Articles of Note

 In praise of Ben Jonson. The failed actor, scurrilous and bawdy, had a penchant for publicity stunts but the soul of a poet... more »

“These throw no light on my work,” said Samuel Beckett of his letters. Ah, but they do. For one thing, he was miserably busy.... more »

The “whitening” of rock ’n’ roll. Tracing the genre from Lennon to Springsteen to the Rolling Stones shows that race is key to its ideology of authenticity... more »

Hope amid cynicism, sickness, and death. Kierkegaard renounced worldly pleasures, like trips to the countryside and even marriage. But his vision wasn’t entirely pessimistic... more »

The curious history of Esperanto. The universal language, created by a Polish-Jewish eyeglass-maker, is returning to the roots it fought to transcend... more »

We repeatedly “discover” Heidegger’s Nazism. Philosophers wrote books, Nazis burned books; he did both. Why does this tension cause us such unease?... more »

“I’d like to be thought of as just another rookie,” George Plimpton told the Detroit Lions. Does his participatory sportswriting still hold up?... more »

Paper trail. A recent glut of works examine the history of the book. Clearly we’re anticipating nostalgia for the book format... more »

Those insufferable men. For the French novelist Marguerite Duras, love was terrible because men were terrible. Naturally, she did her finest writing while single... more »

Mocked in the movie Aladdin, William F. Buckley’s singular style of speaking merits attention. Like his ideas, it was heavily influenced by the Spanish language... more »

In postwar Paris, artists flocked to a squalid alley. There was a single shared toilet and cheap food, but the ideas were priceless... more »

Neither entirely Victorian nor modernist, Henry James sowed the seed of postmodern thought. He would be appalled by what it has become... more »

“Germany awake!” went the Nazi slogan. The country was roused by Hitler and methamphetamine. Pervitin, as the drug was called, was National Socialism in a pill... more »

“The hurricane does not roar in pentameters.” At the heart of The Tempest is a linguistic imperialism that still exists today. ... more »

Most social policy is based on the assumption that people’s motives are primarily selfish. But what if we're more virtuous than we think?... more »

From 1944 to 1947, Jean-Paul Sartre was pre-eminent among French intellectuals. Why were so many people drawn to him? What was the appeal of existentialism?... more »

On creepiness. Clowns, taxidermists, and funeral directors: We think they're odd — but why? Perhaps they pose a threat. Or perhaps they simply transgress the natural order... more »

Charles Murray is pessimistic about the state of American politics: The future belongs to authoritarians of the left and the right... more »

Bemoaning the state of poetry is an American pastime. What explains the discontent? The troubled relationship between poets and their audience... more »

Editing is like alchemy, its careful practice a form of creation. Line by line, word by word — “hansom” or “brougham”?... more »

With a click, you can watch John Berryman down beers in Dublin or Marianne Moore throw out a first pitch. Is YouTube changing how we “read” poetry?... more »

Can an insidious artifact of Hitler be neutralized by a phalanx of footnotes and annotations? Here comes a new critical edition of Mein Kampf... more »

Shirley Jackson found people competitive, self-serving, and not to be trusted. She came by such views honestly, then turned them into horror... more »

Why do you read what you read? Because the literary market chose it for you. That's why refusing to read is not a badge of shame. It's the way of the future... more »

Linguistic theories are, in part, explanations of human nature. For more than 50 years, Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar has been dominant. Now it's coming undone... more »

In Latin America, birthplace of the cultural Cold War, artists and writers were courted by superpowers. Which revealed the political impotence of intellectuals... more »

What can be gleaned about the nature of intelligence from tracking 5,000 child prodigies over 45 years? That the 10,000-hour rule is bunk... more »

On the left, "the worker" is sacred. So is a belief in solidarity and equality. But amid rapid economic fragmentation, does the left have a future?... more »

Open plans, glass walls, communal table-desks, exposed brick: The carefully curated aesthetic of the modern office and the grim fate of the "knowledge worker"... more »

Estimates of executions under Lenin and Stalin suggest an average of more than 10,000 per week. We've never come to terms with the cause and consequence of those killings... more »

New Books

 Feeling a “need to be extraordinary,” the author Angela Carter set off for Japan. She left her wedding ring in a Tokyo airport ashtray... more »

So Hobbes was an atheist with a gloomy view of human nature? Rousseau believed in a peace-loving “noble savage”? Wrong and wrong. We misunderstand the great philosophers ... more »

John O’Hara, part Wharton, part Fitzgerald, chronicled and envied well-to-do American society. At 65 he asked Yale for an honorary degree. Yale refused... more »

Romantic acolyte, professional doppelgänger, transcendental hack: Thomas De Quincey’s drug addiction may be the least interesting thing about him... more »

An imperious 19th-century philosopher engaged in ad hominem attacks and obscure internecine disputes. Eleven people showed up for his funeral. His name: Karl Marx... more »

The only way is Wessex. Thomas Hardy’s imagined region grew out of his London experiences — dinners, soirees, supervising cemetery reconfigurations... more »

Climate affects art, especially in England: Shelley was fascinated by wind, Wordsworth by clouds, other English poets by persistent dampness.... more »

Oedipal rebellion and the Frankfurt School. Were Adorno, Benjamin, et al. merely sons rebelling against — while depending on — their wealthy fathers?... more »

What's causing literary culture’s decline? According to Cynthia Ozick, it’s neither TV nor the internet but weak literary criticism. “Without the critics, incoherence.”... more »

Shirley Jackson’s biography had uncanny parallels to her fiction. But what can it tell us about an author who wanted to trade in her life and start anew?... more »

When it came to explaining China to America, Pearl S. Buck and H.T. Tsiang seemed on two ends of a spectrum. But they shared a common fate: being ignored... more »

One day in 1953, Henry Molaison lost the ability to form new memories. He existed entirely in the now, which made him history’s most studied man... more »

Literature helps form our beliefs. And while novels can stir outrage, they also provide catharsis, which has the effect of mollifying our politics... more »

When the milieu makes the philosopher. Descartes, Hobbes, and their contemporaries lived through the Scientific Revolution and several wars of religion. Their narratives matter... more »

Beware nostalgia and those promising to restore society to its former greatness. “Hopes can be disappointed," says Mark Lilla. "Nostalgia is irrefutable”... more »

Against everything. In a time of abundance, we impose artificial scarcity. Why? Mark Greif unpacks our elaborate restrictions on food, exercise, sex... more »

1862 was a low point for Marx. Europe had taken a conservative turn. He was obscure and in poor health. So he pursued a new career: railway clerk... more »

Jean Cocteau was a novelist, dandy, designer, and provocateur. How to make sense of his life? A thousand-page book takes on all of his parts... more »

The early days of psychoanalysis were full of hope, overweening ambition, and an absence of scientific method. Witness to it all was Emma Jung... more »

In 1941, Gallimard was eager to publish a novel by an unknown Algerian, Albert Camus. One problem: They couldn't find any paper... more »

How have the Mitford sisters so captivated writers? Start with their wealth, wayward magnetism, antic charm, rivalry, loyalty, and political folly... more »

Literary biography meets the anecdote-proof life. Wallace Stevens loved long walks, gifts from Ceylon, and persimmons. Does knowing that help us understand his poetry?... more »

Clive James, bingewatcher. He's an incisive and discerning critic. But it's his affection for the abysmal that distinguishes his taste in television... more »

The struggles of August Wilhelm Schlegel. He defined Romanticism, pioneered Indology, and translated Shakespeare into German. He also managed to alienate almost everyone along the way ... more »

A world without cats. They're cute, but don't be fooled: They're a menace to animal society. Is it morally acceptable to sacrifice one species over another?... more »

Born "ordinary, hillbilly, and poor," Helen Gurley Brown made her life a monument to artifice and the belief that any problem could be redeemed by humor and an upbeat ending.... more »

The forces of reaction, on the right and the left, have shadowed European thought for centuries. Mark Lilla explores a cast of mind... more »

Campaign season: a quadrennial procession of academics advancing obtuse theories on the electorate. Here comes a Berkeley sociologist dripping condescension... more »

The desire to conclude with a clear moral can lead writers to try to bring closure. This awkwardness rarely pays off, especially when the topic is marital angst... more »

Essays & Opinions

Learning from John Cage means listening not just to his work but also to the world through his sensibility... more »

When, like Faust, we despair at the limitations of human knowledge, another path opens. Experience, in the Emersonian sense, can show the way to transcendence... more »

The art and artifice of the poetic pilgrimage. Can seeing Shakespeare’s First Folio or Dickinson’s house in Amherst bring a reader closer to the work itself?... more »

Beyond self-evident. In a time of Lockean philosophy and trompe-l’oeil art, America’s founders embraced doubt and ambiguity. Was their stance a weakness?... more »

The Marquis de Sade as your guide to the modern office? His 120 Days of Sodom explains it all: hierarchy, accounting, bonuses, boredom... more »

Inside the nonsense machine. Žižek’s ideas are repellent, argues Roger Scruton. Behind the slick, occasionally persuasive writing lie “little pellets of poison”... more »

Where deconstruction came from. Americans blame French theorists, like Derrida, for the idea. Its rise, however, is an American story... more »

Poems are inefficient by design, like taking a long walk. That’s why a society that celebrates efficiency, profit maximization, and productivity needs them... more »

The notion of time travel beguiled Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and Stephen Hawking. Has any idea produced more convoluted and futile philosophical analysis?... more »

Philosopher problems. “All we do is gloss each other,” complained Montaigne in the 16th century. Since then the field’s issues have only worsened... more »

There's long been a vexed relationship between flesh and thought. We stubbornly cling to the hope of transcending the former to achieve a higher state of the latter   ... more »

Step aside, Ann Landers. The advice columnist has evolved into the advice artist, essayistic excavator of complexity and vulnerability ... more »

The boundary between science journalism and PR is so porous that the task of informing the public about science is often indistinguishable from efforts to promote it... more »

The genius of Duchamp’s “Fountain.” His porcelain urinal is more than a cultural oddity. It is both art and non-art, a self-referential philosophical paradox... more »

From 1876 until 2007, everyone used the telephone for talking. No longer. The cost of that change is dear: the human voice... more »

Epidemics of political insanity are unique: Islamists are distinct from Maoists. But they're united by an iconography and an attraction to dogmatism and violence... more »

Making sense of Mahler. His symphonies burst with seemingly incoherent themes and moods. The immensity of his productions are a problem -- and a gift ... more »

Smartphones haven't made us happier, but they've made us less aware of our unhappiness, says Andrew Sullivan. "There is no dark night of the soul anymore that isn’t lit with the flicker of the screen" ... more »

Are you a jerk? If the question causes genuine worry, you're probably not. But note: Often it's the most educated who are the least self-aware... more »

We're used to irony and polemic from our public intellectuals, but a higher standard is to be found. Exhibit A is Jürgen Habermas... more »

The virtue of analogies, said Wittgenstein, consists in "changing our way of seeing." But most offer just temporary distraction, not illumination ... more »

Philip Larkin's photographs. He picked up a camera as a child, and the images — striking, sensitive, emotion-filled — send us back to the poems with new eyes... more »

Secular national movements of the 20th century assumed that "decline was the destiny of all religions,” as Michael Walzer puts it. They were wrong. So is Walzer... more »

Against art history. It’s obsessed with obscure formalist twists, micromovements, and jargon-laden intellectualism. Real art is bigger than all that... more »

“Your mind is a country I find very agreeable.” wrote Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau. But is it really possible to enter the well-guarded secrecy of another life?... more »