Articles of Note
Regency-era sex ed was comprised of such works as Tableau de l’Amour Conjugal, Every Woman’s Book, and the best-seller Aristotle’s Masterpiece... more »
New Books
How did "diet" go from a way of life to a sum of calories and carbs? The shift began in the 17th century... more »
Essays & Opinions
No matter how hard-nosed and rigorously philosophical Hannah Arendt’s prose is, it makes space for something like mysticism... more »
Articles of Note
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 »
New Books
Are Amazon reviews art? The writer Kevin Killian posted more than 2,000 of them. Now they're collected in a book... more »
Essays & Opinions
Fifty years of luminous painting in Sienna — largely of saints and martyrs — ended abruptly, with the plague... more »
Articles of Note
Victor Pelevin’s “descent from dazzling young writer to misogynist crank mirrors the decline of mainstream Russian culture”... more »
New Books
Bohemians and bohemia. How does a neighborhood become a cultural magnet? Consider Greenwich Village ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The widespread caricature of Adorno as a scowling contrarian or snob continues to inhibit our understanding of his work”... more »
Articles of Note
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 »
New Books
Aristotle dismissed the sense of smell as the domain of women. In fact, humans have a better nose than most other mammals'... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Tradwives” boast hobby farms and $300,000 old-timey ovens to go with their polka-dotted aesthetics. Paging Thorstein Veblen... more »
Articles of Note
Why did Alice Munro’s biographer keep quiet about the abuse endured by the short-story writer's daughter?... more »
New Books
To explain the workings of the imagination, brain science is necessary but insufficient. A great mystery remains... more »
Essays & Opinions
How good was Martin Amis? His verbal ambition was a crucial force in the revitalization of the novel in English... more »
Articles of Note
The humanities refashioned themselves as society’s conscience. A new, conservative movement in literary studies recoils from that role... more »
New Books
Leibniz’s literary remains. An epistolary graphomaniac, he left behind 15,000 letters to some 1,300 people... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1880, Matthew Arnold foresaw religion's being replaced by poetry. If literature did gain that lofty status, it has lost it. Why?... more »
Articles of Note
In South America, capybaras run riot. In Italy, gray wolves interbreed with dogs. So in rushes the wildlife birth control industry... more »
New Books
Before the Brothers Grimm, death, poverty, disfigurement, and hunger had never been so charming... more »
Essays & Opinions
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 »
Articles of Note
Is there a radical feminist undercurrent to embroidery and crochet? Or is such crafting merely “she-power frippery”?... more »
New Books
How two lovably eccentric dilettantes rescued Nietzsche's reputation and recast him as a prescient postmodern thinker... more »
Essays & Opinions
Should the 20th-century canon exclude Updike, Baldwin, and Roth in favor of Alfred Kubin, Machado de Assis, and Natsume Soseki?... more »
Articles of Note
American men have stopped reading fiction — or so suggests an array of think pieces. But is it true?... more »
New Books
The problem with Christian rock: The music’s stale conformity was the inverse of the ecstatic freedom its lyrics promised... more »
Essays & Opinions
Since the '60s, Marxism has flourished on American campuses. So where are the great works of American Marxist scholarship?... more »
Articles of Note
Consider a new volume of Freud’s works, an ethnography of homeless Angelenos, and 10 of the other best scholarly books of 2024... more »
New Books
The extinction obsession. We’ve always indulged fantasies about the end of the world. What’s changed is the mechanism of our destruction... more »
Essays & Opinions
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 »
Articles of Note
Obsession with historical authenticity prevails at sites like Colonial Williamsburg — but such re-creations take us only so far... more »
New Books
What’s the point of psychoanalysis? According to Freud, it's to turn “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”... more »
Essays & Opinions
The preposterous productivity of Barry Malzberg. Could you write a publishable 60,000 word novel in 27 hours?... more »
Articles of Note
Apoptosis, necroptosis, entosis, NETosis: Cells die in at least 20 different ways, some silent and some showy ... more »
New Books
“Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Are operas more relatable if we regard them not primarily as works of art but as work by artists?... more »
Articles of Note
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 »
New Books
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 »
Essays & Opinions
Daniel Defoe’s travelogue on Britain is unsurpassed, despite its fabrications, carelessness, and overuse of superlatives... more »
Articles of Note
English is the most widely used language in the history of humanity. Is the world being linguistically brainwashed? Not likely... more »
New Books
Many scholars write histories of the working class without grasping the actual experience of work. David Montgomery was an exception... more »
Essays & Opinions
God doesn’t like Marxists — or so concludes Jordan Peterson in a 500-page book ostensibly about the Old Testament... more »
Articles of Note
How does your “self-continuity” stack up? The concept measures the extent to which your past, present, and future selves align... more »
New Books
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 »
Essays & Opinions
“The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty”... more »
Articles of Note
What explains the public’s pathetic knowledge of history? Start with bogus cliches and salacious, error-filled bestsellers... more »
New Books
How Tariq Ali, a street-fighting, mustachioed Marxist, became a Trotskyist Zelig, never indulging a second thought... more »
Essays & Opinions
“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 »
Articles of Note
Stanley Kubrick and the price of perfectionism. He preoccupied himself with every detail, big and small. It came at a cost... more »
New Books
For Thomas Hardy, the death of his first wife prompted him to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life... more »
Essays & Opinions
Does real moral progress begin when we give up on moralism? We’re just not built that way... more »
Articles of Note
Who killed literary fiction? It's the big publishing houses, which used to compete for talent but have become sedate, predictable... more »
New Books
Millennials' divorce books are less concerned with social tragedy or triumph. Tthe possibilities they explore instead are thrilling... more »
Essays & Opinions
The case for Trollope. He should be read because he is not of our time. His charitable attitude is anachronistic – and necessary... more »
Articles of Note
Sailor, singer, atheist, philosopher, aficionado of ribald limericks: Daniel Dennett contained multitudes. But why was his work important?... more »
New Books
By the time Handel presented Messiah, he was being ridiculed as a fat, stale has-been. Only one of those things was true... more »
Essays & Opinions
DH Lawrence vs. Orwell. “Dreaming up laws of the cosmos from under your scrotum is one thing; cheating on your wife is another”... more »
Articles of Note
Does progress in the arts and sciences purify our moral or corrupt them? That question reduced Rousseau to tears... more »
New Books
Saints for supper. In the Middle Ages, consuming holy icons was thought to cure a range of intestinal ailments... more »
Essays & Opinions
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 »
Articles of Note
"You can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity," says Judith Butler. "If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties" ... more »
New Books
"Every era reinvents the biography form to suit its purposes," writes Laura Kipnis. "Call it the post-truth biography"... more »
Essays & Opinions
For Fredric Jameson, theory, in its turning away from common sense, offered a trip through the looking glass... more »
Articles of Note
The Zabihollah Mansouri riddle. Was one of the most popular literary figures of 20th-century Iran an utter charlatan?... more »
New Books
“Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”... more »
Essays & Opinions
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 »
Articles of Note
“Picture a desert with old servers rusting into the sand beneath the sun like the state of Ozymandias.” Ryan Ruby on language, poetry, and civilizational collapse... more »
New Books
Piet Mondrian failed as a prophet. Today he's regarded as something more significant: an influencer... more »
Essays & Opinions
A weekend at the ventriloquist convention holds flirtation, aggression, corny jokes, and above all, faith in the art form... more »
Articles of Note
Harold Bloom claimed to be able to read 1,000 pages an hour. At that pace, it would still take 280 years to get through GPT-4’s training data... more »
New Books
Dicey, piece of cake, scrounge, and bonkers are all NOOB's — "not one-off Britishisms." Why have such words conquered America?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Literary criticism has become almost entirely cultural criticism. Was this shift an inevitable product of the academy?... more »
Articles of Note
Virginia Woolf's pastoral idyll. For the Bloomsbury set, country retreats were sources of well-being, inspiration, and recuperation... more »
New Books
The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“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 »
Articles of Note
Kafka's dark humor is apparent in his weirdest, longest, and most underappreciated short story ... more »
New Books
Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »
Essays & Opinions
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 »
Articles of Note
Beatrix Potter wasn’t just a children’s book writer — she was a framer, sheep breeder, and conservationist... more »
New Books
In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »
Essays & Opinions
The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »
Articles of Note
100 pages a day. No exceptions. That’s how much Matthew Walther reads. You're skeptical?... more »
New Books
“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »
Essays & Opinions
We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »
Articles of Note
Why read novels? To recognize our preoccupations and escape from them; to be intellectually engaged and emotionally devastated... more »
New Books
Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »
Essays & Opinions
Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »
Articles of Note
Roger Scruton became a conservative in Paris, but refined his thinking in the “bohemian blur” of 1970s Britain... more »
New Books
“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »
Essays & Opinions
When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »