Articles of Note
Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »
New Books
The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned ... more »
Articles of Note
Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism ... more »
New Books
High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality” ... more »
Articles of Note
Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »
New Books
Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province ... more »
Articles of Note
Jordan Petersen is rich, famous, and unhappy. His anxiety landed him in a Russian hospital. Now he's back from breakdown ... more »
New Books
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »
Essays & Opinions
We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »
Articles of Note
Sherry Turkle, MIT’s “one-woman emergency empathy squad,” is a critic of technology amid its evangelists...more... more »
New Books
What can we learn from Philip Roth, master careerist? Lawyer up early, listen to critics while scorning them publicly, sell out whenever possible ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it" ... more »
Articles of Note
The tragic legacy of “comfort women” has divided South Korea and Japan for decades. Enter the dubious claims of a Harvard law professor ... more »
New Books
What Freud got right. According to a new book, his ideas weren’t just ahead of his time — they are ahead of ours ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »
Articles of Note
Parul Sehgal read 125 years of writing in The New York Times Book Review. She found mostly a dearth of style and a failure of criticism... more »
New Books
At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon... more »
Essays & Opinions
Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress ... more »
Articles of Note
The book blurb requires too much work and induces too much guilt. As Viet Thanh Nguyen says, “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave.”... more »
New Books
René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors ... more »
Articles of Note
What happens when race, class, and power collide at an elite liberal-arts college? No one emerges unscathed ... more »
New Books
More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie... more »
Essays & Opinions
Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification? ... more »
Articles of Note
No human invention has destroyed the civilization that invented it. We haven't been careful or wise — just lucky ... more »
New Books
Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman” ... more »
Articles of Note
Two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, exemplify two radically different ideas about politics and design... more »
New Books
Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more »
Essays & Opinions
Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »
Articles of Note
Unearthing Caligula's pleasure garden. Was he assassinated because he was a monster, or was he made into a monster because he was assassinated? ... more »
New Books
When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes... more »
Essays & Opinions
In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »
Articles of Note
How to write, according to Martin Amis: No fancy syntax; use line breaks liberally; be original; see things with a poet’s eye... more »
New Books
A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more »
Essays & Opinions
In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust ... more »
Articles of Note
Psychosis and dissociation were key mechanisms for Surrealist artists. Down with Western logic! they cried. Long live paranoia!... more »
New Books
Alan Greenspan wished he’d never spoken of “irrational exuberance”; Thomas Kuhn rued introducing “paradigm shift” — coiner’s remorse is real ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »
Articles of Note
What is the cultural sway of magazines when there are 20-year-old TikTok influencers with many more subscribers than Time? ... more »
New Books
A mammoth new biography of Philip Roth is imminent. Who better to review it than, well, Philip Roth? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »
Articles of Note
In Victorian times, one sat erect in polite society. Enter the scandalous American rocking chair — a “lazy and ungraceful indulgence”... more »
New Books
The legacy of British imperialism is everywhere: Even the word “loot” is appropriated — from the Hindi “lut,” the spoils of war... more »
Essays & Opinions
Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »
Articles of Note
Classics is beholden to a traditional, triumphalist, “Western civ” model. If the field doesn’t change, it doesn’t deserve to survive ... more »
New Books
When it comes to Patricia Highsmith, the question of mental illness, of course, arises. Her personality was interwoven with those of her characters ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system ... more »
Articles of Note
Computers can’t understand a haiku or conjure a fairytale. They can't grasp literature at all. And they never will. Here's proof ... more »
New Books
Joan Didion's potency and influence stems for her ability to repurpose an ingrained sense of futility into a tool of critical analysis... more »
Essays & Opinions
Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist” ... more »
Articles of Note
Seth Abramson's books promise "proof" of Trumpian misdeeds. In reality, they are incoherent summaries of other people's reporting ... more »
New Books
To separate science from pseudoscience, it helps to consider the rationales of UFOlogists, Yeti enthusiasts, and yes, anti-vaxxers ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances ... more »
Articles of Note
There is “a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course” ... more »
New Books
After residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, along with a Guggenheim and a MacArthur, Bette Howland never wrote another book ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind... more »
Articles of Note
Reading Heidegger in Beijing. He's a rock star in academic circles there. But kindly ignore the corruptive impact of a bad regime on a great thinker ... more »
New Books
Golden age of the cigarette. The war over smoking is too easily cast as one of heroes and villains - in truth things were much messier ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Criticism is often a cycle of destruction, a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own ... more »
Articles of Note
Do "woke" American ideas on race, gender, and post-colonialism really pose an existential threat to France?... more »
New Books
Acid humor, a flair for pith, a feel for the uncanny — Joan Didion’s talents have been celebrated for decades. Let’s not stop now... more »
Essays & Opinions
In the 1950s, writers began to formulate a critique of technology. Since then we've rushed into an uncritical embrace. What now?... more »
Articles of Note
When Charles Darwin met Harriet Martineau, she enjoyed a level of influence he could not imagine. And she challenged his dim view of women ... more »
New Books
"Yeats saw so deeply into the contours of his age that the shape of the future became somewhat discernible" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A biography paints Tom Stoppard as unfailingly kind. The playwright’s reaction? He is “not as nice as people think” ... more »
Articles of Note
Cassandra of the internet age: As far back as the mid-'80s, Michael Goldhaber was worried about the attention economy. ... more »
New Books
Was the painter Francis Bacon a truth-teller about humanity's animal nature, or a mere mimic, best at rendering feet, doorknobs, and toiletware? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
On pop futurism. The genre's method? Sketch out possible future, highlight emergent trend, and promise way for reader to benefit ... more »
Articles of Note
Juliet did not say "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore [is he] Romeo?" So why do so many people deface quotes with brackets? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The ur-existentialist. Kierkegaard was torn by his desires for recognition and for walking the path of a self-denying Christian ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The provincialism of American literary culture: We want books that "speak to the moment," espousing a political urgency. That's small-minded ... more »
Articles of Note
How Mary-Kay Wilmers refashioned the London Review of Books in her image: literary and eccentric... more »
New Books
Both Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath were caught in the web of literary fame. But he lived to 74, she died at 30. The difference is instructive ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A fact about the academic humanities? "Bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they make the case for their departments"... more »
Articles of Note
The book pirates of 18th-century France devised a strategy: Republish works by Voltaire. It was “an enterprise of solid gold”... more »
New Books
As a 23-year-old social-media influencer tops the best-seller list in France, the old guard fights back: “147 pages of emptiness, 19.50 lost euros” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Transgression was the founding gesture of the avant-garde. Now the avant-garde can seem a little "rapey." What changed? ... more »
Articles of Note
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is one of the most prominent classicists of his generation. He's not sure the field should exist ... more »
New Books
In her writings, Mary Wollstonecraft flouted social norms. In life, she often defied her own pronouncements ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Philosophers have sought for centuries to understand beauty. Now scientists are giving it a try ... more »
Articles of Note
The law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule call for rule by social-scientific elites. That would be a disaster... more »
New Books
Did E.E. Cummings’s relationship with a French prostitute really have a serious effect on his work?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Helen Frankenthaler was many things, but perhaps not “a Shakespeare of the Eisenhower era,” as a fulsome biography asserts... more »
Articles of Note
Silvia Foti's grandfather is a national hero in Lithuania. He also worked with the Nazis to kill Jews. His story has echoes across Eastern Europe ... more »
New Books
We inhabit a dystopian reality, says John Gray, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction... more »