Articles of Note
Fear of geopolitical decline and of cultural decadence often go hand-in-hand, a point echoed by conservative choirs of the 1750s and our own time... more »
New Books
Political earnestness can be tedious in an essayist. But in Olivia Laing, it's leavened by empathy and an omnivorous curiosity... more »
Essays & Opinions
Peter Schjeldahl predicts what we'll experience when can once again wander museums: Everything in them will be other than what we remember... more »
Articles of Note
Covid-19 is a disease of the social as well as physical body. Our challenge is to invent, rather than nostalgically restore, a society in which we are in touch without touching... more »
New Books
Bearded like a deep-sea fisherman, baggy-eyed, high on drugs or alcohol, the novelist Robert Stone cut a curious figure at catered cocktail parties... more »
Essays & Opinions
An artist's gifts are meant for giving. That's always been a dilemma for gifted people. In the digital age, it's a crisis... more »
Articles of Note
Evgeny Morozov made his name as a scourge of megalomaniacal technologists. Now he’s readying a new way to spread information online... more »
New Books
“Cosmopolitanism” is often meant as a dig at the Davos set of footloose capitalists. But the term contains rich philosophical potential, says Martha Nussbaum... more »
Essays & Opinions
The art world has survived outlaw days and obscene money, keeping its culture intact. But can it survive the coronavirus?... more »
Articles of Note
When magazines were ambitious. In the 1890s, they offered designs for homes, college degrees, even a model town. Occasionally those ventures worked... more »
New Books
Darwin wrote more than a dozen books. Some of them are easily ignored. Some are fun and charming. Some grind through important stuff. One of them flows briskly and changed the world... more »
Essays & Opinions
What to read in quarantine? Colette, Hilary Mantel, and classic, 700 page academic tomes. It’s a good time for slow reading... more »
Articles of Note
As the bubonic plague ravaged Florence, Boccaccio observed the putrid crisis at ground level. What did social distancing look like in 1347?... more »
New Books
Wordsworth's credentials as a sage and prophet of nature were unimpeachable. Then he suffered "the longest, dullest decline in literary history"... more »
Essays & Opinions
The coronavirus marks the end of an era defined by liberalism and rising living standards. What will shape the new world order?... more »
Articles of Note
The Russian battle against death began in the second half of the 19th century. It continues to this day... more »
New Books
Whoever has the most galleries when he dies, wins. Such is the consensus among art collectors like the particularly ruthless Larry Gagosian... more »
Essays & Opinions
The case for Don DeLillo. By every metric of literary greatness, he is in the highest percentile. Give him the Nobel Prize. This year... more »
Articles of Note
The genius of Heinrich von Kleist — writer, newspaperman, tragic figure — was in using plain, reportorial language toward grotesque ends... more »
New Books
Stylish novelists like Ottessa Moshfegh and Ling Ma give us curiously passive, apathetic characters. What’s behind this tedious tendency?... more »
Essays & Opinions
"You can live alone without being lonely, and you can be lonely without living alone," says Jill Lepore, "but the two are closely tied together, which makes lockdowns, sheltering in place, that much harder to bear"... more »
Articles of Note
Influence is difficult to measure, but however you calculate it, Encounter had it. How a magazine shaped the intellectual climate... more »
New Books
William Blake's flint cottage, Rudyard Kipling's stone manor: What role do houses play in the lives of creative people?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Two years ago, Joseph Epstein set out to learn Latin. As his dream of mastery has given way to reality, what remains is his love for the language... more »
Articles of Note
A sensational Parisian scandal in 1386 escalated into France’s last trial by combat. Was it all just a case of mistaken identity?... more »
New Books
If you elide crucial historical context, it’s easy to make religious notions of the afterlife look like freakish curiosities. A recent book does just that... more »
Essays & Opinions
Auden was filthy, strewing old food, cigarettes, and martini glasses everywhere. Such squalor, he protested, was necessary for a man of letters... more »
Articles of Note
Zach Baron is a profiler, involving a strange and ephemeral genre of magazine journalism. He spends time with someone and writes about the experience. Now he can't leave the house... more »
New Books
No modernism without lesbians. More than a sexual preference, lesbianism created the conditions for an artistic revolution. Or so claims Diana Souhami... more »
Essays & Opinions
A pandemic is a time for rethinking everything, for changing one’s mind, for putting down books by fashionable theorists... more »
Articles of Note
Orwell and the left. Would this foremost cant-detector find a whiff of it on the contemporary left? He would cast a baleful eye on identity politics and be dubious about diversity... more »
New Books
In his letters, Robert Frost is never tedious, always fun, appallingly crafty, and unusually trusting in people he barely knew... more »
Essays & Opinions
The literature of contagion is vile, says Jill Lepore. "Every story of epidemic is a story of illiteracy, language made powerless, man made brute... more »
Articles of Note
From the Sator Square to anti-riddles, word games have a long and delightful history. Crosswords weren’t invented until 1913... more »
New Books
Freud was a social philosopher, using a scientific guise to lend his ideas more authority. Or so argues a new book... more »
Essays & Opinions
The critical theorist as coronavirus denier. Giorgio Agamben uses outdated jargon to make once-fashionable arguments that now seem absurd. Who's listening?... more »
Articles of Note
“In all the creative occupations, there’s no stability unless you’re a superstar of some sort.” Barbara Ehrenreich reckons with success... more »
New Books
During the 16 months Einstein spent in Bohemia, he did nothing much. But the banality of his experience there is itself worth consideration... more »
Essays & Opinions
In praise of marginalia. "Like having a child or planting a garden, annotating a book is an expression of hope for the future"... more »
Articles of Note
There’s a lot we can numb ourselves to in order to survive, says Meghan O'Rourke. But can we ignore our inability to come together to mourn the dead?... more »
New Books
Could it be that loneliness was invented around 1800? The separation of self and society has deeper roots, as Hamlet or Othello might testify... more »
Essays & Opinions
Any critic who wants to write something lasting must do so in part from aggression. Few have been more successful than T.S. Eliot... more »
Articles of Note
In the 1790s, muslin gowns, hoops earrings, and madras were the height of European fashion. They were all shamelessly appropriated from the West Indies... more »
New Books
“Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising. … Ideally, the only difference would be the logo.” So it went at the Warhol Factory... more »
Essays & Opinions
Society, Durkheim held, was a social fact irreducible to psychology or economics. In a time of pandemic, we’re all Durkheimians... more »
Articles of Note
Crossword editors are strange arbiters of cultural relevance. But it really matters what reaches the grid — and what's kept out... more »
New Books
George Gershwin attacked a “crude, vulgar, and unadorned” version of jazz. But were his experiments in the genre just cultural appropriation?... more »
Essays & Opinions
When Alex Perez praises Philip Roth and Henry Miller, people react as if to an atrocity. And yet he can’t get enough of these problematic white dudes... more »
Articles of Note
Inigo Philbrick is the art world’s mini-Madoff. A young and charming dealer who dabbled in drugs, prostitution, and endless scams... more »
New Books
Lucian Freud’s art was an obsessive quest to exert maniacal control over contour, color, and light. He was a King Lear of the brush... more »
Essays & Opinions
What does a writer do when his words stop working? Wait for the muse to recharge or dwell in the struggle to overcome your own silence... more »
Articles of Note
Judith Shklar, critic of liberal triumphalism, was no system builder. But her thought resonates in our disenchanted, skeptical world... more »
New Books
Tarred as elitist and conservative for its New Critical roots, formalism is making a comeback. Will it stick this time?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Be of good cheer,” advises Geoff Dyer, reflecting on the pandemic. But inwardly he’s clutching his head like Munch’s screamer... more »
Articles of Note
As Furtwängler and Shostakovich showed, classical music has the ability to bind a nation. Why hasn’t that happened in America?... more »
New Books
Before the 1600s, the workplace drug most commonly consumed in the West was beer. Then capitalism brought a craze for something new: coffee... more »
Essays & Opinions
In literature, a disease is not just a disease. It is a return of the repressed, a manifestation of an eternal crisis... more »
Articles of Note
War, corruption, oppression, and misogyny were facts of life in Renaissance Italy. Are the period’s great artistic achievements complicit in those brutalities?... more »
New Books
Shrinking news coverage, online consumer reviews, the withering of literature in public esteem: an audit of book reviewing in uncertain times... more »
Essays & Opinions
Much of the poetry we love most is wistful and regret-filled. Why? The all-too human hankering for things to be other than they are. Michael Dirda explains... more »
Articles of Note
Why do American cemeteries look the way they do? The answer lies in a 19th-century passion for rural, rustic design... more »
New Books
Explainer journalism never lets actual events get in the way of big ideas. Exhibit A: Ezra Klein’s new book... more »
Essays & Opinions
Through Umberto Eco’s eyes, the library functions not to enlighten, but to disorient — to overwhelm your self-confidence... more »
Articles of Note
From The Decameron to Station Eleven, there has always been a literature of pandemic because there have always been pandemics... more »
New Books
Writing about music is a difficult thing, saying in words that which words cannot say. Philip Kennicott gets it exactly right... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1948, Camus discovered Simone Weil’s manuscripts. They revolutionized not only his sense of suffering but his sense of self... more »
Articles of Note
When Dora Maar, Picasso’s lover, suffered a jealousy-fueled breakdown, he blamed Surrealism and “that whining, weepy phony, Jean-Jacques Rousseau”... more »
New Books
How was America transformed from a “rabidly anti-theatrical” society to one that, by 1833, viewed Shakespeare as its great national author?... more »
Essays & Opinions
George Steiner, an unrepentant elitist, was a moral force for high art. Among his virtues was a hunger to be more serious... more »
Articles of Note
A medical mystery to unravel: Jordan Peterson was in a drug-induced coma in Russia. When he awoke, he was unable to speak or write... more »
New Books
The battle between Noah Webster and Joseph E. Worcester still matters because it was over the words Americans use to understand themselves... more »
Essays & Opinions
Long gone are the days of Dickens and Kafka — the novel has been brought low. Are its days numbered?... more »
Articles of Note
In 1967, William Styron, a white novelist, fictively entered the mind of a black man. What would happen if The Confessions of Nat Turner appeared today?... more »
New Books
Americans seem headed for an “endless autumn” — plenty of free time, but creativity, warmth, and hope in short supply... more »
Essays & Opinions
George Scialabba, who has spent a lifetime suffering from depression and reading about others', has some advice... more »
Articles of Note
Hannah Arendt recognized that thinking is not necessarily a moral activity but can function as a brake on the temptation to do wrong... more »
New Books
The reality of numbers. Does it matter if numbers are, in a philosophical sense, real, as long as they work as expected? Depends on whom you ask... more »
Essays & Opinions
The University of Chicago is renowned for its commitment to open debate and rigorous inquiry. Is that still true of its English department?... more »
Articles of Note
Jeremy Bentham warned against ancestor worship. How does that square with the newly prominent display of his waxy, skeletal remains?... more »
New Books
We are confronted with two new, substantial Hitler biographies. How much more is there to say? Quite a lot, it turns out... more »
Essays & Opinions
In praise of passive protagonists. The insipidity of characters like Candide and Bartleby belies their triumphant potential... more »
Articles of Note
The paradox of authenticity: In order to reap the benefits of feeling authentic, you may have to betray your true nature... more »
New Books
iBauhaus. Was this laboratory of Modernism, founded in 1919, a progenitor of the iPhone? The case is by turns persuasive and preposterous... more »
Essays & Opinions
Faulkner arrived in Hollywood in 1932 and made a lasting first impression: He was drunk, disheveled, and bleeding from the head... more »
Articles of Note
Lunch with Freeman Dyson. The notoriously contrarian polymath, who died last week, was a slow eater. He did nearly all of the talking... more »
New Books
Newly married to George Orwell, Eileen Blair cried a lot and typed his manuscripts in the dark. Things went downhill from there... more »
Essays & Opinions
It's been said that most writers are lucky to have one original book in them. A lot of literary careers consist of rewriting it again and again... more »
Articles of Note
The millennial aesthetic: potted plants, sans-serif fonts, pastels (especially pink). It’s for those who can’t afford frills or risk failure... more »
New Books
The joyousness of dogs. We love them and they love us, as no small measure of philosophical material bears out... more »
Essays & Opinions
All is not well in the humanities. Why are its adherents so eager to convince themselves otherwise? Charlie Tyson unpacks “reassurance lit”... more »