New Books

On Janet Malcolm’s memoir: “There is a difference, after all — at times, a contradiction — between journalistic integrity and artistic integrity”... more »

The paradox of rootedness. Genealogies connect us with the past, but they are also contingent exercises in historical interpretation... more »

“If the good news is that we are doomed, the better news is that we can’t do much about it”... more »

Obsessed with precociousness, our literary culture overlooks two late masterworks from Cormac McCarthy... more »

Picasso in Paris. He was everything that made French authorities suspicious: rich, famous, unfathomable, uncontrollable, cosmopolitan... more »

Charlatan or a genius? Jacob Taubes — rabbi, sociologist, philosopher — lived on the line between confabulation and creative thought... more »

“Much of what feels like mastery in adult life is actually the avoidance of a challenge.” Adam Gopnik explains... more »

It’s tempting to take sides on literary marriages. But with so much pain, abuse, and mental ill health, often both partners are victims... more »

Jenny Odell’s new book produces novel juxtapositions, but to what end? It is “an attempt to cultivate profundity in the absence of an argument”... more »

Hegel compared women to plants; Nietzsche said they “delayed human development.” How to explain philosophy’s dogged exclusion of women?... more »

The cost of cathedrals. Architectural ambition demanded the selling of indulgences, financialized cults and relics, and strange marketing campaigns... more »

Bemoaning breast enlargement, a philosopher makes the case for the “unmodified” body. But what of tattoos, cochlear implants, or even cutting one’s hair?... more »

Ballet is full of contradictions. For one, the dancer must put forth every effort to make it all look effortless... more »

Modern society suffers from a wide array of social problems. Would simply hanging out with friends be a big step in the right direction?... more »

When surrealism moved to New York. Masson, Dalí, Ernst, Breton were involved in “one of the greatest cultural exchanges in modern history”... more »

Young Darryl Pinckney was caught between druggy late nights and the snobbish sensibilities of literary apprenticeship... more »

Late bloomer. Amy Clampitt was unknown to the literary world in 1978, when she had her first poem published. She was 58... more »

Jeff Sharlet’s America is “a world of apocalyptic pulsings and unnatural peril.” Behind it lies grief, rage, and bad-faith histrionics... more »

Janet Malcolm had an unrivaled knack for finding the incriminating flaw. In her gaze, everyone is under suspicion... more »

We’ve radically simplified Adam Smith’s rich vision. Blame Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and George Stigler... more »

“All the world’s knowledge in one convenient bookcase.” The sales pitch for the $1,500 Encyclopaedia Britannica was aspirational ... more »

The manuscript of the Marquis de Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom” survived the storming of the Bastille and was later smuggled out of Germany just before the Nazis took over    ... more »

On forgetting: “To remember the details of every action is to invite madness, to paralyze our brains and our communities with memory”    ... more »

Robert Pinsky: “Poetry’s great mission is the pursuit of truth on a human scale, bound by the measure of each person’s mortal voice” ... more »

Is human intelligence our crowning glory as a species, or is it a liability — the source of existential angst and our talent for self-destruction?... more »

 Grotesque, comical, cruel: Kafka's drawings show that he was serious about the visual as well as the verbal ... more »

How was it that idea of the cosmos was invented in the ancient Greek city of Miletus in about 600BC? Credit two men: Thales and Anaximander... more »

When monobrows were all rage and cosmetics were an ethical quandary. Viewing the female body through a medieval lens ... more »

Martha Nussbaum on animals: “Living beings don’t want to just be put in a state of satisfaction. They want to be active architects of their own lives”    ... more »

What is Enlightenment? A new answer to Kant’s question lurks in an investigation of a dozen 18th-century best sellers... more »

Think-tank Thucydides. In cool prose, Robert Kagan makes the case that military intervention is sometimes the only responsible option  ... more »

The Wonders of Things Created and Rarities of Matters Existent. Largely forgotten, this 700-year-old text paints a world of alchemy and amulets and a divine cosmos... more »

Is literary criticism a political force? Do interpretations of Victorian novels really alter the culture? Justin Sider is skeptical... more »

We know that Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital on October 7, 1849. Just about everything else about his premature demise remains a mystery... more »

Palo Alto is a new Olympus, where flip-flopped geniuses save the world. Or so holds a common misperception... more »

What Robert Kaplan learned from the Iraq War: the folly of the modern notion that every human conflict is fixable... more »

Buckminster Fuller was seen as a jack of all trades but master of just one: self-promotion... more »

Jane and Anna Maria Porter are the most famous 19th-century British novelists you’ve never heard of... more »

Human institutions are rarely, if ever, all good or all bad. So is it possible to draw up a balance sheet on the legacy of colonialism? ... more »

Essays & Opinions

T.S. Eliot and the study of power. The drama that takes place across the span of his poetry seems more vital than ever... more »

What is the proper relationship between art and morality? One answer lies in Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, a filthy book about an intolerable man... more »

To take to heart Awakenings, published by Oliver Sacks 50 years ago, is to embrace the possibility of an awakening of our own common humanity... more »

Leonardo was drawn to youth and beauty. He was also obsessed by strange, diseased, "monstrous" faces, which he sketched in caricatures... more »

After 23 years and 2,293 published reviews, A.O. Scott is hanging it up as a film critic. Time for his exit interview... more »

“The history of art is the history of the underrated and overlooked, as well as the overblown and over-sold”... more »

A dearth of deep talk. College was once for airing out one’s views completely. Now students — and professors — choose their words very carefully... more »

Diane Arbus’s photography of the socially marginalized is not revolutionary, but it does have a leveling effect... more »

Distraction, then and now, is driven by sweeping societal changes. So why do we insist that it does private damage to the mind?... more »

The worse things get, the more we want to know: What role has critical theory played in getting us into a democratic crisis?... more »

Where did the Scientific Revolution take place? In Europe, yes, but also in Mexico, Suriname, India, and East Asia... more »

In a rush to dispense lucrative uplift, the happiness industry has lost sight of the long and difficult effort to determine what happiness is... more »

A data scientist tried to optimize daily life using algorithmic principles. The unexpected result: a wicked hangover... more »

In 1705, Damaris Masham put things plainly: “I see no Reason why it should not be thought that all Science lyes as open to a Lady as to a Man”... more »

A Jew in Berlin. How Max Czollek brought U.S.-style identity politics to the German literary-political scene... more »

The battle against euphemism and cliché is longstanding and continuing. Consider the rise of equity language and the proliferation of guides that prescribe its use

“Nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses,” says Hanif Kureishi. But if someone did, would anyone have the balls to defend them?... more »

The sensitivity readers have come for Roald Dahl. Katha Pollitt on the falsification of history and the dumbing down of great literature... more »

In a designer suit and bulletproof vest, Bernard-Henri Lévy set out for Ukraine. Is the philosopher just play-acting at seriousness?... more »

The art of the blasphemer is based on a question: “Why do the feelings of the religious matter more than mine?”... more »

Hannah Rose Woods: “It feels terrible as a writer to admit, but I’ve been struggling to read for pleasure” ... more »

“It is an infernal riddle of digital culture that ‘authenticity’ is constantly breeding its opposite: the ‘spontaneous’ event that proves to be no such thing”   ... more »

Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis built the tenets of modern dance: pastoral simplicity, revolutionary fervor, Eastern ritual... more »

Most concerned with technology and the economy, does “progress studies” have room for progress in art, ethics, and culture? ... more »

Painters have rendered shadows incorrectly for centuries. But artistic liberties with physics can contain aesthetic multitudes... more »

The “capricious, exacting, exquisite” Hope Mirrlees wrote one of the greatest fantasy novels of all time, though it went uncelebrated in her day... more »

Emily Dickinson’s poetry reflected a scientific consensus — the essential characteristics of plants and animals could not be easily distinguished ... more »

"Conspiracies are symptoms of the anxiety which comes from freedom," says Terry Eagleton. "They are antidotes to the open-endedness of history" ... more »

Allan Bloom excelled at culture-war sloganeering. Was it cover for his transgressive sexual and intellectual exhortations? Consider Bronze Age Pervert... more »

Spare a thought for the Paleolithic child, whose activities included herding, fetching water, harvesting vegetables, and making stone tools... more »

Snark v. smarm. For two decades, the cultural climate was marked by the battle between scornful knowingness and superficial seriousness ... more »

“Scholars involved with the literary, visual, and musical arts have fundamentally misunderstood or at least misconstrued the role of the arts in human history”  ... more »

Dream sequences, italics, preternaturally clever children, talking animals — the list of things readers hate is long and varied... more »

Why do literary types put so much emphasis on the power of story? They have nowhere else to turn... more »

Thomas Nagel compels us to confront the possibility that the most fundamental problems of philosophy are insoluble — but no less important for that... more »

Joy, happiness, disgust, and melancholy have their explicators and advocates. Delight, however, is an intellectual orphan. That's a shame... more »

Orwell praised Friedrich Hayek for having the courage to be "unfashionable." He was also self-certain, obtuse, elusive, and often oblivious ... more »

Our culture is awash in “Easter eggs” — covert messages in songs, books, and film. Hunting for them is a waste of time... more »

Marx's style. His polemical and literary temperament — suffused with irony, mockery, critique — cannot be walled off from his social theory... more »

We take “getting lost in a book” to be a good thing. For Petrarch, the voracious reader was an intellectually malnourished, overstimulated junkie... more »

The story of Joshua Katz isn’t really about him — it is about us, our cynicism, and our politicization of everything. Celeste Marcus explains... more »

The real controversy behind the film The Woman King? The poor state of our knowledge of African history... more »

How does the Philippines — a nation with at least 150 languages — read José Rizal, the national poet and novelist? In English... more »

Some clever-seeming, rich young men have renounced reading books. Their moral vision is severely lacking... more »

ChatGPT has prompted hand-wringing that "the college essay is dead." The obit is late: The college essay died years ago... more »

Full of architectural fantasies, the plans for Neom, a new city in Saudi Arabia, reveal a dystopia in the desert... more »

Vsevolod Garshin, Russia’s most underrated writer, was both an incorrigible idealist and a skeptic paralyzed by doubt ... more »

The archive mole toils in obscure used-book stores, poring over sad-looking, dog-eared paperbacks... more »

“Matisse beguiles and bewilders. He renders tree trunks in incandescent primary colors or turns the view out a window into a black void” ... more »

Most kids’ books uplift and delight, or at least instruct. Then there’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day... more »