Inside Kevin Wheatcroft’s mazelike house is the largest collection of Nazi artifacts in the world. “Hitler’s eye for quality was just extraordinary”... more »
Max Brod was a middling, if prolific, writer. He was also, of course, a close friend of Kafka. Together they explored museums, theaters – and brothels... more »
We live in technological times. Everything is optimized. It’s time to revive a humanistic tradition of robust criticism. Time to revive Arnold Toynbee... more »
Why are the leaders of the New York Public Library so intent on destroying one of the world’s great repositories of knowledge?... more »
Marriage, a fraught and mysterious institution, inspires both passion and pragmatism. Gabriel García Márquez called it “the conjugal conspiracy”... more »
John Berryman: In his youth, a splendid dancer; later, a nervous, erratic man; finally, a broken alcoholic – and brilliant poet... more »
Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t take on faith everything between the covers. Behold the imperiled state of facts in book publishing... more »
Whether glass, ruby red, or furry slippers; winged boots or glowing-hot iron shoes; footwear is a recurrent fairy-tale motif. Why?... more »
Is a Catholic novelist, by definition, a failed novelist? Consider dogma in the fiction of Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Graham Greene... more »
Pornography is old. But our ability to track how porn affects us is relatively new. The upshot: Porn has been unfairly maligned... more »
Everything you know about perception is wrong – and it’s the fault of Western philosophers, starting with Descartes. Or so John Searle would have you think... more »
Days of rage. What is the inner logic that leads idealistic souls of various ideological stripes to embrace violence for political ends?... more »
The education of a young poet. T.S. Eliot was at Harvard from 1906 to 1914. But he had to escape to put to use what he’d learned there... more »
The first literary duel: Hector and Achilles. Among the last: Allen Tate against Karl Shapiro, in 1948. The unlikeliest weapon: unsold books... more »
George Orwell had many dislikes. Among them: bearded fruit-juice drinkers, young social-literary climbers, sex maniacs, Quakers, pistachio-colored shirts... more »
Nabokov in Utah. Among marmots and Mormons, the author collected butterflies, smoked five packs a day, and suffered a bad friction burn on his buttocks... more »
In defense of pragmatic pessimism. As a corrective to the deluded optimism of the happiness industry, worrying is more essential than ever... more »
Historians are fond of epochs. The Enlightenment, for instance: an arbitrary idea that long ago outlived its usefulness... more »
In the ‘20s, a female sculptor like Barbara Hepworth had three options: assimilate, decorate, or detonate. She chose the third... more »
The Japanese literary scene is plagued by rehashed American literature. Contemporary novelists are “brainless writers of crap.” Exhibit A: Haruki Murakami... more »
The Pickwick craze. More than a serial novel, it was a Victorian phenomenon: merchandise (hats, soaps), spinoffs (bootleg editions, joke books). It was the birth of modern mass culture... more »
Inside Kevin Wheatcroft’s mazelike house is the largest collection of Nazi artifacts in the world. “Hitler’s eye for quality was just extraordinary”... more »
Why are the leaders of the New York Public Library so intent on destroying one of the world’s great repositories of knowledge?... more »
Don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t take on faith everything between the covers. Behold the imperiled state of facts in book publishing... more »
Pornography is old. But our ability to track how porn affects us is relatively new. The upshot: Porn has been unfairly maligned... more »
The education of a young poet. T.S. Eliot was at Harvard from 1906 to 1914. But he had to escape to put to use what he’d learned there... more »
Nabokov in Utah. Among marmots and Mormons, the author collected butterflies, smoked five packs a day, and suffered a bad friction burn on his buttocks... more »
In the ‘20s, a female sculptor like Barbara Hepworth had three options: assimilate, decorate, or detonate. She chose the third... more »
Henry James loved his mother and was desperate to get away from her. It’s no coincidence that some of his best novels have no mothers at all... more »
The sad fate of the silent-film star. Buster Keaton’s art was sublime. Then came talkies, alcoholism, and drifting around Hollywood in a “land yacht”... more »
The story of Lewis Carroll: 98,721 letters sent or received, 3,000 photographs taken, a revolutionary imagination, an unknowable man... more »
A “clerk” for migrants, peasants, and industrial workers. John Berger’s literary storytelling mixes politics and aesthetics. It defies categorization...... more »
Libraries are wondrous repositories of knowledge, entrusted with fascinating treasures. Too bad they’re terrible at keeping track of things... more »
“I could either shut up, that’s the end, get on with dying. Or, get gripped, which is what happened.” Jenny Diski on turning death into sentences.... more »
Art in a time of tyranny. Most art produced under the Third Reich has been destroyed or hidden. Is it time to give those pieces a museum of their own?... more »
Richard Dawkins joined Twitter seven years ago; he has one million followers. He likes the 140-character format. But is Twitter ruining his reputation?... more »
Why do we lie? The short answer: We can’t help it: We’re human. We deceive, often without meaning to. A flawed memory doesn’t always indicate a flawed character... more »
The dream of a common language goes back to Genesis. But it remains just that, a dream. Still unresolved: Is translation an art or a problem of math?... more »
How Delmore Schwartz, onetime wunderkind of New York’s literary scene, overcame academic mandarins and become the voice of his generation... more »
Half Xanadu, half Lowe’s, the Robert Rauschenberg archive contains bicycles, neckties, a recipe for key lime pie. How to separate the materials of life from those of art?... more »
“More than a publication, n+1 is a microculture, a whole way of intellectual life.” The magazine is 10 years old. Time to take stock... more »
Remember surrender? Appomattox, Saigon, Germany capitulating to the Allies. Makes you wonder: When did eternal war replace surrender, and why?... more »
The culture of jihad is a culture of romance. It promises adventure, chivalry, and heroism. Just read the poetry of ISIS... more »
“They’re first-rate: the fabric, embroidery and monogramming, the sewing of the button.” How Eva Braun’s underwear ended up in an Ohio thrift store... more »
Even secular critics, as they get older, tend to write about the Bible, observed Frank Kermode. They yearn to understand the largest issues... more »
According to its founder, Wikipedia is the "sum of all human knowledge." More accurate to say the sum of all male knowledge; 91 percent of editors are men. It shows ... more »
"There is a tendency to hubris in science," says Tom Stoppard. Such a tendency is evident in David Sloan Wilson: "If my passion comes across as hubris, then let it!"... more »
Napoleon in love. Enemy fire couldn't stop him from writing dozens of erotic, emotionally needy letters. What do you expect from a man with 22 mistresses?... more »
Weighing Machiavelli, Dale Carnegie, and "the no-asshole rule," we've endured a long debate about what personality type breeds success... more »
Politics and madness. The French Revolution in some ways invigorated the national mind. But for many participants joy tipped into delirium... more »
Does fear of death explain the development of art, religion, language, economics, science, and almost all of human behavior? ... more »
Max Brod was a middling, if prolific, writer. He was also, of course, a close friend of Kafka. Together they explored museums, theaters – and brothels... more »
Marriage, a fraught and mysterious institution, inspires both passion and pragmatism. Gabriel García Márquez called it “the conjugal conspiracy”... more »
Whether glass, ruby red, or furry slippers; winged boots or glowing-hot iron shoes; footwear is a recurrent fairy-tale motif. Why?... more »
Everything you know about perception is wrong – and it’s the fault of Western philosophers, starting with Descartes. Or so John Searle would have you think... more »
The first literary duel: Hector and Achilles. Among the last: Allen Tate against Karl Shapiro, in 1948. The unlikeliest weapon: unsold books... more »
In defense of pragmatic pessimism. As a corrective to the deluded optimism of the happiness industry, worrying is more essential than ever... more »
The Japanese literary scene is plagued by rehashed American literature. Contemporary novelists are “brainless writers of crap.” Exhibit A: Haruki Murakami... more »
The trouble with new nature writing. Books by Helen Macdonald and Robert Macfarlane purport to be about wildness. Why are they so tame?... more »
How are children supposed to grow up, to become free, happy, decent adults? Answers are elusive in our infantile age... more »
The challenges of translating Homer. How does one render magically appearing bathtubs or spears in two places at once? That depends. Is The Iliad art or accident?... more »
A collection of biographies shows literature as a longtime refuge for sad sacks and self-destructors, a cynical celebration of spectacular failure... more »
An aesthetic of shyness. Elizabeth Bishop wasn’t much for confession. In her life, as in her apartment, she craved “closets, closets, and more closets!”... more »
Mary Shelley wasn’t overtly political in her seven novels, two travelogues, and 23 short stories. But the influence of her outspoken mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is evident throughout... more »
Roland Barthes regarded biography as “a novel which dare not speak its name.” He preferred to reduce life to a few distinct moments, details, inflections he called “biographemes”... more »
Critics says Alain de Botton is a marketer of solipsism, a moron. But does their ire just highlight their own unwillingness to engage the public?... more »
A guide to Jonathan Galassi’s Muse: Pepita Erskine = Susan Sontag; Sterling Wainwright = James Laughlin; Elliott Blossom = Harold Bloom. But who is The Nympho?... more »
Boswell was at home in the salons of the Enlightenment, but he wasn't an enlightened thinker. Ask the women he pursued... more »
What could have brought William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer together in friendship? For starters, both detested Gore Vidal... more »
C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Catholic, homosexual, friend of Chesterton, Owen, Eliot, Waugh. Also war hero, spy, and the first English translator of Proust... more »
Does evolution favor altruism? That cooperative groups prevail over uncooperative groups is an ascendant idea. That doesn’t mean it’s right... more »
The closing of the French mind. Its way of thought has never quite recovered from the end of Communism and the fading of structuralism... more »
Dave Hickey has a gift for unfashionable subjects, like Las Vegas and Liberace. An art critic of sorts, he’s also one of our best writers... more »
In the 1950s, T.S. Eliot’s critical judgments were largely sacrosanct. By the 1980s, Harold Bloom had made a revolution in literary taste... more »
The many myths of Alfred Hitchcock. Incarcerated at 4, beaten by Jesuits, left outside during a bombing raid: His trauma was part branding strategy... more »
From 1948 to 1960, Nabokov wrote parts of Lolita, Pnin, and Speak, Memory. He was a writer transformed – an American, no longer a European aesthete... more »
Bertrand Russell said that he feared argument with John Maynard Keynes, likening it to taking his life in his own hands. Keynes was ruthless, especially toward fellow academics.... more »
Buckley once called Mailer a "moral pervert." Then they became friends, close enough for Buckley's wife to call Mailer Chooky Bah Lamb... more »
In Putin's Russia, Stalin apologists are on the rise. "Strong leader," "effective manager," "benevolent dictator": Behold the whitewashing of a tyrant... more »
To force men into utopia is barbarism, said Irving Howe. But the image of utopia keeps imagination alive ... more »
We live in technological times. Everything is optimized. It’s time to revive a humanistic tradition of robust criticism. Time to revive Arnold Toynbee... more »
John Berryman: In his youth, a splendid dancer; later, a nervous, erratic man; finally, a broken alcoholic – and brilliant poet... more »
Is a Catholic novelist, by definition, a failed novelist? Consider dogma in the fiction of Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Graham Greene... more »
Days of rage. What is the inner logic that leads idealistic souls of various ideological stripes to embrace violence for political ends?... more »
George Orwell had many dislikes. Among them: bearded fruit-juice drinkers, young social-literary climbers, sex maniacs, Quakers, pistachio-colored shirts... more »
Historians are fond of epochs. The Enlightenment, for instance: an arbitrary idea that long ago outlived its usefulness... more »
The Pickwick craze. More than a serial novel, it was a Victorian phenomenon: merchandise (hats, soaps), spinoffs (bootleg editions, joke books). It was the birth of modern mass culture... more »
“I’m after me,” explained Edward Hopper. He hoped to find himself in what he painted, which explains the mystery of his art... more »
Of God and gold. In the fifth century, when St. Augustine wanted to revolutionize philanthropy, he turned to the countercultural strategies of the ancients... more »
We adore the poet who makes nature intelligible, “and by so doing a part of our creative power,” said W.B. Yeats. But is that a reason to adore Yeats?... more »
France invented the word “intellectual,” but French thought is in the doldrums, brought low by a technocratic, complacent, bunker mentality.... more »
Educated people used to know the difference between French Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. No more. We no longer care about fine art... more »
The realism of Anna Karenina. Tolstoy’s novel seems like reportage, and his technique casts a dream spell on readers. Janet Malcolm explains... more »
The logic of hating new poems. They’re impenetrable, elitist, and fail to measure up to those of the past. But this contempt reveals just how badly we need them... more »
“I am an equal-opportunity feminist,” says Camille Paglia. “All barriers to women’s advancement must be removed. However, I don’t feel that gender is sufficient to explain all of human life. This gender myopia has become a disease"... more »
Ignorance comes in at least two varieties – simple and willful. Ours is an age imperiled by willful ignorance, an attack on truth that began in the academy... more »
The epistolary record of Henry James's life comprises 10,423 letters. What do they reveal? What you'd expect: He was a sufferable snob... more »
For Michael Oakeshott, philosophy is a conversation, not an argument; a disposition, not a doctrine. He had no interest in changing the world... more »
Two centuries ago, the literary reviews – especially Blackwood’s – were slashing, pugnacious, out for blood. Now “the bloodbath has become a featherbed”... more »
What’s a museum for? In the hands of Renzo Piano, it is a place to gawk at the New York skyline, to eat, to see and be seen, to do most everything – except see art... more »
Campus activists are animated by a noble impulse to right historical wrongs. Yet their moral fervor has descended into a form of zealotry... more »
Diderot, Balzac, Proust, and Bourdieu all wrote on philosophies of clothing. Today we have only coffee-table books on the subject. What’s become of the literature of fashion?... more »
Far too much art is locked in the warehouses of a handful of museums. What happened to the goal of getting more people to look at more art to get more out of it?... more »
John Berryman was 12 when he wrote his first lengthy work. He was 57 when he killed himself. In between were guilt, humiliation, failure, and breathtaking feats of imagination... more »
Gen X-ers are independent and productive. Millennials don't buy cars. Says who? It's time to abandon the hopelessly arbitrary pseudoscience of generational analysis... more »
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