Articles of Note
The artist, writer, and gallerist John Kelsey is, at heart, a Romantic, but an injured and grudging one... more »
New Books
Known by Longfellow as that “dreary woman,” Margaret Fuller was, in fact, the least dreary of writers... more »
Essays & Opinions
Henry James, America’s first international writer, couldn’t leave home behind – and couldn’t abide it as a permanent home... more »
Articles of Note
Are there life-forms hiding inside Earth’s crust? And if there are, how do they survive?... more »
New Books
The golden age of radio: “It could be ... a psychedelic experience. It could alter your consciousness”... more »
Essays & Opinions
NASA has spent decades looking for alien intelligence in the far reaches of the universe. But should we be looking much closer to home?... more »
Articles of Note
The materialism of Richard Dawkins, Robert Sapolsky, and Lawrence Krauss is among the silliest ideas of our time... more »
New Books
In preparation for World War II, zookeepers shot, strangleed, poisoned, starved, and beat to death hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals... more »
Essays & Opinions
What does it mean to win an award for translation? The International Booker Prize for fiction in translation doesn’t seem to know... more »
Articles of Note
The novelist and the censor. A best-selling Chinese writer is contacted by the man who erases his social-media posts. Why?... more »
New Books
“It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Behold, the new Frick. Post-renovation, the museum has nearly twice as much to see. What’s not to love?... more »
Articles of Note
Junot Díaz was cleared of the worst of the #MeToo charges against him. Yet his work still disappeared from the Norton Anthology... more »
New Books
Even in the 1880s, surrounded by like-minded artists in Paris, Van Gogh felt deep social isolation... more »
Essays & Opinions
Who has written the best American poetry of the 21st century? Claudia Rankine, Terrance Hayes, and Ocean Vuong... more »
Articles of Note
The harrowing story of The Buru Quartet. Indonesia’s pre-eminent novelist wrote his masterpiece while on a prison island... more »
New Books
Curious aspects of the historical Jesus have been lost over time. Elaine Pagels seeks to remedy that... more »
Essays & Opinions
Absorbed in close textual analysis, literary scholars overlook the simple joys of the plot twist and the big reveal... more »
Articles of Note
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist known for gritty realism, is dead. He was 89... Dwight Garner... Alberto Manguel... Tunku Varadarajan... WSJ... El País... Ilan Stavans... more »
New Books
Efforts at spelling reform have suggested such clunkers as “reezon,” “enuf,” and, naturally, “spelyng”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Edward Said gave the Palestinian position its gravitas. Now, at Columbia, his intellectual legacy is under attack... more »
Articles of Note
Slurp, chomp, squish, chew. Why do some people find the sound of eating so unbearable?... more »
New Books
The afterlife of Anne Frank. The idea of her obscures the person. "She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Claire Messud on Lolita: “In this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass”... more »
Articles of Note
In 1932 Leo Strauss asked Hannah Arendt on a date, only to be rejected for his conservative politics... more »
New Books
The religion of irreligion. Why are secular silence-seekers flocking to monastic retreats? To learn from silence... more »
Essays & Opinions
The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz commemorated suffering. But he never abandoned a fragile sense of hope... more »
Articles of Note
Baby in a box. B. F. Skinner’s “air crib” promised to solve parenting woes with gadgeteering. The public reception was decidedly mixed... more »
New Books
The evolution of teeth. What began in the ocean half a billion years ago has led us to the dentist's chair... more »
Essays & Opinions
A generation of students raised on an ethic of sexual egalitarianism struggles to confront a key theme in Othello: jealousy... more »
Articles of Note
Delmore Schwartz contended with great expectations and frustrated ambitions, especially as mental illness closed in. But he kept writing... more »
New Books
For Agnes Callard, the philosophical life demands relentless self-questioning. But she has little to say about the conditions that make such inquiry possible... more »
Essays & Opinions
Awash in freedom and material abundance, Americans are mired in boredom and intellectual dullness... more »
Articles of Note
The defrocked Armenian monk Ambroise Calfa made his fortune by swindling social climbers with faux knighthoods ... more »
New Books
James C. Scott called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’” Why were his ideas so compelling to libertarians?... more »
Essays & Opinions
"The college essay is absurd and unfair," writes Yascha Mounk. "It’s time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny"... more »
Articles of Note
Jill Lepore: “Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago”... more »
New Books
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was both artist and prophet. He was far more persuasive as the former than as the latter... more »
Essays & Opinions
Learning for learning’s sake. College is being portrayed through the narrowest, most vocational lens. That’s a travesty... more »
Articles of Note
Hilma af Klint is hailed as an iconic genius of abstract art. But should some of the credit assigned to her be shared?... more »
New Books
Melancholy need not be understood as fatalism or decadent withdrawal. For W.G. Sebald, it was a form of resistance... more »
Essays & Opinions
Perry Link: "People who ask me about my blacklisting usually don’t imagine that there are benefits to the status, but there are"... more »
Articles of Note
Why do so many academics and nonacademics alike feel so hostile toward academic writing?... more »
New Books
"People tell me I get overexcited," Philip Hoare tells us. "Well, bollocks to that." When it comes to William Blake, his enthusiasm knows no bounds... more »
Essays & Opinions
“I like genre fiction for the same reason I like … the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: Things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake”... more »
Articles of Note
Egon Schiele and the secret baby. His sister's surprise pregnancy posed a question: Was he the uncle or the father?... more »
New Books
At the Great Siege of Malta, a belligerent bunch of homeless knights were suicidally brave in the defense of a barren island. Why?... more »
Essays & Opinions
$10 from The New Leader, $100 from Commentary. James Baldwin’s magazine writing career had humble origins... more »
Articles of Note
Comma queen. If style is character, what does Renata Adler’s promiscuous use of commas say about her?... more »
New Books
The critic Andrea Long Chu gets away with baggy associative gesturing because her prose has a patina of brilliance... more »
Essays & Opinions
The most stable repository of civilization worth has long been books. That era is ending. What comes next?... more »
Articles of Note
Good writers match language and form with observation and feeling. AI fiction, however, has no feeling... more »
New Books
Henry James in Palm Beach. “Picture the Master, at this point in his life portly and frequently constipated, lounging on the white sand”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Critics loved Evelyn Waugh’s dark comedy and wicked social satire. Then, to their dismay, Brideshead Revisited appeared... more »
Articles of Note
An exhibit of the letters of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne has the New York Public Library preparing for a flood of visitors... more »
New Books
The prevailing view of Hegel is that he regarded history as a simplistic march of progress. The prevailing view is wrong... more »
Essays & Opinions
Christ and Campbell’s soup. Did Andy Warhol's faith have more influence over his art than his critics realize?... more »
Articles of Note
"The ordinary son of an extraordinary father.” Richard Blair was three weeks old when he was adopted by George Orwell... more »
New Books
Czeslaw Milosz agonized over whether to defect from Stalinist Poland: “What’s good in America is that you have the feeling of universal exile”... more »
Essays & Opinions
John Cage instructed his composition “ORGAN2/ASLSP” be played “as slowly as possible.” The world’s longest organ recital will take 639 years. ... more »
Articles of Note
“Erotomania,” “a monstrous sexual perversion,” the ultimate symbol of a persecuted gay man. Oscar Wilde’s sexuality was complex... more »
New Books
There were methods for slowing Big Tech’s overhaul of our social world — but they are too little, too late... more »
Essays & Opinions
“My whole life,” wrote Bruce Chatwin, “has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific”... more »
Articles of Note
As poetry and criticism professionalized, difficulty was fetishized. But Robert Frost’s difficulties are of a different kind... more »
New Books
What is it about brutally inhospitable mountains that can move us so totally and instinctively? Nan Shepherd called it “the tang of height”... more »
Essays & Opinions
In a famous scene in Moby-Dick, Ishmael encounters “a long, limber, portentous, black” artwork. Could AI recreate it?... more »
Articles of Note
Leisure as letters. Reading and writing should be fundamentally playful — but deliberate — acts... more »
New Books
The benefits of a bad memory. To remember the important things, we have to forget the inessential... more »
Essays & Opinions
Judith Butler: “Is there a proposed criterion by which ‘extremist’ gender ideology can be distinguished from the non-extremist kind?”... more »
Articles of Note
The rock biopic has a new job in the age of the financialization of music: produce, and reproduce, an audience... more »
New Books
Was Curzio Malaparte — nationalist and cosmopolite, pacifist and bellicist, elitist and populist — the quintessential European of his time?... more »
Essays & Opinions
We seek rest, yet are wary of its implicit boredom. This dilemma is resolved, perhaps, only by cats... more »
Articles of Note
Could the oldest writing system in the world be deciphered? Cuneiform persistently stumped scholars — until the 1850s... more »
New Books
“A book was like fresh air," said Adam Michnik. "They allowed us to survive and not go mad.” The CIA was deft at smuggling them behind the Iron Curtain... more »
Essays & Opinions
The homogenous, aging American psychoanalytic community has begun emphasizing social injustice. The result: chaos... more »
Articles of Note
“The nonagenarian writer should speak only of gratitude — and then shut up.” But not yet, if you’re Cynthia Ozick... more »
New Books
A rarefied gig. Has there ever been a more lucrative place to be a writer than Graydon Carter’s Vanity Fair?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Hunter-gatherer societies were much more violent than our own, but much of that is due to a relatively small number of prehistoric psychopaths... more »
Articles of Note
“Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.” So held Alan Turing in 1950... more »
New Books
The history of AI is dashed hopes and blind alleys. You don't have to be an “accelerationist” or a “doomer" to see that this time is different... more »
Essays & Opinions
One early human tool gave rise to our leap in intelligence: not the sharpened stone, but the handbag, for carrying food and babies... more »
Articles of Note
Daniel Kahneman was determined to create a happy ending to his 90 years of life, to avoid the indignities and miseries of age. He chose suicide... more »
New Books
House of Albert Barnes. What drove the curmudgeonly collector to acquire so many Renoirs, Cézannes and Modiglianis?... more »
Essays & Opinions
For a powerful account of the human condition, writes Marilynne Robinson, turn not to “anemic anthropology,” but to Calvinism... more »
Articles of Note
“Nature and nurture aren’t separate forces — they’re a Möbius strip, endlessly looping back on each other”... more »
New Books
Through binges, bankruptcies, and depressive spells, Edgar Allan Poe knew where the best of him lay: in making art... more »
Essays & Opinions
Fairy tales are archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone. This is an illusion... more »
Articles of Note
How to spot a fake masterpiece. In the exposure of artistic forgeries, it's the little things that give them away... more »
New Books
In the 18th century, hypochondria was a rarefied disease tied to leisure and luxury. Then the laboring classes began to develop it... more »
Essays & Opinions
Today we treat novels as salubrious stress relievers — kale smoothies for the soul. That overlooks their dark, diabolical potency... more »