New Books

Imagine what life was like 245 million years ago. Hard, isn’t it? Forget fossils — the world of dinosaurs is inherently unfathomable to us... more »

As any pet owner can attest, animals do communicate. But do they have languages? Do mating dances, alarm calls, and meows have a grammar?... more »

The genius of Philip Larkin’s poetry was his gift for somehow sublimating our appreciation of life by amplifying its ordinariness... more »

Who was Edison? To his employees, an Ubermensch; to his investors, a fantasist; to his rivals, a publicity whore; to his family, a stranger... more »

Not her sister’s keeper. Mary-Kay Wilmers is exacting and suspicious of didacticism, especially where feminism is involved... more »

What you think of religion largely depends on what you think is religion. Stephen Asma has been changing his mind... more »

“Historians of ideas were the least useful kind of historians,” held Isaiah Berlin. But there was one exception: Lewis Namier... more »

As America’s identity wars go on, the combatants forget a simple truth: Holier-than-thou-ism is as old as the country itself... more »

For 176 years, The Economist has been the ur-magazine of Anglophone liberalism. Can it survive an illiberal era?... more »

The unbearable loneliness of the concert pianist. Applause, green room, hotel room, taxi, airport lounge. Reprise, repeat... more »

Horrified by campus debauchery, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to aim higher. But it quickly became a training ground for “young despots”... more »

Few architects have been studied more thoroughly than Frank Lloyd Wright. The problem isn't a lack of material. It's a lack of answers... more »

The Epicurean life has a serious side. Hedonists cultivate a practical, prudent way of taking their pleasures... more »

Jared Diamond's new book is a sustained but misleading metaphor. His giant category error: that nation-states behave like individual humans... more »

Ibram Kendi is here to teach you how to be antiracist. His book has the tone of a fundamentalist sermon. Andrew Sullivan is having none of it... more »

What is real? How should one live? What government is best? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Philosophy is ever-changing and never-ending... more »

For their coiled, angry masculinity, D.H. Lawrence's essays are indefensible. For their sweep and immaculate style, they are unforgettable... more »

“Puritan” was at first a spiteful nickname for those who were not purer than others but were seen as thinking of themselves that way... more »

James Wood’s transformation: Once fizzing with aphoristic insights, he now writes more carefully, often of aging, exile, and emotion... more »

When Elaine Stritch was called “iconic," she'd get exasperated. “Let’s all level and tell each other what ‘iconic’ means,” she'd say. “It’s a mouthwash!”... more »

Chaucer’s family was proud of him. But did he really have to wear a tunic so short that it exposed his loins, in red-and-black hosiery?... more »

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child,” wrote Nabokov. So are his interviews at all worthwhile?... more »

When Wittgenstein went to war, the gossip machine quickly determined that he was a burnt-out wreck and a disgrace to the field... more »

Is most modern liberalism just the Christian heresy of Pelagianism by another name? A revisionist critique of John Rawls says yes... more »

Elizabeth Bishop’s dogged pertinacity: She would spend years, even decades, on a poem. Every word, every nuance, had to be perfect... more »

The National Review, American Greatness, and The Claremont Review of Books share a vision of American nationalism. That vision is a lie... more »

Lucian Freud thought Celia Paul was just another pretty muse. But she was a painter herself. Zadie Smith unpacks “museography”... more »

Science is trustworthy because it works, right? Well, most scientific theories throughout history have turned out to be false. Is our time different?... more »

Rivalries, alleged plagiarism, rapturous fandom — the giants of Russia’s golden age of literature had complicated relationships with one another... more »

Lydia Davis is a modern Vermeer, patiently observing everyday life, but from odd and askew angles... more »

In terms of its influence, The Economist has long been a publication like no other. It can plausibly be said to have made the modern world... more »

For García Márquez, the relationship between journalism and fiction was symbiotic: Journalism was an apprenticeship for fiction... more »

Jefferson's lofty vision for the University of Virginia was not shared by its early students. Riots in 1825 brought him to tears... more »

In John Hersey's day, all news was slow news. Hiroshima appeared more than a year after the bombing. The delay contributed to its style, substance, and accuracy... more »

By the end of his life, John Rawls had a stature so great that he shaped the very idea of what philosophy is. Has this become a problem?... more »

Jill Lepore's problem. She is among the most eloquent preachers of the liberal gospel. Yet she's preaching in increasingly radical times... more »

Is the modern world receptive to ancient ideas? A new series of compact and handsome pocket-sized translations seeks to find out... more »

On a February night in 1965, William F. Buckley squared off against James Baldwin. For Buckley, it was his most satisfying debate. For Baldwin, not so much... more »

Howard Zinn told America's story as a simplistic melodrama. But the latest attempt to create an appealing alternative is no less flawed... more »

Essays & Opinions

What differentiates people from pigs? Perhaps just the existence of autobiographical memories, from which we construct a self... more »

Lucian Freud sought to "move the senses by giving an intensification of reality.” He wanted to “shock and amaze.” At that he succeeded spectacularly... more »

Just as the invisible man’s retreat is a hibernation preparatory to action, Ralph Ellison’s letters are a map of his planned advance... more »

A new science of humanity. In the first half of the 20th century, anthropologists were at the forefront of “the greatest moral battle of our time”... more »

Every era has its fashionable argot. Ours is rife with buzzwords that have gone mainstream: "privilege," "problematic," "cisgender"... more »

A more scientifically literate public, it’s presumed, could better distinguish truth. But our problem is not too little science in public culture, but too much... more »

The flummery of neuroscience: Defeated by the “hard problem” of consciousness, the field postulates one improbable theory after another... more »

Amid the grief, grievances, and betrayal in the marriage of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, what remained was a need to write to each other... more »

What do the digital, medical, and legal humanities have in common? They subjugate the humanities to applied fields... more »

Wherever one looks in history, rationality is haunted and teased by its other, irrationality. Now the boundary is being abandoned altogether... more »

Liberal, literary attacks on “woke” culture have something in common: They are expressed in irritable gestures rather than ideas... more »

Has Silicon Valley killed creativity? Artists, astrologers, and addicts, pushed out by high rent, find themselves in an impossible situation... more »

Social media has devolved into a contagion of moral grandstanding and outrage-mongering. And yet it can be fixed... more »

Modern science rejected Aristotle, turning him into a caricature and a bogeyman. Time to unlearn something important. Aristotle was not “pre-scientific”... more »

"Forcing opinions into the mouths of dead writers is a dangerous style of necrophilia, especially when the writer is Adorno"... more »

Elaine Showalter was a target of Harold Bloom's attacks. Yet she still found his combination of the melodramatic and ridiculous an engaging shtick... more »

Is plagiarism wrong? Worry less about people stealing from you. Worry more about saying something worth stealing... more »

“September 1, 1939,” perhaps Auden's most-quoted poem, is the one he liked least. Why did it survive all of his attempts to mute or suppress it?... more »

“I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know than all the allegorical paintings they can show me,” held Samuel Johnson... more »

Victor Serge was a permanent oppositionist — a committed revolutionary who was a thorn in the side of every movement he supported... more »

"The question of what you are is qualitative, not quantitative. What sort? What life? What team? In late 1995, I chose to switch teams.” Deirdre McCloskey on changing gender... more »

Unable to predict a crash or facilitate prosperity, economics is now a field of dubious value. And yet it retains an unearned intellectual authority... more »

Ibsen was reviled by some as immoral, hailed by others as prophetic. James Joyce thought him the most influential intellect of his time. Ibsen retains his potency today... more »

Which words should be banished? “Adorkable,” “YOLO,” and “influencer” are popular suggestions. But policing language is a fraught exercise... more »

The origin stories of big ideas highlight the eureka moments. But it's the mundane work that is key. Inspiration favors the prepared mind... more »

"Liberalism" is a slippery word for Americans, who have no experience of anything else. Now critics are falling over themselves... more »

When the Aztecs met Cortés, they did not think he was a deity. Rather, they scouted his forces and set up a war room. So why does another tale persist?... more »

The sad-lady literary sirens are legion: Plath, Woolf, Jean Rhys. What would it mean, wonders Leslie Jamison, to move beyond them?... more »

“Where man strives for knowledge, the Devil will never be far away.” Knausgaard contemplates the power and temptations of literature... more »

Cave art has been found on nearly every continent. What does it mean? That our Paleolithic ancestors knew something we still strain to imagine... more »

Google has a “chief happiness officer,” a “treat yourself” ethic reigns, and happiness bloggers score viral hits. Yet peak happiness is a noxious goal... more »

Reading Kierkegaard can be dispiriting. He seems so dour, so tortured by inner turmoil. But he was, in some odd way, a happy writer... more »

Education of an architect. Aspiring to greatness is now conflated with aspiring to novelty, bolstering the field's affinity for what’s ugly... more »

Young Lucian Freud delighted in shocking visitors. He maintained a grisly cast of mounted animals in his home, and stored two dead monkeys in his kitchen oven... more »

To accommodate drinking, the Literary Review established the Academy Club. Poets were banned for never paying their tabs and for bad conversation... more »

Lusty retirees and power-lifting septuagenarians churn out books chronicling the joys of aging. It’s all quite misleading, of course... more »

"One doesn’t want to share in that old-man vibe and die of a heart attack after a student protester shows us her breasts." Justin E.H. Smith on avoiding Adorno's fate... more »

John Ashbery was famous for his impenetrability. "My poetry is disjunct," he said, "but then so is life." Fair enough. But is it fair to the reader?... more »

Why are some intellectuals pardoned for past sins, but others condemned? Case study: the reaction to a new collection by the “fascist icon” Charles Maurras... more »

Bartleby, autistic? Melville, on the spectrum? Literary critics used to make such armchair diagnoses, but now they’ve gotten more sophisticated... more »

Peter Handke has been widely denounced for his politics, but what of his prose? Turns out it’s associative, digressive, oneiric, and, above all, idiosyncratic... more »

J.S. Bach, bad boy. We remember him as a saint, but he downed beer by the gallon, got mixed up in knife fights, and consorted with women in the organ loft... more »

Parents whitewash parenting. For the truth, turn to Knausgaard: The car seat will humiliate you; you will panic in silence... more »

Everyone, academics included, hates academic writing. But maybe the disgust is misplaced. Could it be that most academic writing is actually pretty good?... more »

Reading is not a team sport. Thus, when we talk of the historical or cultural power of the novel, we may miss its real strength: establishing intimacy... more »

Since Shakespeare's day, theaters have been uniquely flammable. Thus early Broadway theaters’ obsession with fire escapes. Forty wasn’t too many... more »

Memoirs From Beyond the Grave. Chateaubriand wanted his 2,000-page book published only after his death. Then financial hardship struck... more »

Wittgenstein's house on a lake was built as a retreat from the world. But it turns out he was an oddly ostentatious recluse... more »

Lenin invented totalitarianism and the ideas of a one-party state and a terrorist state. He also invented a style of thinking that endures... more »

Minae Mizumura, both imaginatively cosmopolitan and linguistically rooted, exemplifies the change in what it means to be an immigrant writer... more »