World War I ended Henri Bergson’s influence: As Georges Politzer put it, “Mr. Bergson is as yet still dying, but Bergsonism is in fact dead”... more »
Épater la bourgeoisie. Artists once sought to disturb the conventions and the complacency of polite society, but no more... more »
Dostoevsky's faith. Belief, doubt, and hypocrisy preoccupy both his fictional characters and his own agonized quest for understanding... more »
How Janet Malcolm created "Janet Malcolm." But she wrestled with her reputation as decisive, pitiless, a "journalistic serial killer"... more »
In 1945, Olivier Messiaen split the Parisian music scene: Was his work modernist genius? Or hopelessly lost in idolatry and kitsch?... more »
A new literary genre — call it the Hot Divorcées Club — has arrived with an unmistakable whiff of emancipation... more »
What does mescaline do to the brain? The works of Henri Michaux, the French Jackson Pollock, supply an answer... more »
R.E.M. had a sound that was "sonically sui generis and abnormally normal" and a knack for cashing in without being seen as selling out... more »
“Make your own job.” The slogan of the 19th-century New Thought movement has been embraced by contemporary self-help gurus... more »
What if the solution to what ails the humanities is 10 days on an old farm in the Hudson Valley? Bill Deresiewicz explains... more »
The misadventures of Augustus the Strong include an epic drinking bout with Peter the Great and an obsession with the crown of Poland... more »
Fredric Jameson left us with a slogan (“Always historicize!”), a weighty best seller on postmodernism, and an aversion to sentimentality... more »
Descartes, Kepler, Boyle, Newton — these titans of the Scientific Revolution are, in fact, not the intellectual forefathers of modern secularism... more »
The paradox of Marx’s popularity: His genius is widely acknowledged precisely as the political horizon of Marxism has diminished... more »
"The use of a review is not to force talent, but to create a favorable atmosphere,” said T.S. Eliot. the transatlantic review cultivated just such an atmosphere... more »
Andrea Long Chu on Pamela Paul: “Her principal opinion is that everyone else’s opinions should be as weakly held as her own”... more »
Simone Weil adored her parents and refused to let them into her inner life, especially once Christianity began to engross her... more »
University presses are flourishing as they move beyond monographs to put out big, bold, and often award-winning books... more »
"A children’s book is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build"... more »
We have little to fear from machine-generated art, argues David Hajdu, citing the player piano. But generative AI is not like the player piano... more »
Sam Kriss goes in search of "alt lit" and finds that its hyper-sincere, hyper-vulnerable, hyper-personal writing is indistinguishable from the literary mainstream... more »
Sir Thomas More’s birthplace was very likely not fashionable Milk Street, but lawless “Cripplegate Without,” home to thieves, sex workers, and trash dumps... more »
As a critic, W G Sebald produced something rare in German: criticism that functions between academic study and journalistic discussion... more »
A century's accumulation of cliché leads us to associate The Great Gatsby with gin, jazz, and the Roaring Twenties. That misses its point... more »
Soliciting book blurbs is time-consuming, dispiriting, and occasionally mortifying. So Simon & Schuster is getting rid of them... more »
Bibliophobia presents occasionally as a literal fear of books. More often it’s an anxiety about reading for those with deep connections to literature... more »
Capitalism may be the best economic system, but the price for all that prosperity was always going to be at the cost of high culture... more »
With intensity, earnestness, and a bougie aesthetic, McNally Jackson is reshaping literary life in New York... more »
When Isaac Newton broke white light into colored rays, he did not find pink. But it was evident in nature, and rapidly became fashionable... more »
What differentiates translation from the other literary arts? The way translators read. Damion Searls explains... more »
The Gobi bear, the northern white rhinoceros: We talk about preserving species of animals. But what about preserving sub-species?... more »
A prodigy of Renaissance Italy, Pico della Mirandola devised his grand unified theory of mystical learning at the age of 23... more »
Socrates was poor, ugly, boastful, kind of a jerk. He was also, of course, a timeless genius. But is he a man for our times?... more »
Before Gloria Steinem fought the patriarchy, she wrote The Beach Book to “make you feel better about wasting time on the beach”... more »
For Flaubert, Balzac “was no writer, merely a man of ideas and of observation; he saw everything, but he didn’t know how to express anything”... more »
Paul Krugman has a question for the New York Times. Given its “push toward blandness,” “why even bother having an opinion section?”... more »
The dead are universally respected but lack human rights. Should their bodies have legal protections? Which ones?... more »
The evolution of Jonathan Haidt: He used to be open-minded and humble; now he’s polemical and grumpy ... more »
Agnes Callard: "Where once children were instructed to be saintly, or at least virtuous, or at least ordinary, now they are invited to be weird"... more »
Celebrities sign autographs with autopens, cursive is on the wane in schools — what does it mean to live without handwriting?... more »
Cellphones, social media, AI. “The more we communicate, the worse things seem to get,” says Nicholas Carr... more »
In bohemian New York, a vibe shift is underway. The avant-garde is advancing no more than a series of poses and affectations... more »
The case of Alexander Berkman, 19th-century anarchist, illustrates that one man’s nihilistic terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter... more »
What’s the result of endless music, organized into playlists seamlessly optimized just for you? Aural wallpaper... more »
Writers like Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe conveyed moral, practical, and proverbial wisdom. But now “the communicability of experience is decreasing”... more »
Sober at Bonaroo. Amid libertine carousing, “Soberoovians” chase catharsis — and transcendence... more »
If dogs are natural philosophers, what do their boundless joys and anxieties reveal about the human condition?... more »
We no longer read long books but seem to have no problem with long movies or narrative TV. The “attention crisis” isn’t what you think it is... more »
The Little Ice Age of the 17th century gave rise to hermetic philosophies — and, in southern Germany, the persecution of witches... more »
What can material objects — a comb, a brooch, a board game — tell us about the violent history of the Vikings?... more »
“In the age of abundant digital information, materials libraries offer something scarce: hands-on experience with the stuff that makes the world”... more »
David Lynch on cigarettes: “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us”... more »
The annual Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology reveals the state of fiction. It’s less concerned with “good” politics than in “bad” characters... more »
Questions of taste are freighted by uncertainty and ambiguity. In the arts, what distinguishes good from bad?... more »
The Black Book of Communism was published in 1997 to acclaim and good sales. The debate over its credibility endures... more »
“What will come from my whole life?” The Tolstoy problem won't be solved by some clever lifestyle hack... more »
“It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised”... more »
Good fiction creates a space between the “true” and the “false” — between what is real and what is imaginary... more »
Chomsky, with his long and snowy beard, has come to physically resemble the biblical prophet he’s always wanted to be... more »
James Longenbach’s poetry occurred in “the lyric now” — a “state of constant mutability … always happening, always having happened”... more »
“Cancel culture is not abating but merely shifting from left to right as a new group of scolds gain power”... more »
World War II was fought on the battlefields. But perhaps it was won in the libraries... more »
A cenotaph for Newton would be taller than the Pyramids. Paris was to have 17 extravagant tollhouses. 18th-century architecture had a flair for the dramatic... more »
World War I ended Henri Bergson’s influence: As Georges Politzer put it, “Mr. Bergson is as yet still dying, but Bergsonism is in fact dead”... more »
How Janet Malcolm created "Janet Malcolm." But she wrestled with her reputation as decisive, pitiless, a "journalistic serial killer"... more »
What does mescaline do to the brain? The works of Henri Michaux, the French Jackson Pollock, supply an answer... more »
What if the solution to what ails the humanities is 10 days on an old farm in the Hudson Valley? Bill Deresiewicz explains... more »
Descartes, Kepler, Boyle, Newton — these titans of the Scientific Revolution are, in fact, not the intellectual forefathers of modern secularism... more »
Andrea Long Chu on Pamela Paul: “Her principal opinion is that everyone else’s opinions should be as weakly held as her own”... more »
"A children’s book is not a luxury good. It is fundamental to our culture, to the grown-ups we become, to the society we build"... more »
Sir Thomas More’s birthplace was very likely not fashionable Milk Street, but lawless “Cripplegate Without,” home to thieves, sex workers, and trash dumps... more »
Soliciting book blurbs is time-consuming, dispiriting, and occasionally mortifying. So Simon & Schuster is getting rid of them... more »
With intensity, earnestness, and a bougie aesthetic, McNally Jackson is reshaping literary life in New York... more »
The Gobi bear, the northern white rhinoceros: We talk about preserving species of animals. But what about preserving sub-species?... more »
Before Gloria Steinem fought the patriarchy, she wrote The Beach Book to “make you feel better about wasting time on the beach”... more »
The dead are universally respected but lack human rights. Should their bodies have legal protections? Which ones?... more »
Celebrities sign autographs with autopens, cursive is on the wane in schools — what does it mean to live without handwriting?... more »
The case of Alexander Berkman, 19th-century anarchist, illustrates that one man’s nihilistic terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter... more »
Sober at Bonaroo. Amid libertine carousing, “Soberoovians” chase catharsis — and transcendence... more »
The Little Ice Age of the 17th century gave rise to hermetic philosophies — and, in southern Germany, the persecution of witches... more »
David Lynch on cigarettes: “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us”... more »
The Black Book of Communism was published in 1997 to acclaim and good sales. The debate over its credibility endures... more »
Good fiction creates a space between the “true” and the “false” — between what is real and what is imaginary... more »
“Cancel culture is not abating but merely shifting from left to right as a new group of scolds gain power”... more »
Robert Frost's poetic prerequisites: “A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written” ... more »
Regency-era sex ed included such works as Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal, Every Woman’s Book, and the best seller Aristotle’s Masterpiece... more »
Michael Ignatieff: “I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls”... more »
Victor Pelevin’s “descent from dazzling young writer to misogynist crank mirrors the decline of mainstream Russian culture”... more »
In 1723 a poetic work about bees — yes, bees — so scandalized English society that it was put on trial for fear it would “debauch the nation”... more »
Why did Alice Munro’s biographer keep quiet about the abuse endured by the short-story writer's daughter?... more »
The humanities refashioned themselves as society’s conscience. A new, conservative movement in literary studies recoils from that role... more »
In South America, capybaras run riot. In Italy, gray wolves interbreed with dogs. So in rushes the wildlife birth control industry... more »
Is there a radical feminist undercurrent to embroidery and crochet? Or is such crafting merely “she-power frippery”?... more »
American men have stopped reading fiction — or so suggests an array of think pieces. But is it true?... more »
Consider a new volume of Freud’s works, an ethnography of homeless Angelenos, and 10 of the other best scholarly books of 2024... more »
Obsession with historical authenticity prevails at sites like Colonial Williamsburg — but such re-creations take us only so far... more »
Apoptosis, necroptosis, entosis, NETosis: Cells die in at least 20 different ways, some silent and some showy ... more »
Intellectuals seeking God? “A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything ... are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more”... more »
English is the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Is the world being linguistically brainwashed? Not likely... more »
How does your “self-continuity” stack up? The concept measures the extent to which your past, present, and future selves align... more »
What explains the public’s pathetic knowledge of history? Start with bogus cliches and salacious, error-filled bestsellers... more »
Stanley Kubrick and the price of perfectionism. He preoccupied himself with every detail, big and small. It came at a cost... more »
Who killed literary fiction? It's the big publishing houses, which used to compete for talent but have become sedate, predictable... more »
Épater la bourgeoisie. Artists once sought to disturb the conventions and the complacency of polite society, but no more... more »
In 1945, Olivier Messiaen split the Parisian music scene: Was his work modernist genius? Or hopelessly lost in idolatry and kitsch?... more »
R.E.M. had a sound that was "sonically sui generis and abnormally normal" and a knack for cashing in without being seen as selling out... more »
The misadventures of Augustus the Strong include an epic drinking bout with Peter the Great and an obsession with the crown of Poland... more »
The paradox of Marx’s popularity: His genius is widely acknowledged precisely as the political horizon of Marxism has diminished... more »
Simone Weil adored her parents and refused to let them into her inner life, especially once Christianity began to engross her... more »
We have little to fear from machine-generated art, argues David Hajdu, citing the player piano. But generative AI is not like the player piano... more »
As a critic, W G Sebald produced something rare in German: criticism that functions between academic study and journalistic discussion... more »
Bibliophobia presents occasionally as a literal fear of books. More often it’s an anxiety about reading for those with deep connections to literature... more »
When Isaac Newton broke white light into colored rays, he did not find pink. But it was evident in nature, and rapidly became fashionable... more »
A prodigy of Renaissance Italy, Pico della Mirandola devised his grand unified theory of mystical learning at the age of 23... more »
For Flaubert, Balzac “was no writer, merely a man of ideas and of observation; he saw everything, but he didn’t know how to express anything”... more »
The evolution of Jonathan Haidt: He used to be open-minded and humble; now he’s polemical and grumpy ... more »
Cellphones, social media, AI. “The more we communicate, the worse things seem to get,” says Nicholas Carr... more »
What’s the result of endless music, organized into playlists seamlessly optimized just for you? Aural wallpaper... more »
If dogs are natural philosophers, what do their boundless joys and anxieties reveal about the human condition?... more »
What can material objects — a comb, a brooch, a board game — tell us about the violent history of the Vikings?... more »
The annual Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology reveals the state of fiction. It’s less concerned with “good” politics than in “bad” characters... more »
“What will come from my whole life?” The Tolstoy problem won't be solved by some clever lifestyle hack... more »
Chomsky, with his long and snowy beard, has come to physically resemble the biblical prophet he’s always wanted to be... more »
World War II was fought on the battlefields. But perhaps it was won in the libraries... more »
Joseph Epstein: “I may very well be one of those pathetic types whose ambition is four or five times greater than his talent”... more »
How did "diet" go from a way of life to a sum of calories and carbs? The shift began in the 17th century... more »
Are Amazon reviews art? The writer Kevin Killian posted more than 2,000 of them. Now they're collected in a book... more »
Bohemians and bohemia. How does a neighborhood become a cultural magnet? Consider Greenwich Village ... more »
Aristotle dismissed the sense of smell as the domain of women. In fact, humans have a better nose than most other mammals'... more »
To explain the workings of the imagination, brain science is necessary but insufficient. A great mystery remains... more »
Leibniz’s literary remains. An epistolary graphomaniac, he left behind 15,000 letters to some 1,300 people... more »
Before the Brothers Grimm, death, poverty, disfigurement, and hunger had never been so charming... more »
How two lovably eccentric dilettantes rescued Nietzsche's reputation and recast him as a prescient postmodern thinker... more »
The problem with Christian rock: The music’s stale conformity was the inverse of the ecstatic freedom its lyrics promised... more »
The extinction obsession. We’ve always indulged fantasies about the end of the world. What’s changed is the mechanism of our destruction... more »
What’s the point of psychoanalysis? According to Freud, it's to turn “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”... more »
“Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism”... more »
How was early Christianity unified? As Augustine put it, “Better a few Donatists burn in their own flames … than their vast majority perish in the flames of hell”... more »
Many scholars write histories of the working class without grasping the actual experience of work. David Montgomery was an exception... more »
A new account of the Vietnam War gets it all wrong: “In this search-for-villains approach to history, it is always the Americans who matter most”... more »
How Tariq Ali, a street-fighting, mustachioed Marxist, became a Trotskyist Zelig, never indulging a second thought... more »
For Thomas Hardy, the death of his first wife prompted him to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life... more »
Dostoevsky's faith. Belief, doubt, and hypocrisy preoccupy both his fictional characters and his own agonized quest for understanding... more »
A new literary genre — call it the Hot Divorcées Club — has arrived with an unmistakable whiff of emancipation... more »
“Make your own job.” The slogan of the 19th-century New Thought movement has been embraced by contemporary self-help gurus... more »
Fredric Jameson left us with a slogan (“Always historicize!”), a weighty best seller on postmodernism, and an aversion to sentimentality... more »
"The use of a review is not to force talent, but to create a favorable atmosphere,” said T.S. Eliot. the transatlantic review cultivated just such an atmosphere... more »
University presses are flourishing as they move beyond monographs to put out big, bold, and often award-winning books... more »
Sam Kriss goes in search of "alt lit" and finds that its hyper-sincere, hyper-vulnerable, hyper-personal writing is indistinguishable from the literary mainstream... more »
A century's accumulation of cliché leads us to associate The Great Gatsby with gin, jazz, and the Roaring Twenties. That misses its point... more »
Capitalism may be the best economic system, but the price for all that prosperity was always going to be at the cost of high culture... more »
What differentiates translation from the other literary arts? The way translators read. Damion Searls explains... more »
Socrates was poor, ugly, boastful, kind of a jerk. He was also, of course, a timeless genius. But is he a man for our times?... more »
Paul Krugman has a question for the New York Times. Given its “push toward blandness,” “why even bother having an opinion section?”... more »
Agnes Callard: "Where once children were instructed to be saintly, or at least virtuous, or at least ordinary, now they are invited to be weird"... more »
In bohemian New York, a vibe shift is underway. The avant-garde is advancing no more than a series of poses and affectations... more »
Writers like Kafka and Edgar Allan Poe conveyed moral, practical, and proverbial wisdom. But now “the communicability of experience is decreasing”... more »
We no longer read long books but seem to have no problem with long movies or narrative TV. The “attention crisis” isn’t what you think it is... more »
“In the age of abundant digital information, materials libraries offer something scarce: hands-on experience with the stuff that makes the world”... more »
Questions of taste are freighted by uncertainty and ambiguity. In the arts, what distinguishes good from bad?... more »
“It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised”... more »
James Longenbach’s poetry occurred in “the lyric now” — a “state of constant mutability … always happening, always having happened”... more »
A cenotaph for Newton would be taller than the Pyramids. Paris was to have 17 extravagant tollhouses. 18th-century architecture had a flair for the dramatic... more »
“A tissue of horrors” telling of “an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity” — 19th-century France reviled (and was hooked on) newspapers... more »
No matter how rigorously philosophical Hannah Arendt’s prose is, it makes space for something like mysticism... more »
Fifty years of luminous painting in Sienna — largely of saints and martyrs — ended abruptly, with the plague... more »
“The widespread caricature of Adorno as a scowling contrarian or snob continues to inhibit our understanding of his work”... more »
“Tradwives” boast hobby farms and $300,000 old-timey ovens to go with their polka-dotted aesthetics. Paging Thorstein Veblen... more »
How good was Martin Amis? His verbal ambition was a crucial force in the revitalization of the novel in English... more »
In 1880, Matthew Arnold foresaw religion's being replaced by poetry. If literature did gain that lofty status, it has lost it. Why?... more »
From roughly 1945 to 1990, America fostered a dazzling succession of artistic developments. Since then, says William Deresiewicz, we’ve been trudging in a circle... more »
Should the 20th-century canon exclude Updike, Baldwin, and Roth in favor of Alfred Kubin, Machado de Assis, and Natsume Soseki?... more »
Since the '60s, Marxism has flourished on American campuses. So where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship?... more »
The poetry of stones. In times of stress, Oliver Sacks turned to the physical world, “where there is no life, but also no death”... more »
The preposterous productivity of Barry Malzberg. Could you write a publishable 60,000 word novel in 27 hours?... more »
Are operas more relatable if we regard them not primarily as works of art but as work by artists?... more »
Daniel Defoe’s travelogue on Britain is unsurpassed, despite its fabrications, carelessness, and overuse of superlatives... more »
God doesn’t like Marxists — or so concludes Jordan Peterson in a 500-page book ostensibly about the Old Testament... more »
“The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty”... more »
“I used to think of the swelling piles of books in every room as literary stalagmites, but now that they’ve merged, they’re more like a great coral reef of literature”... more »
Does real moral progress begin when we give up on moralism? We’re just not built that way... more »
The case for Trollope. He should be read because he is not of our time. His charitable attitude is anachronistic – and necessary... more »
DH Lawrence vs. Orwell. “Dreaming up laws of the cosmos from under your scrotum is one thing; cheating on your wife is another”... more »
When a letter is not just a letter. It’s a confession, a moral credo, a play, a plot, an existential quarrel. Cynthia Ozick explains... more »
For Fredric Jameson, theory, in its turning away from common sense, offered a trip through the looking glass... more »
In 1919, Charles Hoy Fort, the “enfant terrible of science,” wrote Book of the Damned: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”... more »
A weekend at the ventriloquist convention holds flirtation, aggression, corny jokes, and above all, faith in the art form... more »
Literary criticism has become almost entirely cultural criticism. Was this shift an inevitable product of the academy?... more »
“Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »
Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »
The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »
We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »
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