Articles of Note
Man of many dreams. In the early 1930s, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli began recording his dreams for Carl Jung. Somehow he remembered 1,300 of them ... more »
New Books
The Didion gaze. What makes her work fascinating is also what makes it rare: a woman looking at men and not looking away ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Freud’s philosophy of grief. How the loss of a daughter shaped a father’s understanding of death ... more »
Articles of Note
Rose Dugdale was a 33-year-old British heiress with a Ph.D. and a glowing recommendation from Iris Murdoch. How did she end up an art thief? ... more »
New Books
Why did the West rise? Meritocracy, democracy, trust, innovation, and restraint, argues a new book. But was it really so simple?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harold Bloom’s last book is lazy, solipsistic, vague, and plain wrong. It suggests that he may have misunderstood literature all along... more »
Articles of Note
An “economy of favors.” Poetry prizes suffer from reciprocity: judges give awards to those who have given them awards... more »
New Books
From the “morally hideous” to the terroristically violent, Kate Manne offers a clear taxonomy of misogyny. And yet no vision for the future emerges ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Feynman, Hawking, and Herschel all insist that empirical evidence is the sole truth of science. Do they protest too much? ... more »
Articles of Note
Suffering from syphilis, Manet turned to alternative medicine: ergot of rye, mercury, ice showers, hydroelectric baths. Nothing helped... more »
New Books
What constituted identity in the Renaissance? According to two new books, it was a slippery concept, bounded by neither mind nor body... more »
Essays & Opinions
America’s battle is not between a “liberal” left and a “fascist” right, but rather between the people and a grandiose system of political management ... more »
Articles of Note
The old-world strangeness of her diction, the stirringly beautiful chest voice: What it means to finally take Dolly Parton seriously... more »
New Books
Selecting Adrienne Rich for a poetry prize, Auden praised her “neatly and modestly” finished work. So began her desire to be “messily passionate and grand” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Literature defines itself against the pedantry of popular advice. Self-help promotes itself as an antidote to intellectual bombast. Are the genres antithetical? ... more »
Articles of Note
Amid extreme deprivation, food and shelter matter, of course. But so do laughter, stories, play, dance, music... more »
New Books
Even when the history of philosophy doesn't make sense philosophically, it does makes sense as a story ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The world is a wild and unlikely place: the giraffe, stranger than the griffin, taller than a tall house, does us the incomparable gift of being proof of it” ... more »
Articles of Note
Once a patrician malady, gout is now more widespread. Fortunately, treatments have advanced beyond poultices of fermented ox dung ... more »
New Books
War has advanced in lockstep with civilization, argues Margaret MacMillan. It is "the most organized of all human activities” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A profusion of new voices, all clamoring for readership, most unable to pay the bills: the 18th-century writing life... more »
Articles of Note
Literature is distinct from politics. And yet, from Walt Whitman to Curtis Sittenfeld, American writers can’t look away... more »
New Books
A rage to possess: Degas could not say no to calico headdresses, Normandy handkerchiefs, Gavarni prints, and Oriental carpets ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Though his ideas have faded, the charismatic philosopher Franz Brentano achieved immortality by other means — his students ... more »
Articles of Note
America is on the brink of civilization collapse, argues Peter Turchin. The cause: an overproduction of elites... more »
New Books
What's the best book of 2020? The New Statesman rounds up picks from Hilary Mantel, Steven Pinker, Pankaj Mishra, and other readers ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Before there was cancel culture, Wagner was canceled. He hated Jews and was embraced by the Nazis. Yet his work has persisted ... more »
Articles of Note
Classical music offers the last true unmediated listening experience: no microphones, no amplifiers, no speakers ... more »
New Books
In a new book of essays, Zadie Smith offers advice for getting through the pandemic: “Think, reflexively, of whoever suffers” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A new translation casts Beowulf as a modern bro, making a point about toxic masculinity and leaving a trail of clichés ... more »
Articles of Note
Book publishing is a business, and a difficult one. One result of our hard times: a well-made book is tougher to find ... more »
New Books
“This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved. We persist.” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Self-awareness as a literary tic doesn’t arise out of thin air. So why have writers become so annoyingly self-conscious? ... more »
Articles of Note
At The New York Times, liberal institutionalists and woke insurrectionists duke it out. Is the paper of the resistance still the paper of record? ... more »
New Books
When Michael Dirda first heard Wagner, he understood why Victorian mothers shielded their daughters from it. "This wasn’t just a 40-minute duet, it was aural sex" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
In praise of minor aesthetics. The beautiful and sublime are rare; the cute, zany, interesting, and gimmicky are ubiquitous ... more »
Articles of Note
The study of civilizational collapse was once a preoccupation of marginal scholars. Now it's growing ... more »
New Books
It's been said that "humans’ greatest invention was the invention of invention itself." What are the origins of our ingenuity? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The election is over, but anti-intellectual resentment remains strong. What does that mean for the academy? ... more »
Articles of Note
With wit and an aversion to self-help, Kate Baer is the Instagram poet for people who don’t like Instagram poets ... more »
New Books
Sybille Bedford ran in elite literary circles with Peggy Guggenheim and Cyril Connolly. She kept her friends close — and exploited them mercilessly ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Ours is an intellectually enfeebled milieu in which the self-interest of privileged white men is passed off as “global thinking”... more »
Articles of Note
Writing with a pen used to be a leaky, smudgy, frustrating affair. That all changed on October 29, 1945 ... more »
Articles of Note
After Oxford, the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane headed to the World War I trenches. He found happiness... more »
Essays & Opinions
Don DeLillo and Martin Amis ruled the literary ’80s. Now they poke along, referencing their former genius ... more »
Articles of Note
Hegel criticized the Romantics for placing individualism above institutions, producing rebellion and disharmony. What would he make of us?... more »
New Books
It’s easy to hate Ezra Pound for his racism and fascism. But consider his painful postwar years and another emotion may emerge: pity ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The “first-person industrial complex.” Confessional writing — from Augustine to Jia Tolentino — turns desire into discourse. But why is it so dominant now?... more »
Articles of Note
Why was a retrospective of Philip Guston’s paintings put on hold? The powers that be couldn’t distinguish between racist imagery and images depicting racists ... more »
New Books
The growth of specialization is by no means regrettable. Pathological pedantry is a prerequisite for producing knowledge ... more »
Essays & Opinions
What happens when we pray? An anthropologist embeds with an evangelical church to distinguish the metaphorical from the miraculous ... more »
Articles of Note
After decades of political repression, Kenya is trying to shed its reputation as a literary desert. The global publishing industry isn’t helping ... more »
New Books
Historians have lost influence to economists and political scientists. Is that because the latter are more willing to court the powerful? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
In praise of politics. It’s messy, unpredictable, and often disappointing. It’s also the starting point for meaningful societal change ... more »
Articles of Note
The film industry is beleaguered, but the experience of watching a movie on a big screen, as part of an audience, will not disappear ... more »
New Books
Was Ted Hughes a wife-beater? That may depend on your interpretation of Sylvia Plath’s tale of a glass thrown across a dark room ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The “full-naming” crusade — against referring to some composers only by last name (Beethoven) but to others by full name — is just silly ... more »
Articles of Note
When humanities professors wade into legal debates, things go south quickly. Consider, for instance, their argument that “originalism is dumb”... more »
New Books
Gogol was strange, but consider his parents: His father was a sort of court jester; his mother thought her son invented the steamboat and the railroad... more »
Essays & Opinions
Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, McEwan — the British baby boomers sink toward senescence with a wave of nostalgic, self-indulgent prose... more »
Articles of Note
The slow agonies of respiratory disease, like the swift drama of plague, can inspire great art... more »
New Books
Delve into Nabokov’s letters and lectures, and a familiar, impertinent question will occur: Was he a pervert? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The Theory Wars of the '90s never ended; they just migrated from Diacritics to Twitter. There’s no end in sight ... more »
Articles of Note
Self-discipline, civility, and reason: these Stoic practices may allow us to live better. But don't underestimate the value of anger... more »
New Books
Across five volumes totaling 2,500 pages, Joseph Frank did more than any other critic to illuminate the mind of Dostoevsky... more »
Essays & Opinions
Being an editor requires two qualities that rarely coexist in the same person, says Norman Podhoretz: arrogance and selflessness ... more »
Articles of Note
“Journalism is the real Minotaur … It demands every year a fresh supply of young men and women: devours them … and is ready for another batch” ... more »
New Books
The invention of alphabetical order signaled a shift from a world with intrinsic order to one we must organize ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Why is autofiction so white? Perhaps it’s an inevitable result of a literary landscape dominated by white editors and critics ... more »
Articles of Note
Every writer is unique in some way; D.H. Lawrence was unique in many ways: his prose style, his personality, his opinions. George Scialabba explains... more »
New Books
A new biography of Lucian Freud withholds gossip into “private affairs.” That’s a shame — Freud’s private affairs propelled his art ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Does history really “have its eyes on us,” as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George Washington says? Where did this idea come from, anyway? ... more »
Articles of Note
Books bound in human skin have a long history, though one less sensational and more ambiguous than the urban legends ... more »
New Books
Intellectual detours are key to learning, and the ability to take them is a skill to nurture ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Hannah Arendt is the most used and abused philosophical source to interpret American politics. Sam Moyn explains ... more »
Articles of Note
Many colleges are fighting for survival. Is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive? ... more »
New Books
Jew, poet, homosexual, painter, punster, novelist, critic, palm-reader, ether-addict, Kabbalist, Catholic: Who was Max Jacob? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"The mob is drunk on the new power that surveillance provides them, seemingly unaware of the many ways it could come back to bite them next" ... more »
Articles of Note
“It’s not a love affair or a marriage; it’s a job," says the biographer Hermione Lee, who is taking on her first living subject... more »
New Books
“Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics,” John Carey wrote. But not necessarily wiser... more »
Essays & Opinions
Political poems were “excruciating”; the “so-called arts of the left” were insincere — for George and Mary Oppen, politics and the arts did not mix ... more »
Articles of Note
Academia, a theater of “grinding competition and relentless banality,” is no longer a place to live the contemplative life... more »
New Books
The maddening Martin Amis. He denounces authors’ asides into dreams, sex, and religion… and then commits those very novelistic sins ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Ruthlessly self-absorbed, obsessed with power, a sexual predator — Simone de Beauvoir was not a good person. But at least she stood for something ... more »
Articles of Note
What defines the literature of the far right? Pseudo-academic pretensions, worship of the male physique, and a fixation on technological determinism ... more »
New Books
The voice of The Atlantic is authoritative, high-minded, empirical — and, once you’ve heard it enough, utterly tedious ... more »
Essays & Opinions
What makes Chekhov unique? His perception, his ability to discern the subtlest emotional shades of human experience. Gary Saul Morson explains ... more »
New Books
The history of knowledge and its enemies was best summed up by Heinrich Heine: “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"A grabby talky disorderly inferno of the spirit." William Gaddis's J R was almost comically ahead of its time ... more »