Articles of Note
History and its futilities. Orlando Patterson brought social science to bear on postcolonial Jamaica. Now he chronicles the failures of such efforts ... more »
New Books
Streaming music is more efficient than CDs, right? Wrong. “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Camus didn't do inspiration. And hope, he believed, is for suckers. But that doesn't mean he condoned despair ... more »
Articles of Note
G.E. Moore, who championed common sense, was an influential philosopher. But a great one? Probably not ... more »
New Books
Walter Gropius achieved fame by passing off Lucia Moholy’s work as his own. Meanwhile, she lived in poverty ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The “encrappification” of America. From the Veg-O-Matic to Beanie Babies, the nation has a long, wasteful history of loving cheap stuff ... more »
Articles of Note
If Christopher Hitchens were still around, what would he make of the world today? Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie discuss ... more »
New Books
In the ’60s, predictive voter analytics was taken as science fiction, as dystopian, as a scandal. Now we meekly accept it... more »
Essays & Opinions
Before Robin DiAngelo, there was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both reveal the limits of reading in pursuit of social justice... more »
Articles of Note
Disease in the time of Defoe. In 1722 he offered advice: Avoid excessive eating and drinking, and restore humoral balance ... more »
New Books
For Vivian Gornick, feminism was a new way of interpreting the world. Then, around 1980, she returned to literature ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The tech gurus tell us that the future of higher ed is adaptive tutors, chatbots, AI, and virtual reality. They're wrong ... more »
Articles of Note
A museum is auctioning off a Jackson Pollock to raise money to diversify its collection. Laudable goal, bad plan ... more »
New Books
Was Beowulf a bro? A new, feminist version of the epic paints a fierce picture of masculine weakness ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The tempo of life reaches a frenzy, and yet we feel stuck. One balm for our internet-accelerated age: read old books... more »
Articles of Note
Stanley Crouch, the jazz critic whose outsize opinions were rendered in scalding, pugilistic prose, has died. He was 74 ... more »
New Books
It’s been said that the correspondence of great artists and idealists is mostly about money. Van Gogh is no exception ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The internet is not what you think it is. For one thing, its intellectual roots go back to 19th-century conjecture on snail copulation ... more »
Articles of Note
When Waltham was radical. How a suburb of Boston became an unlikely fount of new currents in leftism... more »
New Books
The Reformation was “one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge.” Why? Its fondness for book burning... more »
Essays & Opinions
The “bad old days” of academia were full of favoritism, prejudice, and indolence. But sometimes the professors showed up fully clad and sober ... more »
Articles of Note
An Ancient Roman paradox: parricide was punished gruesomely, but revenge killings weren’t prosecuted at all... more »
New Books
How to think about disaster. Accepting one’s place in a vast, complex, and violent world is healthier than it sounds... more »
Essays & Opinions
Down with the dons. English professors have all the book reviewer’s traditional faults — only more so... more »
Articles of Note
Despite the vitriol Philip Larkin held for his parents, he wrote home about every little thing — his red trousers, his allergies, his constipation... more »
New Books
When Christopher met Martin. It happened at the New Statesman in the early '70s. Now Hitchens is at the heart of Amis's new novel... more »
Essays & Opinions
Synthesis, sweep, and all-encompassing theorizing are out of fashion in the academy today. Was René Girard the last of the hedgehogs? ... more »
Articles of Note
What will save the English department? Love, says Mark Edmundson. Professors need to remind themselves that their love for literature is what brought most of them into the profession ... more »
New Books
Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested? ... more »
Articles of Note
“A deluge of things.” We inherit our passion for clutter from Victorians like Marion Sambourne, who owned 66 upright chairs ... more »
New Books
Nathalie Sarraute is remembered as a “boring formalist” within the insipid “new novel” movement. She was much more than that ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be? ... more »
Articles of Note
To read great books by flawed authors, we must recognize the sins of the past but also look for moments of shared human experience ... more »
New Books
When William James gave up on religion, he went in search of a new avenue to save his life. Can his approach help you save your own? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »
Articles of Note
New Yorker writers cultivate reticence, self-deprecation, and wit. As Janet Malcolm learned, those are the last things a jury wants in a witness ... more »
New Books
For more than a century, Wagner's music has been a "drug or even a poison, a cult with members who are sometimes fanatics, not fans" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »
Articles of Note
We think of tact as a little virtue — something commendable but unnecessary, a luxury of polished social interaction. But it’s far more important than that ... more »
New Books
The problems we face — environmental, political, humanitarian — are obvious. Do we still need the painstaking intellectual work of theorizing them? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result ... more »
Articles of Note
Kafka's sentences open with a lucid idea before attempting to present its consequences, comma after unrelenting comma ... more »
New Books
Starving artists. It’s easier than ever to share your creativity with the world, but harder to make a living doing so ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it ... more »
Articles of Note
The Seamus Heaney experience. His gravitas and vast learning were leavened by a droll, high-spirited streak and his capacity for merriment ... more »
New Books
"Whenever they burn books," said Heinrich Heine, "they will also, in the end, burn people." A history of knowledge under attack ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »
Articles of Note
The tradition among mathematicians to name discoveries after one another is charming. It's also a colossal headache ... more »
New Books
The paradox of Graham Greene: He wrote so deftly about international politics, yet was an alarmingly unsophisticated political thinker ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue ... more »
Articles of Note
The policing of speech is more common than it was 15 years ago. Political correctness has run amok, says Tyler Cowen. But so then has everything else... more »
New Books
Warhol's wounds. After he was shot, in 1968, he needed a girdle to keep his innards in place. But he liked being topless. "Paint me with my scars" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »
Articles of Note
Yes, The Great Gatsby conveys grand themes and fine descriptions. But what makes it a Great American Novel? It’s really short ... more »
New Books
Time speeds up as you age, or so it seems. What's really going on is rather more complicated than that ... more »
Essays & Opinions
In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious? ... more »
Articles of Note
Ayn Rand is widely reviled for her ideology. But was she also a terrible writer? Not exactly. Sometimes she was even a halfway good one ... more »
New Books
Conversation among New Yorkers can seem less like a discussion than a verbal wrestling match. Can a sociolinguist explain? Fuhgeddaboutit... more »
Essays & Opinions
What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself." ... more »
Articles of Note
Silicon Valley is a strange place, and Jaron Lanier occupies an even stranger place within it ... more »
New Books
For a moment, London's Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a new kind of thinking was possible ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking? ... more »
Articles of Note
To express life in a concentration camp, imprisoned Jews created a new musical genre: lager-lieder... more »
New Books
A novelist’s work is solitary, and it’s a job that tends to attract misanthropes. Zadie Smith is an exception ... more »
Essays & Opinions
More than 1,000 movies and TV shows have used Wagner's music. Alex Ross dissects a century of Wagner's baleful influence on Hollywood... more »
Articles of Note
Lucian Freud at work. When a painting neared completion, he would step back and, “as though taunting himself,” murmur, “How far can you go?” ... more »
New Books
Ever since Frédéric Chopin's premature death, in 1849, people have foisted on him their own fantasies and desires, some more lurid than others ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Much of Frank Ramsey’s work was unfinished when he died in 1930, at age 26. But philosophers still find that their own insights have already been articulated by him... more »
Articles of Note
“After one finishes a story, one should cross out the beginning and the end," said Chekhov. "It is there that we writers lie most of all” ... more »
New Books
When Ralph Ellison got to New York, age 23, he kept copies of his letters. He was writing himself into history ... more »
Essays & Opinions
John Cheever took no interest in theology. But his keen spiritual sense had a definite tendency... more »
Articles of Note
After 50, Gore Vidal said, litigation replaces sex. He would be proud of his posthumous legal legacy... more »
New Books
How did we go from the techno-utopianism of the ’90s to the digital cesspool we’re left with today? A new book explains ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Olavo de Carvalho, a 73-year-old right-wing autodidact, is on a mission: He wants to become the Brazilian Gramsci... more »
Articles of Note
The tyranny of chairs. For most of history, humans would squat or lie down for stationary activities. Now we’re captive to poorly designed seats... more »
New Books
The least read masterpiece of 20th-century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23... more »
Essays & Opinions
Thinking through the pandemic. Ours is a bleak reality, full of social and personal uncertainty. And so we return to existentialism... more »
Articles of Note
Satirized, pranked, mocked — even pelted with garbage — the Victorian poet William McGonagall was famous for his terrible art... more »
New Books
Boredom has been around since modernity, and now boredom studies is a thriving field. Can its scholars tell us anything new? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Why we hoard. Stuff attracts more stuff, and accumulation has a powerful logic rooted in history and biology ... more »
Articles of Note
The apotheosis of Brutalism, that megalomaniacal overreach beloved of architects and dictators, was in 1920s Moscow. Is it having a retro moment?... more »
New Books
The literature of white liberalism. In books like White Fragility and How to Be an Antiracist, white people try to read their way out of trouble. Does that work?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Tolstoy’s hobbies included drinking copious amounts of fermented mare’s milk, penning vociferous calls for agrarian reform, and learning ancient Greek... more »
Articles of Note
We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
New Books
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Essays & Opinions
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Articles of Note
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
New Books
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Essays & Opinions
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »