New Books

“We are obsessed with bad sex and how to protect against it, and we talk about that almost to the exclusion of good sex and how to have it”... more »

A new genre has appeared on the book scene: a biography of a biography. Joseph Epstein has mixed feelings... more »

Jamaica Kincaid is known for her political writing. Let's also consider her early, humorous work and her passion for gardening... more »

The CIA Book Club started with dropping copies of Animal Farm by balloon into East Berlin... more »

Looking to pinpoint the era in which the culture began coming apart at the seams, Paul Elie makes the case for the ‘80s... more »

Is it possible to exclude ideology from debate on our most controversial social issues? Thomas Chatterton Williams thinks so... more »

Constantine Cavafy is an indispensable poet that was throughout his life poised to disappear into obscurity... more »

In 1829, Thomas Carlyle declared the "age of machinery." Nearly 200 years later, we don't simply use machines; we inhabit them... more »

“Not one photograph devoid of social significance!” Images do not obey social directives, but that didn't stop the Soviets from trying... more »

Pei-Shen Qian was a talented street painter who found no success – until he began to forge the works of his idols... more »

In an anthology of mid-century American poetry composed in psychiatric hospitals, James Schuyler deserved prominent billing... more »

More than 100 books have been written about Gustav Mahler. Too few do what needs to be done: defend his use of cowbells... more »

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 »

Essays & Opinions

Literary masters offer much wisdom on lassitude and lethargy. But can they help you get in shape? Dwight Garner investigates... more »

The university compensates for what many modern democracies struggle to do: think and act across long historical durations... more »

Human nature is real, says Francis Fukuyama, and it's been a decisive force in political philosophy. Why does that fact provoke such resistance?... more »

James Baldwin juggled countless contrasting ideas, as well as the ability to live with these contradictions... more »

For Iris Murdoch, morality hinged on escaping our egos and attending to others — and so it was rooted in love... more »

“Evil can be a spiritual experience, too.” Mary Gaitskill turns to the words of murders and rapists to understand violence... more »

How to describe a Cynthia Ozick's essays? "Ideas are earthquakes; feelings are floods; literature can lift us up or smite us down"... more »

F. Scott Fitzgerald: the most foolish of American writers. He was foolish in his successes, and no less foolish in his many failures... more »

Alekseyevich Bunin was renowned for his romantic poems and sensual prose. He was also a peerless insult artist... more »

"To think of a satirist as a person who angrily turns against a gale-force wind and sprays liquefied shit at a group of constantly multiplying targets would not be entirely wrong"... more »

How to distinguish perfectionism from the mere pursuit of excellence: Reaching the goal doesn't help... more »

We're watching the last meaningful distinctions between creating and copying dissolve, and most people couldn’t care less... more »

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 »