Articles of Note

Instead of bending to the dictates of socialist realism, Isaac Babel simply wrote less. He told people he was mastering a new genre: silence... more »

George H. Nash, godfather of conservative intellectual history, famously explained the movement's success. Now he's grappling with its abandonment of critical thought... more »

The literary legacy of the Man in Black. Johnny Cash’s verse speaks more to psalm-singing than to gunslinging, argues Paul Muldoon. We should take note... more »

In 1857, Frederick Law Olmsted began to redesign Central Park. He was supremely qualified — except for a lack of any artistic experience... more »

For all his refined taste and passion for art, Kenneth Clark was emotionally stunted. Adulation made him feel like a fraud. "My feelings are as stiff as an unused limb”... more »

When Robert Conquest wasn't writing about the atrocities of the 20th century, he was writing love poems and dirty limericks. Other poets are taking note... more »

On bibliotherapy. Novels are hardly cures for our life problems. Books drive people to do strange things. They don’t solve problems, they create new ones... more »

Born in Russia and educated in Britain, Nabokov saw himself as an American writer. He was also a critic of American culture, especially its racism... more »

The godfather of crime fiction, Thomas De Quincey inhabited the dark fringe of Romanticism. He even applauded murder as one of the finer “arts” of life... more »

"From a very early age, I had this sense of harshness and the need for endurance.” John Berger at 90, still arguing about how to see art -- and the world ... more »

Buckminster Fuller popularized the geodesic dome and the idea that technology is society’s salve. Was he, as McLuhan had it, the Leonardo of his time?... more »

Hilton Als was 14 when he first read James Baldwin. "I realized you could write in a ... there's no other way to put it, really, except it was a kind of high-faggoty style"... more »

Animal Farm in America. How an unknown democratic socialist rode the acclaim for his "little squib" of a fable to become the leading literary Cold Warrior... more »

Bards thought writing would destroy our memories; scribes loathed the printing press. Now handwriting enthusiasts have taken up this tradition of snobbery... more »

“The most bank-clerky of all bank clerks” is what Aldous Huxley called T.S. Eliot. If only Huxley had known that the poet walked around London with his cheeks powdered and his lips rouged... more »

Thomas Merton's embrace of monasticism revealed his paradoxical character. Here was a "garrulous apostle of silence who thrived among words"... more »

An investigation into the history of books bound in human skin reveals that it was usually a doctor wielding the knife... more »

At 69, Marina Abramovic is skinny dipping, creating a holographic avatar, conducting semi-occult brain-wave experiments. Some things never change... more »

Forget J.M.W. Turner the man. He lived only to paint, so the (often sordid) details of his biography are irrelevant, right? Not quite…... more »

Diane Arbus cultivated a bond between subject and photographer. She propositioned strangers -- to take their pictures and to sleep with them... more »

Have intellectuals, focusing on the past, ignored the future? The economist Robin Hanson, who has a few ideas about our robot-dominated destiny, thinks so... more »

Philosophy, which, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder, has embraced pedantry and protocols and office charts. Can it be saved from itself?... more »

Talking with the painter, writer, critic, and TV-and-film visionary John Berger is strenuous. He suffers neither bullshit nor idle conversation... more »

What constitutes style for a literary critic? The oscillation between mastery and accident, artifice and character. Consider the work of Elizabeth Hardwick... more »

Sex and seduction in Grantchester. For the poet Rupert Brooke and his neo-pagan friends, summer was for swimming naked, canoeing, and reading Milton... more »

One era’s aesthetic is the next era's eyesore. So it went with Brutalism — until now. Does this wave of revival architecture get it right?... more »

Auden called him “the best English novelist alive”; Partisan Review called him “a terrorist of language.” Meet the shadowy Henry Green... more »

 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 »

New Books

The tyranny of time travel. The subject has had brilliant thinking from Borges, Stoppard, Sebald, and many scientists and philosophers — but to what end?... more »

A.E. Housman’s poetry spoke to the soul of England but was set in “not exactly a real place.” His was an England purely of the mind... more »

Scholars are searching for antecedents to today’s New Atheists. Did a cultlike “atheist underground” really flourish in the ancient world? Doubtful... more »

What was it like to work for Stanley Kubrick? Sample tasks: Take care of the cats and dogs, hang up on Fellini, deliver an enormous porcelain phallus... more »

Jonathan Swift, remembered as petulant and severe, could be tender — although that tenderness seemed like a "quivering slab of meat into which he longed to plunge a nice sharp fork"... more »

Want to live inside a Jane Austen novel? A word of caution from Caitlin Flanagan: Everyone smelled horrible, the Thames overflowed with feces, and women were relegated to the home... more »

Critics argue that lumping “world literature” together leads to a great flattening, reducing particularities into a global monoculture. But has that been true?... more »

Cézanne, Carlyle, and Turing all suffered from shyness. No wonder: Social anxiety turns us — especially writers and artists — into close readers of the world’s signs and wonders... more »

Narcissism is everywhere, the hallmark of our era, we’re told. This belief merely perpetuates what Narcissus’ own story was — a myth... more »

Try literature that scares the daylights out of you. Reading ghost stories not only helps expand the imagination; it also makes us nicer and more humble... more »

Being an agent in Hollywood isn't a job, it's a lifestyle. Those who make it display greed and genius, clairvoyance and an aptitude for both ass-kissing and obstinacy ... more »

The meanings of snobbery. It's an assumption of social superiority, a moral failing, and it’s expressed in a variety of guises: by food snobs, book snobs, real-estate snobs... more »

Liberal intellectuals have long dismissed both radicals and reactionaries. Now this moral certainty has evaporated into empty, cranky clichés... more »

Socrates set the bar too high. Sage, ascetic, gadfly: His purity of motivation is impossible for philosophers to sustain in modern capitalist society... more »

Dating is like a “precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship," says Moira Weigel. "If you look sharp, you might get a free lunch”... more »

Two pillars of physics – general relativity and quantum mechanics -- have been borne out in countless experiments. But they contradict each other... more »

Singleness is thought of as a transitory state, a way station en route to marriage. For Emily Witt, it was a way of life... more »

When Clive James met David Hockney, they discussed Picasso. Hockney had so much to say, recalls James. "I still count this as one of the great conversations of my life"... more »

Screens consume our attention, of course, but they also change the way we look at the world. What happens online increasingly shapes how we feel offline... more »

Alfred Hitchcock was scared of heights, policemen, imprisonment, and other people. But his neuroses meshed well with his talent. The result: a superb fantasist of fear... more »

The amiability and productivity of Jean Cocteau stemmed from a despairing thought: The world is a misunderstanding... more »

At age 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor started walking across Europe in search of erotic, alcoholic, intellectual, and courageous escapades. He never stopped... more »

Fiction in a time of climate change. John Updike defined the novel as an “individual moral adventure.” Not so for Amitav Ghosh, who thinks a collective aesthetic is needed now... more »

Degas vs. Manet, Matisse vs. Picasso, Pollock vs. de Kooning, Bacon vs. Freud. Other than knives through canvases and sexual intrigue, what makes an artistic rivalry memorable?... more »

Mark Rothko, an underprivileged refugee, was scorned at school. He dropped out of Yale to seek “the dignity and excitement” of the arts... more »

Claude Lévi-Strauss is often lumped with Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault in a structuralist “Gang of Four.” But he wanted little to do with Parisian intellectuals... more »

Evelyn Waugh at war. Despite his sloth, snobbery, gluttony, and alcoholism, he was accepted into a commando unit — for his sense of humor... more »

Confronted by solipsism, philosophers have found meaning in religion, society, love — and in grand schemes for the future of humanity... more »

 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 »

Essays & Opinions

What can Margery Kempe, medieval mystic, teach us about literature today? That our relationship with it can be personal, immediate, physical, emotional, and excessive... more »

In 1940, a French novelist named Léon Werth joined the exodus fleeing the Nazis. He wrote an eyewitness account of his exile. He wrote like a man from the future... more »

Against retranslation. Too many recent academic efforts to update translations treat the texts like museum pieces. Where's the energy and spirit of earlier efforts?... more »

Fabric fails to impress. We shrug at a state-of-the-art raincoat, dress shirt, or pair of tights. But no technology is as powerful as fabric. Virginia Postrel explains... more »

Democracy is flawed: Citizens lack knowledge and judgment. John Stuart Mill proposed giving extra votes to those with university degrees. An idea whose time has come... more »

What is utopianism? For China Miéville, it is neither hope nor optimism, but rather a need for alterity, for “something other than the exhausting social lie”... more »

In the 19th century, the short half-life of scientific truth was new and frightening. What was science for, if not the discovery of eternal ideas?... more »

How to explain Freud's waning influence? We've grown skeptical of grand theories and fond of minimalist forms. It’s our loss... more »

Tocqueville admired, invested in, and wrote brilliantly of America. Yet he never felt at home there intellectually. Not as he did in England... more »

How to write a best seller. Avoid fantasy, science fiction, revolutions, dinner parties, dancing. Focus on work. We're fascinated by other people's jobs... more »

Male qualities are out of step with modern times, or so we're told. But before declaring masculinity in crisis, can we agree on how to define it?... more »

What is the work of an intellectual? More and more, it is to celebrate other intellectuals. For Stuart Hall, what mattered was turning other people into deep thinkers... more »

Kierkegaard broke off his engagement claiming to be a young cad in need of a “lusty young girl.” But it was more than that. His entire philosophy can be found in that renunciation... more »

After 1993, when Toni Morrison won the Nobel, the Swedish Academy ignored American literature. Now an American is ignoring the Swedish Academy. Thanks, Bob Dylan... more »

Complaining has become an art form, a way of life, and, for the Tate Modern, a bizarre and misguided strategy for "community engagement" ... more »

Ancient Rome was gripped by a mania for public displays of reading. Wealthy Romans felt the need to boast of their intellect to the world. Some things never change... more »

Flaubert sat in a room above the Seine, writing 14 hours a day. His life is a study in the unrelenting misery of composition ... more »

How science fiction got the future wrong. Great-power rivalry, demographic collapse, mass migration have been absent from futurist literature... more »

What's it like to be a chimpanzee? The strange new science of gauging not only animals' intelligence but also their inner experience... more »

From bats to algorithms to aliens: Can we ever understand consciousness in a form radically different from our own? The question was a challenge to Wittgenstein, Nagel, Chalmers... more »

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Bull. Will Self explains the romance delusion... more »

In the 1960s, Ramparts brought muckraking back into vogue. At the helm was Warren Hinckle, one-eyed with a capuchin monkey named Henry Luce on his shoulder... more »

What was Dada? A school that embraced paradox, chance, irony, and humor. It sought to free people from the insanity of the times... more »

Jargon, mangled diction, meaningless phrases, hackneyed words — such are the writerly sins of academics, who must question their deepest assumptions about writing... more »

The future won’t be decided by all of humanity, united under the banner of liberalism. It will be haphazard, and just as purposeless as the past... more »