solidarity, increased inequality, and precipitated right-wing populism  ... more »

Covid-19 is “the great reset,” argues a new book — humane, techno-elite Davos Men will save the day. Cue the nightmare scenarios  ... more »

Joyce, Picasso — when we think of Modernism, we often think of men. But as a new book shows, there may well have been no Modernism without lesbians... more »

Derrida's insights are fundamental to many fields: literature, law, film theory, theology. But he was a specialist in a subfield of his own design  ... more »

The semicolon is odd but impressive, the interrobang a good idea that never got traction. The hashtag was dead until some guy at Twitter revived it ... more »

The power of Elena Ferrante’s fiction is in chaos and terror — a magma of dread that infuses her novels with energy... more »

What Van Gogh read. "For him, it was not important to physically possess books, but to make them his own."  ... more »

Frantz Fanon has become a near-mythical figure in antiracist discourse. The cost of that achievement: a watering down of his political commitments... more »

As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” Indeed, the history of the idea of freedom is one of paradox and contradiction   ... more »

If life exists on any of the Milky Way’s other 100 billion planets, Darwinian selection would be at work there, too ... more »

Helen Frankenthaler and the mainstreaming of the avant-garde. In 1950s New York, painting's culture looked like pop culture  ... more »

While autofiction asserts a kind of apolitical license, the bar for ethical fiction keeps getting higher and higher  ... more »

Defending Derrida against his critics is easier than defending him against his followers  ... more »

One of Francis Bacon’s lovers burned down his studio; another threw him out of a second story window. For Bacon, pain was indicative of true emotion ... more »

Novels are increasingly autobiographical, which puts reading at the risk of becoming a tiresome test of authenticity  ... more »

Will the pandemic hasten the use of gene-editing technology? Engineering our bodies to resist disease might not sound so radical right now   ... more »

John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald were two men who struggled to make it as writers. Does the connection go deeper?  ... more »

Life is awful, or so said the cynical and perhaps nihilistic Graham Greene. But art — that could at least make life seem worthwhile ... more »

Does the future of postcolonial thought necessitate a return to Indigenous epistemologies, or can at least some modernist ideas be salvaged?   ... more »

Humanists should be skeptical of our increasingly analytical world. Unfortunately, Lev Manovich’s new book is full of gee-whiz-ism   ... more »

A sense of so-called “decency” long kept women out of art studios. Indeed, the history of art is "the history of many women not receiving their dues”  ... more »

Robin Dunbar’s science of friendship: Human beings can sustain at most 150 acquaintances, of which only five are intimate  ... more »

The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »

High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies  ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look?  ... more »

A debate: What does it mean for the future of humanity if we soon share our living space with conscious machines?... more »

If it weren’t for the fall of Rome, Walter Scheidel suggests, we’d all still be ploughing the fields, living in poverty, and dying young... more »

Philip Johnson's Nazi past was long overlooked as he was showered with commissions. Twenty years after his death, the debate heats up  ... more »

John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change”   ... more »

“Trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration"   ... more »

George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward?  ... more »

Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists  ... more »

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It's been decades since anyone has felt guilt about a guilty pleasure  ... more »

You can write poems about sex or excrement, but not business or money. Those are the only two obscene topics left. Dana Gioia explains... more »

Zora Neale Hurston was the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest internal critic. But she found her voice in the swampy muck of Florida  ... more »

In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »

Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »

Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not  ... more »

American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign  ... more »

Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too  ... more »

Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough?  ... more »

David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »

Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness  ... more »

“Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing?   ... more »

“Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away”   ... more »

There is something mildly shameful about literary pilgrimages. They are a kind of emotional and intellectual junk food. And yet...  ... more »

Evelyn Waugh on being interviewed by Jacques Barzun: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He... gave me a viva in history”   ... more »

Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive... more »

The birth of the audiobook dates to the 19th century, when Tennyson and Browning recorded poems for phonographs  ... more »

The new literary moralism. Is this frenzy for censure and the expansion of the definition of harm how we’ll correct the inequities of our time?  ... more »

Polymaths are one thing, freaks of intellect quite another. Even reading about these monsters of learning can leave one exhausted  ... more »

From the Aztecs' “divine food” to the 18th-century smoke enema, the history of smoking is odder than typically presented ... more »

A consensus has emerged on the right and the left, among the regressive populists and the progressive populists: liberals are the villains... more »

Literary studies argues wrong. Because scholars value critical style over substance, academic culture grows misguided  ... more »

Many people are committed to the idea that they’re biologically superior. Does social-science genetics give them scientific cover?   ... more »

Being overshadowed by genius has destroyed many literary careers. For the Canadian critic Robert Fulford, something like the opposite occurred  ... more »

College admissions is one of the few situations in which it’s rich people scrambling for a scarce resource. The result: our insane system of private schools... more »

Liberal and center-left political parties — once champions of the working class — have become home to meritocrats, hence the party of the new aristocracy... more »

When Robert Lowell left Elizabeth Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood and England, Hardwick decried his infidelity — both to her and to American literature   ... more »

Remember the televangelists? We now have the Instavangelists, hawking a blend of self-care, wellness, astrology, and left-wing politics  ... more »

Lolita’s greatest champion? Véra Nabokov. She saved it from fire and thought to publish it abroad, decrying domestic “strait-laced morality”  ... more »

The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned   ... more »

Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality”  ... more »

Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province  ... more »

We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »

"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it"  ... more »

A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »

Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress  ... more »

Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors   ... more »

Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification?  ... more »

“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman”  ... more »

Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »

In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »

In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust   ... more »