New Books

Can the real William Blake be rescued from his reputation as a hedonic, revolution-loving proto-hippie?... more »

W.G. Sebald's reputation has grown so imposing that it is a relief to discover an earlier, less polished version of the writer... more »

We’ve been condensing information into pictures since cave-wall paintings. But is that an excuse to use emojis?... more »

How much does Jewishness explain Partisan Review's famously pugnacious intellectual style?... more »

Who was Leopold Stokowski? The most elusive and controversial conductor in America... more »

“Unalive,” “grape,” “You’re so skibidi…” The literary innovations of Gen Alpha have arrived. They are driven, unfortunately, by influencers... more »

Geoff Dyer has made a literary career out of humorous high jinks and stylistic experimentation. His latest work departs from all that... more »

Early photography, the domain of “the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed,” could be a death-defying pursuit  ... more »

Behind every visionary lies a calamity. For Plato, it was an extraordinary philosophical experiment in Syracuse... more »

When the communist regime in Poland fell, it was a victory for writers and readers and the CIA as much as trade unionists and politicians... more »

Charming English icon or barbarism personified? Samuel Pepys’s diary is a reminder of the complexities of warming to the past... more »

Size matters, but not as much as organization. Anthony Grafton on libraries, then and now... more »

Was Condé Nast an “empire,” with editors shaping the course of the culture? Or did they merely reflect existing cultural change?... more »

Is there anything epistemically admirable or useful about those who seek bliss in ignorance?... more »

Humans and nature: As Annie Dillard put it, “I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany”... more »

The Salt Path is the latest memoir with an author accused of fabrication or embellishment. Why does it keep happening?... more »

“Novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind”... more »

Born into a Mormon family in Utah, the pioneering lesbian poet May Swenson found her footing in Greenwich Village... more »

A “trance evangelist,” an Indian guru, Andrew Jackson, Oprah — in America, charisma takes on many forms... more »

Paradise Lost was not acclaimed by its first readers. Then came John Dryden, who popularized and distorted Milton's masterpiece... more »

Bocaccio, a relentlessly autobiographical author, put his fickleness and neuroticism on display in his work... more »

Have you heard about the classicist who wants to do away with classics? Meet Walter Scheidel... more »

Plato has been pressed into service as the avatar of an intellectual tradition so often that it's easy to forget he was a person... more »

William F. Buckley Jr. embodied conservatism in America. Yet he had trouble defining what it is or ought to be... more »

At Random House, Toni Morrison was an exacting editor. She turned her authors’ talent, and her own, into cultural and literary power... more »

Was Virginia Woolf a depressed recluse? Or a sociable type who enjoyed intimate dinner parties? A new collection of letters suggests the latter... more »

Hubris and design thinking: The history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference... more »

Steven Shapin: “The duty of genius may be total dedication to solving scientific puzzles, but the price of genius will be paid by other people”... more »

Those in Gen Z are having less sex, and when they do have it, they are doing so in arcane arrangements. Is that a problem?... more »

Technology elevates efficiency over friction and seamlessness over inconvenience. Is that a bad thing?... more »

In America, has the backlash against Marxism been more influential than the theory itself? ... more »

Tom Crewe on the “ridiculous, sententious” writing of Ocean Vuong: “It was one of the worst ordeals of my reading life”... more »

Thomas Mallon has mastered the bitchy aperçu and brisk, summarizing detail. In short, he's an ideal diarist... more »

Dominic Pettman and Eugene Thacker seek to parochialize the human, showing that our activities may just be a cosmic sideshow... more »

An architect’s eccentric residential design, a manifesto house, is a rare instance of an artist putting polemic into practice... more »

The Divine Comedy, repeatedly rescued from obscurity, has long perched awkwardly between canonical reverence and cultural neglect... more »

Analytic philosophy offers the fantasy of free inquiry, but really just leans on “common sense” to justify the status quo — or so charge its critics... more »

In 1959, Richard Ellmann published a biography of James Joyce. The genre would never be the same ... more »

To the ancients, revolution was a perversion. To French philosophes, it marked human progress. How did that change in meaning come about? ... more »

Essays & Opinions

The anthropomorphic mistake: It isn’t to see emotion where there is none. It is to see the wrong emotion... more »

Ibsen and the paradox of progressive moralism. He demonstrated how claims to serve ideals are often ways of serving ourselves... more »

Written reviews have long been the currency of cultural coverage. Now they are imperiled – and worthy of defense... more »

The shushing librarian performed a public service: defending quiet. Now "reading rooms" are turned over to zoom calls... more »

In poetry, the liminal is a tired, vague, often meaningless signifier. Not for Laura Gilpin... more »

For Christopher Lasch, sloppy writing was a form of sloth, and ambiguity was a form of lying. In other words, style revealed the soul... more »

What happens if you splice, slice, and rearrange 121 Lewis Lapham essays? You distill the Laphamian vernacular... more »

The uses of anthropomorphism. We often misinterpret animal emotion, but denying their emotions is also a category error... more »

The problem with analytic philosophers isn’t that they turn their attention to what interests them. The problem is that it isn’t all that interesting... more »

Henry James’s eloquent cruelties. His razor sharp criticism took literary failings as evidence of their authors’ personal inadequacies... more »

Admirers called Alexandre Kojève “The Professor.” Others took a dimmer view: “the snake in the grass.” Both perspectives had merit... more »

Russian literature has long maintained a deep hold on the Western mind. But is Gen Z really mad for Dostoyevsky?... more »

The French liar. Descartes was, for his sharpest critics, a seductive purveyor of ignorance and Catholicism... more »

Could it be that momentous theological differences between Christians and Jews stem from bad translations?... more »

Ottessa Moshfegh interviews her former crushes, Joyce Carol Oates posts cat pics: Substack is where authors go to get weird... more »

Mountains rise, species disappear — in the incomprehensible vastness of time we encounter the geological sublime... more »

Engagement with art and literature is a way of turning toward the world, towards reality, even in a state of captivity or desolation... more »

The science of consciousness has stagnated around two opposing approaches: physicalism and idealism. There’s another way... more »

Geoff Dyer has been described as an “essayist,” “comic writer,” “humorist,” and worst of all, “travel writer.” How dare they, he asks... more »

For Kurt Vonnegut, survival was a kind of "cosmic joke, with death being the setup and life being the punch line"... more »

Only mediocrities adhere to rules of writing, so make your prose purple — the purpler the better... more »

The geopolitical stakes of the race for AI dominance prompt a thorny question: Can we preserve both our humanity and our security?... more »

Why do writers write? For pleasure, meaning, money, fame – and for no reason at all. Lydia Davis explains... more »

The mystery of Sylvia Plath is that she was simply ordinary right up to the point that she became extraordinary... more »

Humans have long mistaken fluency for presence. Now, with the rise of hyper-fluent AI, our notions of identity will be tested... more »

The doubt disorder. At the 28th Annual OCD Conference, Andrew Kay asks: What is OCD, and where does it come from?... more »

“Offense has become so large and so accepted a part of our response to art that it can sometimes seem we’ve endowed it with unimpeachable authority”... more »

For influential 20th-century anthropologists, religion could not be reduced to its social function or explained away by other metadiscourses... more »

Geoff Dyer: “The humor in my later books is sometimes very adolescent, which strikes me as a good sign — immaturing with age”... more »

“Violence follows Harry Crews around like an oversized lapdog, eager to spring upon him with bone-crunching love”... more »

You won’t look to ChatGPT as a role model for the life of the mind, but A.I. has readerly strengths that lie precisely in its impersonality... more »

Politicians love to mock seemingly useless studies of shrimp treadmills and gecko mechanics — but silly science plays a vital role... more »

James Schuyler, whose poems exuded calm, was prone to anxiety attacks, nervous breakdowns, morbid depressions, and manic episodes... more »

Geniuses behaving badly is a historical commonplace.  Indeed, it's enough to wonder if the label is a license to misbehave... more »

The impossible genre. Biography incorporates every style and school. We categorize it as nonfiction, “but its facts ride upon a raft of speculation”... more »

“Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones”... more »

From 1770 to 1790, a new view of liberty ascended to a position of ideological dominance. Why?... more »

Sandra Cisneros: “Every woman writer could use a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf wrote. But what really serves a woman, in my opinion, is a house”... more »

Yes, much about poetry gets lost in translation. But to conclude that poetry is therefore untranslatable is to misrepresent both poetry and translation... more »

Critics take Shulamith Firestone’s schizophrenia to reveal some truth about feminism, or family tragedy, or psychiatry. That’s nonsense... more »

Jordan Peterson somehow manages to be both a sententious reactionary and a purveyor of postmodern gobbledygook... more »

What made the Enlightenment extraordinary? Not just a set of ideas or what was said but also how it was said... more »

“Avoid adverbs” is advice commonly encountered by writers. It's also bad advice. By all means, use adverbs – carefully, not exuberantly... more »

Modern aesthetics encouraged a warm relationship between an artwork and its viewer. What happens to art in an age of enmity?... more »

John Jeremiah Sullivan on the Mark Twain revival: “How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent?”... more »

The missive mania of Seamus Heaney. He once wrote 14 letters during one flight, and routinely wrote 15 per day... more »

Some of Edward Said’s ideas have become canonical. Others are as contentious today as they were 30 years ago... more »

Huge sums of money are being invested in life-extension research. Success would be a disaster, warns Francis Fukuyama ... more »

Criticism without flair is dull. Criticism without sensibility is useless. Henry James knew this well... more »

Was Martin Amis, famous for his love of style and idolized for his own, in fact guilty of crimes against it?... more »