Articles of Note
The Shostakovich problem. What is it about the composer that makes some people withhold their approval?... more »
New Books
As Martin Amis wrote, art “celebrates life,” increasing “the store of what might be lost.” Can art — at the same time — lament what will be lost in climate change?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Covid-19 has exposed Anglo-America as woefully lacking in crucial ways. In rebuilding, the world will turn to Germany, Japan, and South Korea... more »
Articles of Note
What was the origin of the novel? Perhaps it was Robinson Crusoe, perhaps Don Quixote. Or perhaps the question is nonsensical... more »
New Books
A pain “unlimited in both intensity and duration.” For George Scialabba, depression seemed as if it would never end, and life became an eternal, excruciating present... more »
Essays & Opinions
YouTube, as Nicholson Baker explains, is an “indispensable, life-enhancing tool, and also a source of poisonous neo-medieval yammering”... more »
Articles of Note
A bold broadside against a dogmatic intellectual culture? Or “fatuous, self-important drivel”? Artists, writers, and thinkers react to that Harper’s letter... more »
New Books
Culture, identity, psychology — Instagram takes the content of our private lives to digitize, feed through algorithms, and repackage for our consumption... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.” Patricia Lockwood shares her notes from living with coronavirus... more »
Articles of Note
Against “decency, morality, and good taste” the men of 1840s Brighton, England invariably swam naked. The problem was acute at low tide... more »
New Books
“She was a good old stick,” said Orwell, when his first wife died at the age of 39. But Eileen Blair’s story was more interesting than that... more »
Essays & Opinions
A hunger for auditory escape. Now 40 years old, the Walkman was the device that taught us social distancing. Its legacy lives on today... more »
Articles of Note
Composers come in the form of two seasons — winter and summer. Gustav Mahler, who worked in a shed beside a lake, is the archetypal summer composer.... more »
New Books
To read Seamus Heaney is to experience a downward and backward pull. What drew him to bogs, slime, and ritualized violence?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Gregory Bateson was one of the most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture. His ideas are attuned to the peculiar dysfunctions of our own time... more »
Articles of Note
"Patriotism is a moral mistake and an intellectual mistake, a mistake twice over," says George Kateb. "We are all subject to it"... more »
New Books
Glamour is a form of persuasion, says Virginia Postrel, and jet-age glamour changed the way people think about the relationship between humans and technology... more »
Essays & Opinions
Matisse was a lover of women. Karen Wilkins explains the layered richness of his response to the female body... more »
Articles of Note
Michelangelo outlived his patrons, assistants, friends. Late in life he took on huge, daunting projects, fully aware that he would not see them completed... more »
New Books
The bunker is one of the oldest building types made by humans, dating to around 1200 BC. Its dark charisma endures... more »
Essays & Opinions
The melancholy of reading Max Weber resonates today, maybe more than ever, even if he offers little illumination and less consolation... more »
Articles of Note
What’s it like working in publishing while Black? Seven industry insiders on rank discrimination, systemic racism, and the misconconception that “Black books don’t sell”... more »
New Books
All is not minimalism. According to Kyle Chayka’s recent book, Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Marx all inform modern minimalist lifestyles. Not quite... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Britain’s a world/By itself,” says a typically villainous Shakespearean character. The Bard has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet... more »
Articles of Note
There’s no reason that the art gallery as we know it, a 19th-century invention, should last forever. Does it have a post-pandemic future?... more »
New Books
Why do people swim? "To witness metamorphosis, in our environment, in ourselves. To swim is to accept all the myriad conditions of life"... more »
Essays & Opinions
The miseries of the male libido were obsessions of Bellow, Roth, and Updike. Now, if male novelists take up the subject at all, they force sex into a neat moral framework... more »
Articles of Note
The social cost of cheap food. In Victorian England, rock-bottom prices meant poverty for food growers and sellers. So, too, in the rest of the world today... more »
New Books
The scientist J.B.S. Haldane is best remembered as an example of how someone so smart can be so dumb when enthralled by ideology... more »
Essays & Opinions
Max Weber’s troubles were at least in part sexual — castration was discussed as a cure. That changed when he met Else Jaffé in his later years... more »
Articles of Note
Joyce Carol Oates and the war against literary pieties. Novels should have “symmetry, unity of tone, precision” the thinking went. She is having none of that... more »
New Books
How to be alone. Solitude is not about alienation, isolation, or even physical surroundings. It's a state of mind... more »
Essays & Opinions
Do theoretical asides — like those in The Magic Mountain — happen on the level of plot? The novel of ideas is full of such riddles... more »
Articles of Note
You may not have heard of Jean-Michel Frank, but he helped create minimalism. To channel his vision: “Throw out and keep throwing out!”... more »
New Books
Innovation is prized but misunderstood. We don't how it happens or how to nurture it. We can't even agree on what it is... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Time exists, as love exists, as a myth: real because contingent, real because constructed, a catch-all term for phenomena bigger"... more »
Articles of Note
"The worst-case scenario, which is entirely possible, is a historical bloodletting in academic research unlike which you have never seen"... more »
New Books
Driverless cars are not primarily about saving lives. They are about eliminating contingency and replacing it with machine-generated certainty. That's terrifying... more »
Essays & Opinions
The Point, n+1, Jacobin — today’s little magazines all suffer from the same flaw: a congenital addiction to seriousness... more »
Articles of Note
Sianne Ngai renovated the field of aesthetics by studying the small stuff: the cute, the zany, and now, in her magnum opus, the gimmicky... more »
New Books
All shall be saved. Hell is a vestige of Christendom, not of Christianity itself. David Bentley Hart explains... more »
Essays & Opinions
Henry Fielding, Adam Smith, and other 18th-century intellectuals found no food finer than the potato. It was Enlightenment superfood — the kale of its time... more »
Articles of Note
Victorian women with the temerity to harbor their own ambitions faced a bitter sequence of humiliation, betrayal, and scandal... more »
New Books
For Patricia Churchland, conscience is rooted in evolutionary biology; moral choices are explained away by neuroscience. Raymond Tallis isn’t buying it... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The cat of the wood,” “the stag of the cabbages” — if there is magic in this world, no small part of it lies with that majestic creature, the hare... more »
Articles of Note
Despite their pivotal role in our lives, we read so little about door handles. Yet their story is, in microcosm, that of architecture... more »
New Books
After years of correspondence, Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally met Emily Dickinson, who promptly unleashed — in a torrent — a literary manifesto... more »
Essays & Opinions
Was the chilly stroll by Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929 the moment that analytic and Continental philosophy truly split?... more »
Articles of Note
It was in the gym that Bruce Lee, a failing philosophy student, turned his musings into mantras: Using no way as way; having no limitation as limitation... more »
New Books
Being Kierkegaardian precludes any dutiful fealty to Kierkegaard himself. Unfortunately, a new book misses this point... more »
Essays & Opinions
What has the coronavirus revealed? For many, the answer is: “Whatever I thought was wrong with the world before, well, this proves it”... more »
Articles of Note
Until 1834 there was no general name for those who studied the material world. Then the English philosopher William Whewell coined one: scientist... more »
New Books
Longfellow’s ode to Fanny Appleton was not welcome: “It is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches,” she said. They married four years later... more »
Essays & Opinions
Can American racism be seen in the same terms as the murderous ideology of the Nazis and be similarly discredited? No, such a comparison only confuses... more »
Articles of Note
The end of the performing arts? The pandemic has muted symphonies and opera houses. When they return, things will not be the same... more »
New Books
Military overreach, excessive spending and taxation, the rise of Christianity: many explanations for the fall of Rome. Was a pandemic to blame?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1965, in words that echo today... more »
Articles of Note
Mozart wrote some of his most sublime works in E flat major. There is no better key in which to hear music in dark times... more »
New Books
The race for domination in publishing Trump tell-alls is between Simon & Schuster and Henry Holt. For now, Simon & Schuster is winning... more »
Essays & Opinions
In his 90s, Habermas is increasingly consumed by questions of faith and religion. His latest book spans more than 3,000 years and 1,700 pages... more »
Articles of Note
Darwin and the earthworms. To prove their intelligence, he glued leaves together, shouted at them, and serenaded them with a bassoon... more »
New Books
For Deirdre Bair, being Beckett’s biographer entailed exhausting hours spent on bar stools, keeping out of the reach of drunken Irish poets and professors... more »
Essays & Opinions
Loud, constant parakeet chatter, the squawking of crows – there is no such thing as bad birdsong, a welcome respite from self-absorption... more »
Articles of Note
In the 15th century, “correctors” toiled away in printing shops, earning a pittance for their scholarly labors. Such is the quintessential fate of humanists... more »
New Books
Frida Kahlo's years in Paris were a high point of her life. She spent much of her time conveying disdain for French culture... more »
Essays & Opinions
How to decide which statues can remain standing and which should be toppled because they honor racists? Julian Baggini offers a rational... more »
Articles of Note
Flannery O’Connor’s racism. She was a product of her time, her defenders say — but that understates her intellectual independence... more »
New Books
In 1911 Einstein moved to Prague, becoming part of an intellectual milieu that would influence Central Europe for decades to come... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The intractable problem for thinking beyond the nation-state is that its imputed obsolescence can neither be easily forced nor messianically awaited”... more »
Articles of Note
Philip Roth and Robert Stone were anarchic in their hedonism, yet fanatically disciplined as writers... more »
New Books
“I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures.” Apparently that passes for a bold claim these days... more »
Essays & Opinions
Is an exhausted liberalism being supplanted by a successor ideology that's apparent everywhere? Ross Douthat makes the case... more »
Articles of Note
For Hollywood’s silent-film stars, celebrity faded quickly — and no family experienced it as intimately as the Costellos... more »
New Books
How can a 976-page biography of Warhol fail to contain a single fresh idea? Gary Indiana on an “incredibly prolonged, masturbatory trance of graphomania”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Descartes argued that developing grand philosophical visions requires meditative solitude. Is such work incompatible with being a parent?... more »
Articles of Note
“When intellectuals can do nothing else they start a magazine,” wrote Irving Howe. What sounds like an admission of futility is the opposite... more »
New Books
Gulch, hankering, woolypates, foofoo, squaw: Behold the promiscuous range of Walt Whitman’s vocabulary... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The real point about Communists,” wrote Vivian Gornick decades ago, is that they “were like everybody else, only more so.” Her point is finally sinking in... more »
Articles of Note
The Lake District poets, so radical during the French Revolution, quickly turned conservative. Wordsworth’s apostasy was the hardest to swallow... more »
New Books
“It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil,” wrote Keynes. But his own story points to ideas' limited power... more »
Essays & Opinions
Minimalism was in, KonMari was all the rage, and then a pandemic hit. Now clutter is useful as never before... more »
Articles of Note
Things unlikely to go viral: a classical musician’s monotonous practice. And yet the rise of the bassoonfluencer is real... more »
New Books
“Origins and Entropy,” “Particles and Consciousness,” “Duration and Impermanence": How pop science became metaphysical self-help... more »
Essays & Opinions
Charles Portis, author of True Grit, died in February at 86. He was a master of American vernacular... more »
Articles of Note
The project to collect and publish Samuel Johnson's massive oeuvre began during the Eisenhower administration. It has finally come to fruition... more »
New Books
When Mary Bunting created an institute for high-achieving women, she knew she had to provide them with the material support that would allow them to succeed... more »
Essays & Opinions
To see the Third Reich captured in 100 vile objects is to realize how good the Nazis were at photography and industrial design... more »
Articles of Note
After the publication of “The Song of Hiawatha,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was everywhere. Then he was ejected from the pantheon. What happened?... more »
New Books
For James Wood, critics must always answer one fundamental question: “What’s at stake in this passage?”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Want a job in academia? No problem — as long as you specialize in Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and everything else... more »