Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »
The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »
The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned ... more »
Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism ... more »
High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies ... more »
Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality” ... more »
Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »
Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »
Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province ... more »
Jordan Petersen is rich, famous, and unhappy. His anxiety landed him in a Russian hospital. Now he's back from breakdown ... more »
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »
We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »
Sherry Turkle, MIT’s “one-woman emergency empathy squad,” is a critic of technology amid its evangelists...more... more »
What can we learn from Philip Roth, master careerist? Lawyer up early, listen to critics while scorning them publicly, sell out whenever possible ... more »
"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it" ... more »
The tragic legacy of “comfort women” has divided South Korea and Japan for decades. Enter the dubious claims of a Harvard law professor ... more »
What Freud got right. According to a new book, his ideas weren’t just ahead of his time — they are ahead of ours ... more »
A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »
Parul Sehgal read 125 years of writing in The New York Times Book Review. She found mostly a dearth of style and a failure of criticism... more »
At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon... more »
Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress ... more »
The book blurb requires too much work and induces too much guilt. As Viet Thanh Nguyen says, “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave.”... more »
René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »
Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors ... more »
What happens when race, class, and power collide at an elite liberal-arts college? No one emerges unscathed ... more »
More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie... more »
Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification? ... more »
No human invention has destroyed the civilization that invented it. We haven't been careful or wise — just lucky ... more »
Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew ... more »
“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman” ... more »
Two bookshelves, all but identical in appearance and construction, exemplify two radically different ideas about politics and design... more »
Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more »
Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »
Unearthing Caligula's pleasure garden. Was he assassinated because he was a monster, or was he made into a monster because he was assassinated? ... more »
When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes... more »
In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »
How to write, according to Martin Amis: No fancy syntax; use line breaks liberally; be original; see things with a poet’s eye... more »
A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more »
In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust ... more »
Psychosis and dissociation were key mechanisms for Surrealist artists. Down with Western logic! they cried. Long live paranoia!... more »
Alan Greenspan wished he’d never spoken of “irrational exuberance”; Thomas Kuhn rued introducing “paradigm shift” — coiner’s remorse is real ... more »
Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »
What is the cultural sway of magazines when there are 20-year-old TikTok influencers with many more subscribers than Time? ... more »
A mammoth new biography of Philip Roth is imminent. Who better to review it than, well, Philip Roth? ... more »
"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »
In Victorian times, one sat erect in polite society. Enter the scandalous American rocking chair — a “lazy and ungraceful indulgence”... more »
The legacy of British imperialism is everywhere: Even the word “loot” is appropriated — from the Hindi “lut,” the spoils of war... more »
Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »
Classics is beholden to a traditional, triumphalist, “Western civ” model. If the field doesn’t change, it doesn’t deserve to survive ... more »
When it comes to Patricia Highsmith, the question of mental illness, of course, arises. Her personality was interwoven with those of her characters ... more »
Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system ... more »
Computers can’t understand a haiku or conjure a fairytale. They can't grasp literature at all. And they never will. Here's proof ... more »
Joan Didion's potency and influence stems for her ability to repurpose an ingrained sense of futility into a tool of critical analysis... more »
Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist” ... more »
Seth Abramson's books promise "proof" of Trumpian misdeeds. In reality, they are incoherent summaries of other people's reporting ... more »
To separate science from pseudoscience, it helps to consider the rationales of UFOlogists, Yeti enthusiasts, and yes, anti-vaxxers ... more »
Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances ... more »
There is “a new kind of marginalized literature: literature that does not serve the didactic purposes of the postcolonial survey course” ... more »
After residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, along with a Guggenheim and a MacArthur, Bette Howland never wrote another book ... more »
Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind... more »
Reading Heidegger in Beijing. He's a rock star in academic circles there. But kindly ignore the corruptive impact of a bad regime on a great thinker ... more »
Golden age of the cigarette. The war over smoking is too easily cast as one of heroes and villains - in truth things were much messier ... more »
Criticism is often a cycle of destruction, a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own ... more »
Do "woke" American ideas on race, gender, and post-colonialism really pose an existential threat to France?... more »
Acid humor, a flair for pith, a feel for the uncanny — Joan Didion’s talents have been celebrated for decades. Let’s not stop now... more »
In the 1950s, writers began to formulate a critique of technology. Since then we've rushed into an uncritical embrace. What now?... more »
When Charles Darwin met Harriet Martineau, she enjoyed a level of influence he could not imagine. And she challenged his dim view of women ... more »
"Yeats saw so deeply into the contours of his age that the shape of the future became somewhat discernible" ... more »
A biography paints Tom Stoppard as unfailingly kind. The playwright’s reaction? He is “not as nice as people think” ... more »
Cassandra of the internet age: As far back as the mid-'80s, Michael Goldhaber was worried about the attention economy. ... more »
Was the painter Francis Bacon a truth-teller about humanity's animal nature, or a mere mimic, best at rendering feet, doorknobs, and toiletware? ... more »
On pop futurism. The genre's method? Sketch out possible future, highlight emergent trend, and promise way for reader to benefit ... more »
Juliet did not say "O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore [is he] Romeo?" So why do so many people deface quotes with brackets? ... more »
The ur-existentialist. Kierkegaard was torn by his desires for recognition and for walking the path of a self-denying Christian ... more »
The provincialism of American literary culture: We want books that "speak to the moment," espousing a political urgency. That's small-minded ... more »
How Mary-Kay Wilmers refashioned the London Review of Books in her image: literary and eccentric... more »
Both Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath were caught in the web of literary fame. But he lived to 74, she died at 30. The difference is instructive ... more »
A fact about the academic humanities? "Bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they make the case for their departments"... more »
The book pirates of 18th-century France devised a strategy: Republish works by Voltaire. It was “an enterprise of solid gold”... more »
As a 23-year-old social-media influencer tops the best-seller list in France, the old guard fights back: “147 pages of emptiness, 19.50 lost euros” ... more »
Transgression was the founding gesture of the avant-garde. Now the avant-garde can seem a little "rapey." What changed? ... more »
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is one of the most prominent classicists of his generation. He's not sure the field should exist ... more »
In her writings, Mary Wollstonecraft flouted social norms. In life, she often defied her own pronouncements ... more »
Philosophers have sought for centuries to understand beauty. Now scientists are giving it a try ... more »
The law professors Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule call for rule by social-scientific elites. That would be a disaster... more »
Did E.E. Cummings’s relationship with a French prostitute really have a serious effect on his work?... more »
Helen Frankenthaler was many things, but perhaps not “a Shakespeare of the Eisenhower era,” as a fulsome biography asserts... more »
Silvia Foti's grandfather is a national hero in Lithuania. He also worked with the Nazis to kill Jews. His story has echoes across Eastern Europe ... more »
We inhabit a dystopian reality, says John Gray, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction... more »