Articles of Note
Terry Teachout's criticism was marked by a philosophical, non-political conservatism. That might be rare, but is it extinct? ... more »
New Books
H.G. Wells was short and stocky, sporting a comb-over. He looked like a seedy groper. He was irresistible ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Once, “vibe,” “mood,” and “energy” were watchwords of the counterculture. Now everyone uses them — and they have lost their force ... more »
Articles of Note
Emotions are amorphous. Attempts to catalog them, in order to master them, are doomed to fail ... more »
New Books
The unbearable mawkishness of Michael Ignatieff. He is never so platitudinous as he is regarding consolation ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A literary injustice: The ambitious, serious Russell Hoban is best remembered for his children’s books about Frances the Badger ... more »
Articles of Note
Art crimes are as old as art itself. But the FBI's Art Crime Team is fairly new — and busier than ever... more »
New Books
Socrates scoffed at grief. The Stoics regarded it as a messy distraction. Why has this central experience been overlooked by philosophers? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Art’s not a commodity,” held Donald Judd, a mainstay of the art town Marfa, Tex. Now the place confronts the NFT craze... more »
Articles of Note
Molière and the art of hypocrisy. He understood that a certain kind of dissembling is a necessary vice ... more »
New Books
Black power and Black arts were “so twinned and joined at the hip that it is impossible, really, to tell where one begins and the other ends” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Has the Thomas Mann revival trivialized him, reducing the Great Ambiguator to an op-ed columnist? Alex Ross makes the case ... more »
Articles of Note
In his early 70s, Bernard-Henri Lévy has survived several cycles of literary fame. Who is he now? ... more »
New Books
Ali Baba, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: These fairy tales endure because they respond to a deep human need ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The hatchet job is back, made for internet virality. These book reviews have even given rise to a new literary mode ... more »
Articles of Note
A titanic forfeiture of intellectual capital? Into the crossword craze of the 1920s came an even more time-consuming task: the cryptic crossword... more »
New Books
Pablo Picasso, emotional monster. His genius was rivaled by his talent for manipulation — as is evident in his art ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Thou shalt not…” “To be or not to be?” “I would prefer not to.” Words of negation like “not” have a mysterious power ... more »
Articles of Note
Humans are creatures of habit. What does that mean in a world increasingly dominated by automation? ... more »
New Books
“Hobbes’s story is still our story.” For David Runciman, the state — not democracy — is central to modern political experience ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? Such questions promote a narrow view of what art can do... more »
Articles of Note
A catalyst increases the rate of a chemical reaction. E.O. Wilson played that role in the biological science... more »
New Books
An emphasis on “relevance” in art is troubling Jed Perl. Where does the threat come from? He won’t say ... more »
Essays & Opinions
David Hume and a footnote. In one sentence, he forever tarnished his reputation. What lesson do we take?... more »
Articles of Note
Spanish intellectual culture treasures Miguel de Unamuno’s 1936 denunciation of fascism. But did it really happen? ... more »
New Books
In the critic Harold Rosenberg’s hard-drinking milieu, cultural and political sparring sometimes erupted into fistfights ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Martha Nussbaum: “With humor, with science, with kindness, let us resist the ignoble and damaging project of disgust” ... more »
Articles of Note
Surrealism is no longer the art world’s reigning movement. But it’s uniquely suited to making us slow down and look... more »
New Books
Jane Austen had six novels published in six years. But her writing life was spread across three decades... more »
Essays & Opinions
In praise of tackiness: Cheesecake Factory, Guy Fieri, the band Creed — where would we be without such low aesthetics?... more »
Articles of Note
Science used to advance theory by theory. Now breakthroughs often emerge without explanation. Is this progress? ... more »
New Books
Is Slaughterhouse-Five evidence of Kurt Vonnegut’s undiagnosed PTSD? Wrong question ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Louis Menand and Roosevelt Montás clash over the purpose of studying literature. Their disagreement is both interesting and important ... more »
Articles of Note
The women of the Napoleonic wars, unable to serve in battle, advanced their politics via other means... more »
New Books
“As inventive and inspiring as Emerson and Thoreau often were, their zeal for ‘individual freedom’ has curdled into a socially destructive force” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
W.E.B. Du Bois’s masterly “Black Reconstruction” got a vitriolic reception in 1935. The vitriol lingers on... more »
Articles of Note
For a long time, a primary goal of the artist was to violate taboos. Then the culture simply ran out of ways to shock... more »
New Books
Is Gauguin redeemable? Probably not. Would he want to be redeemed? Almost certainly not ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Secularism has given rise to substitute religions — Romanticism, communism, social crusades. Each has failed in turn ... more »
Articles of Note
What was the best scholarly book of 2021? Paul Bloom, Corey Robin, Priya Satia, and other readers make their picks... more »
New Books
Consulting psychology and data, Jonathan Gottschall has determined that storytelling is everything. Timothy Snyder begs to differ ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“While death can be an astute career move for underrecognized writers, it proved critically disastrous for T.S. Eliot” ... more »
Articles of Note
Has travel writing, a once-venerated literary genre, lost its direction? ... more »
New Books
What does it mean to consult the papers of a person or institution when they're stored not on paper but in digital flotsam? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
What explains Amia Srinivasan’s popularity? Perhaps her tendency to avoid hard conclusions, argues Katha Pollitt ... more »
Articles of Note
Sinclair Lewis and the invention of the midlife crisis. In the social evolution of America, George F. Babbitt is a fictional landmark... more »
New Books
Duels that didn't prove fatal often gave rise to friendship. "Facing death together prompted a mutual respect"... more »
Essays & Opinions
Even an obscure book by a great writer should never be considered obsolete. Consider the newfound relevance of Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man... more »
Articles of Note
Why are Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach still regarded as the greatest composers? If Edison were born today, what would he invent? Human progress is very uneven ... more »
New Books
John Tierney raises a glass to the civilization-building power and distinct hedonic satisfaction of a stiff drink — or two... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1865, Dostoevsky suggested a story idea to his editor and asked for 300 rubles. Thus Raskolnikov’s inauspicious origins... more »
Articles of Note
With three hearts, green blood, and surprisingly advanced cognition, the humble cuttlefish may offer evolutionary clues ... more »
New Books
What to read in 2022? W Magazine... FT... WSJ... Time... Vogue... BuzzFeed... Guardian... NYT... more »
Essays & Opinions
Forget “blast!” or “confound it all!” Sometimes, as new research shows, proper swearing is what we need... more »
Articles of Note
Among 19th-century American farmers distrustful of banks and England, a financial philosophy flourished: the coin-standard... more »
New Books
John McWhorter’s Woke Racism caricatures antiracist thinking and reads like an extended Twitter rant ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The history of the tractor. John Deere’s Model D squared off against Henry Ford’s Model F and an ingenious “Tractivator” ... more »
Articles of Note
What if T.S. Eliot, who had a cold at the time, hadn’t turned down an invitation to visit from Virginia Woolf, who was spiraling into depression? She died shortly thereafter... more »
New Books
A critic’s lament: Too many books, too little time. Michael Dirda on 12 overlooked titles... more »
Essays & Opinions
Once you are attuned to it, disgust is everywhere. But does it really define — and explain — humanity? ... more »
Articles of Note
bell hooks, who rewrote our understanding of Black feminism, is dead. She was 69 ... NY Times... Jennifer Schuessler... Hua Hsu... Tressie McMillan Cottom... Danica Savonick... Sophie Smith... more »
New Books
When men are mistaken for gods, what follows are questions of identity, myth, and intellectual inferiority... more »
Essays & Opinions
Hannah Arendt’s work is fundamentally about the discovery of human freedom and its gradual disappearance... more »
Articles of Note
Seventy-one writers reflect on 2021: an evil year, a relentless year, a year of suffering and loss ... more »
New Books
Often overlooked for contemporary novels like Lolita or Catch-22, Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge is a quiet masterpiece... more »
Essays & Opinions
“In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status — our red badge of courage?”... more »
Articles of Note
Our hearing influences how we feel, see, move, and think. But we've forgotten how to listen... more »
New Books
"I can't tell if it's ignorance or cynicism, but for Andrew Sullivan to condemn tribal thinking is like watching an arsonist call the fire department" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"If art ... performs any form of moral service, it does so by alerting us to the difficulties of being moral" ... more »
Articles of Note
In 1913, Kandinsky produced a 33-page exegesis on three of his paintings. Should works of art require such explanatory aids? ... more »
New Books
As interviewer, essayist, editor, or critic, Donald Hall produced prose that was always supple, probing, funny... more »
Essays & Opinions
Who needs English or political science, universities are wondering, when there’s engineering and computer science ... more »
Articles of Note
Joan Didion — novelist, essayist, memoirist, consummate stylist, icon of cool — is dead. She was 87... Parul Sehgal... Megan Garber... Nathan Heller... Emma Cline... Zadie Smith... Michiko Kakutani... Jay Caspian Kang... Len Gutkin... Hilton Als... Ross Douthat... Washington Post... more »
New Books
Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, as different as “a sea creature and a land animal,” kept up a 30-year correspondence... more »
Essays & Opinions
Wittgenstein, who regarded philosophy as a “kind of magic,” noted more than a few parallels linking conjurers and philosophers ... more »
Articles of Note
What is it about our politics that no matter the topic, we usually end up arguing over the definitions of our words?... more »
New Books
When it comes to the stickiness of economic ideas, what matters more: stories or theories? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Robert Zaretsky is a professor devoted to reading in a world where his students are not. How absurd, right?... more »
Articles of Note
The publishing house Merve intended to jump-start German Marxism. It failed miserably... more »
New Books
In 1792, Francisco Goya went deaf. He found a new language through sketching in pen and ink ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Graydon Carter: “The Christopher Hitchens I knew and adored wouldn’t be like the majority of us, huddling in our trembling silence” ... more »
Articles of Note
Wilfred M. McClay's paradox: While we "know” more about the American past, we know less because we fail to grasp its overarching meaning ... more »
New Books
It’s fashionable to think that the writing life is built on nothing but shallow notions of fame, success, and ambition. Why? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Confessions of a crossword constructor: The puzzle “acts as a window into our fantasies, tastes, and unyielding fixations” ... more »
Articles of Note
Does Richard Dawkins have an impulse to offend, or the belief that one must never be afraid of stridency? ... more »
New Books
Among today’s Goth, New Age, and Wicca cultists, the monstrous has acquired a new seductiveness ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Suicide has long been a concern of theology, philosophy, and, more recently, medicine. But what of the things no medicine can cure? ... more »
Articles of Note
In the wake of the French Revolution, dancing swept Paris. The “waltzmania” was not well received by all ... more »
New Books
We live in infantilizing times. Let us at least drink like adults. Eric Felten explains ... more »
Essays & Opinions
George Steiner didn't give rise to a distinctive school of criticism. He was foremost a critic of critics ... more »