Articles of Note
1619, 1776 — America’s origins-obsessed historicism now dominates liberal circles. But origins are not our destinies ... more »
New Books
Borges to his English translator: “Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark…. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on those who “do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy”... more »
Articles of Note
Curators, academics, governments, boards, funders: This blob of cultural dominance, Dave Hickey is here to remind us, diverts our attention from beauty... more »
New Books
We take graphs and charts for granted, but in their earliest incarnations — to help understand longitude or train times — they were revolutionary ... more »
Essays & Opinions
In Joan Didion's writing, she doesn't quite tell us what she means. But we know how she feels... more »
Articles of Note
Edward de Bono, champion of “lateral thinking” and many implausible creative-thinking schemes, has died. He was 88... more »
New Books
Jon Meacham, a soft-spoken historian with the president’s ear, is impressively — and maddeningly — everywhere... more »
Essays & Opinions
Art galleries and auctions can feel like intimidating, insular places. Here’s how to successfully buy art... more »
Articles of Note
Louise Bourgeois underwent psychoanalysis on and off from 1951 to 1985. It shaped her art but didn't relieve her misery ... more »
New Books
"Within this wide great Universe,/Nothing doth firme and permanent appeare." The Faerie Queene approaches atheism ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Philosophy barely progresses, but what impedes it? Perhaps the solutions to the problems it takes on generate their own problems ... more »
Articles of Note
“Have you ever made a decision that ended up ruining someone’s life?” A college dean has second thoughts ... more »
New Books
Early 19th-century America was gripped by a war on science. Edgar Allan Poe battled for both sides... more »
Essays & Opinions
When a writer declines to such a degree as Naomi Wolf has, we need to ask: Was she always full of shit? ... more »
Articles of Note
Nero: Not that bad. The grisly and perverse crimes of the Roman emperor were very likely invented by vituperative historians ... more »
New Books
The way we grieve now. For the social-media influencer Amanda Kloots, going offline was never an option, even when the worst happened ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Why have English departments fallen on hard times? Because professors stopped speaking the truth about literature ... more »
Articles of Note
Eve Babitz, trying to get the Doors to change their name: "The Doors of Perception ... what an Ojai-geeky-too-LA-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea" ... more »
New Books
Dave Hickey's idiosyncratic blend of high and low - French theory and California surfing - gave him an unmistakable voice ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Retrospectives at the Tate and the Met, a five-volume catalogue raisonné, many biographies: Is there anything left to say about Francis Bacon?... more »
Articles of Note
The U.S. Army’s dalliance with positive psychology was a carnival of unskilled intuition and exaggerated storytelling — a textbook misuse of science ... more »
New Books
Much has been made of Heidegger’s influence on Arendt. What about her influence on him? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism” ... more »
Articles of Note
18th-century anatomy lessons had one big problem: the stench. Enter Marie-Marguerite Biheron and her perfectly accurate wax models ... more »
New Books
The Homeric Question: Were the Iliad and the Odyssey really written by a historical individual named Homer?... more »
Essays & Opinions
If theology, science, and philosophy once shaped souls, a new power has superseded them: HR, the central organizing power of society... more »
Articles of Note
What are scientific papers meant to communicate? Reliable discoveries or messy, inspired guesswork? ... more »
New Books
Before conquering Broadway and Hollywood, Mike Nichols was a bullied, hairless Jewish refugee without a word of English ... more »
Essays & Opinions
A clock is not just a clock. It was created for social and political purposes, and it has a distinctive hold on our lives ... more »
Articles of Note
Cicero, the first intellectual to succeed in politics, was more rhetorician than philosopher. He owed his rise to his sense of humor ... more »
New Books
The shock isn’t that America’s fragile union broke apart so spectacularly in 1861, but that it didn’t happen sooner ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Rachel Cusk’s “tribute” to Mabel Dodge Luhan does not not so much update her story as erode its complexity ... more »
Articles of Note
Cantankerous and unwieldy, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man punctures the pieties of our time ... more »
New Books
He invented or perfected the short story, the mystery, science fiction, and gothic horror: Is Poe the most influential American writer? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
For progressives, Foucault can no longer be “the ‘unsurpassable horizon’ of critical thought.” So what comes next? ... more »
Articles of Note
In June 1965, six boys washed up on a deserted island, where they stayed for a year. The real Lord of the Flies
... more »
New Books
Blades, poisons, guns, bombs, defenestration, and plump cushions: A history of political murder
... more »
Essays & Opinions
Coming out of a long depression, William James made a study of habits. The healthiest ones, he concluded, are those we manage to break... more »
Articles of Note
The heist was brazen: a Magritte snatched at gunpoint. Two years later, someone walked it into a Brussels police station. What happened? ... more »
New Books
What do two centuries of American self-help best sellers say about the country? Louis Menand digs in ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The antagonistic relationship between writers and critics has produced a rich literature of trolling. Both parties are vulnerable to humiliation... more »
Articles of Note
The misinformation age. Understanding the spread of wacky is about who you know, not what you think ... more »
New Books
“Part of grief’s tyranny is that it robs you of remembering the things that matter.” In a pandemic, such theft is even more prevalent ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Conductors aren't quite unnecessary to an orchestra, but they're not as important as those baton wagglers would like us to think ... more »
Articles of Note
A horizontal suggests a landscape. A square evokes timelessness. A circle, the universe itself. How to frame our experiences? ... more »
New Books
"It is startling to witness just how much the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor at Jefferson's own university dislikes its patron, Thomas Jefferson” ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Thomas Nagel on moral intuition: Treating people decently is a vital part of our lives, regardless of the consequences ... more »
Articles of Note
Why is it so easy to hate think tanks? Created to advance scientific thinking, they've become factories of partisan grift... more »
New Books
To understand architecture, look beyond surface materials, like brick and glass, to the technologies that fueled construction... more »
Essays & Opinions
Because the art world is loath to fully censor harmful works, a new tactic has emerged: “curatorial activism”... more »
Articles of Note
In the 1940s, a fiery debate over inclusion, history, and identity swept a city: Whether to hyphenate “New-York”... more »
New Books
Dilemma of the Dylan biographer: His fabulism is baked into his DNA. Explaining him is about as interesting as explaining a magic trick ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Book reviewing: An elegy. Ever since there has been literature, there have been critics. Now that’s in doubt ... more »
Articles of Note
Just below the dream of space travel lurks a nightmare. There will be no real “arrival” on this fantasy trip: It’s all enclosures and pressurized chambers ... more »
New Books
Mabel Loomis Todd is remembered as a literary villain: a seductress who butchered Emily Dickinson’s poems while editing them. The truth is more complex... more »
Essays & Opinions
Who's the 83-year-old muckraker who turned up a Chinese government operation at the University of Chicago? Marshall Sahlins... more »
Articles of Note
Tyler Cowen knows a dirty little secret about economics professors that helps to explain why the field generates so few radical new ideas... more »
New Books
What’s the link between revolutionary thought and conservative disposition? Consider George Berkeley... more »
Essays & Opinions
Conservatives have an unlikely tool to fight the new progressivism and the church of intersectionality: the theories of Michel Foucault... more »
Articles of Note
Both Mike Nichols and Tom Stoppard were interested in comedy, loved the theater, but landed in Hollywood. The paths each followed are telling... more »
New Books
Salman Rushdie has many theories as to why his recent work has been considered abominable. If only those theories carried water... more »
Essays & Opinions
Thomas Sowell, a year into his U. of Chicago Ph.D. under Milton Friedman, remained a staunch Marxist. What changed his mind?... more »
Articles of Note
Orwell in Spain. He had gone to fight for socialism and democracy, but quickly concluded that dictatorship was inevitable. ... more »
New Books
How we dress -- and why. Our wardrobes are filled with coded messages about power, wealth, and status. ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Freud and others warned about the violence and irrationality of crowds. We hear less about their immense dignity ... more »
Articles of Note
Will Roth's personal letters burn? Scholars are trying to prevent that fate, but his biographer's deal with the estate is shrouded in mystery... more »
New Books
The novelist Joshua Cohen is clearly a genius. Now if he could only channel his prodigious talent toward a calmer sort of wisdom ... more »
Essays & Opinions
"Can someone tell when you Google them?" Becca Rothfeld considers the emotional investment and aesthetics of online stalking... more »
Articles of Note
Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist behind The New York Times’s “1619 Project” has been denied tenure at UNC. What happened? ... more »
New Books
Natalie Barney, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein: Why did lesbians tend to be not just custodians but also creators of modernist work? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
For Leo Strauss, the public sphere was for unsophisticated opinion writing, not true philosophical reflection ... more »
Articles of Note
Michael Dirda is back to browsing bookstores. Among his first purchases are Memoirs of an Oxford Don and The Ultimate Spider-Man... more »
New Books
Edmund de Waal’s tour of belle époque Paris is singular in its preoccupation — or obsession — with things... more »
Essays & Opinions
Among the most reproduced books in English are the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and The Compleat Angler, a 17th-century fishing manual... more »
Articles of Note
Take note, would-be iconoclasts: The Journal of Controversial Ideas wants to see what you've been afraid to submit... more »
New Books
For most of history, there were just two types of food: plants and animals. Then along came a third, more akin to poison... more »
Essays & Opinions
Mary Beard: “Classics is what we make it, and the fact that the classical world has been misrepresented should not be used against it” ... more »
Articles of Note
Banal, pervasive, and crucial to modernity: the history of the humble file cabinet shall be ignored no longer... more »
New Books
For most human history, life expectancy was 30 and a quarter of children died before their first birthday. What changed is humanity’s greatest achievement... more »
Essays & Opinions
What has Covid done to the arts? It’s “not a recession. It is not even a depression. It is a catastrophe”... more »
Articles of Note
Ask Salman Rushdie about anything - but not about the fatwa. "I'm not a geopolitical entity. I'm someone writing in a room." ... more »
New Books
As a child, Kurt Gödel wouldn't stop asking questions. He acquired a nickname, Herr Warum: "Mr. Why" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
When Richard Wright moved to Paris, he did not turn his back on America. Rather, he gained a new vantage ... more »
Articles of Note
At 30, Francis Bacon took stock: Failed designer. Failed artist. Two years later, he emerged as a confident painter ... more »
New Books
For Adrienne Rich, the gap between life and art was fraught. She was too narrow or too wide, too personal or too political ... more »
Essays & Opinions
The textile hypothesis: The reason for humankind’s shift to agriculture has to do less with food and more with clothing... more »
Articles of Note
Mark Crispin Miller, a scholar of propaganda and mass persuasion, made his name studying conspiracy theories. Now he pushes them ... more »
New Books
"Spite is for people who want to shove you off the garden walk. A more humane politics would ask how to make the path wider" ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Bolaño's shadow. Marketing trends mislead the few U.S. publishers devoted to Latin American literature ... more »