Articles of Note

Three pipes in the morning, four in the afternoon, three more in the evening. After the death of a friend, Jean Cocteau turned to opium... more »

America has always been in love with Shakespeare. But it’s a complicated affair. He's a figure of unusual reverence, but also vexation... more »

Freud’s founding circle had 13 members. Only one was gentile. Almost all of their patients were Jewish as well. How to explain the Jewish predilection for psychoanalysis?... more »

“I am ill & cannot help. Forgive. So go ahead without me.” With that, Samuel Beckett, committed to correspondence yet overwhelmed by his epistolary duties, signed off... more »

Re-examining the Belle of Amherst. Emily Dickinson was allergic to orthodoxy, a resister of rules, and, in the parlance of Mount Holyoke, a “No-Hoper”... more »

A grandfather clock the size of a stick of chewing gum, a Giacometti-style bronze in the palm of your hand. Inside the strange aesthetics of miniatures... more »

Some of our most important thoughts, feelings, and experiences are inexpressible. But can we know something if we can’t articulate it?... more »

The man who said he built a robot. Houdini was a magician, and a pilot, inventor, historian, and master of collusion as well... more »

Looking for the self in self-help. Self-mastery is an illusion. We do not make ourselves, and we cannot validate ourselves... more »

Good writers toil without regard for money. The literary economy runs on love, not avarice. That common view, which stretches back millennia, has never been true... more »

Is it tenable to celebrate the rise of identity politics in the university while deriding leftist critical theory? Richard Rorty thought so... more »

In the Middle Ages, human flesh (especially the thigh and the upper arm) was occasionally considered an exotic delicacy. What can cannibalism teach us about culture?... more »

When Plimpton met Papa in Cuba. In the course of a Paris Review interview, there were executions observed, boxing, drinking, and CIA meddling... more »

This is how the characteristics of an obscure Amazonian language set off an academic feud that shows no sign of letting up... more »

It can be hard to remember that philosophical work still gets done outside of seminar rooms and academic journals. Mark Greif reminds us... more »

Derek Parfit was a philosopher of unusual novelty and insight. His gift rested on his indifference to individuals, relationships, and institutions... more »

Byron ate egg yolks; Whitman paced for miles and miles; Plath swallowed one pill after another: Why are poets so weird about sleep?... more »

Remember the Sokal hoax? It's been 20 years since a physicist published a sham article in an academic journal. Why he did it, and how, still matter... more »

Secrets of Stradivari. What explains the rich, dark, high-frequency, impossible-to-replicate sound of the peerless violin? ... more »

Depicting the dead was a fixture of 19th-century painting. The genre is marked by skewed bodily proportions and blunt symbolism ... more »

John Berger, art critic, novelist, screenwriter, essayist, counterculture celebrity, cattle herder, is dead. He was 90... more »

For the past 52 years, The Economist was housed in a London tower. The height, perhaps, facilitated its handing down of Olympian judgments... more »

Beyond the Black Notebooks. Heidegger’s newly revealed letters expose his anti-Semitism as a scholarly and moral disaster for German intellectual history... more »

Close reading with Marlene Dietrich. She had a sexually charged, cerebral relationship with Hemingway. Her true literary love, however, was Goethe... more »

Cinderella meets sadomasochism. Fairy tales have always departed from conventional morality, but in fin-de-siècle France, their deviance went further... more »

Karl Polanyi: Is the mid-20th-century economic theorist an example of the impracticality of left-wing thought? Or a guide for our times?... more »

Was Bach a bully? He was a teenage thug, drawing a dagger in an altercation with a bassoonist. Then there are the hints of anti-Semitism... more »

Feeling down about the state of the world? Cheer up, says Steven Pinker. Look at trend lines, not headlines, and you'll see that most long-term trends are heading in the right direction... more »

Seventy percent of museum visitors go for “a social experience” — indeed, serenity is in short supply in crowded galleries. That's why miniature exhibits matter... more »

"The most important thing for any intellectual to have is a sense of proportion," and liberal academics have lost it, says Mark Lilla. "Our campuses are not Aleppo”... more »

New Books

Step aside, Charlotte. Out of the way, Emily. Time for Anne Brontë, the youngest sister, who left behind two novels and five letters, to get her due... more »

"The baton and jackboot." The transformation of German and Austrian orchestras into instruments of Nazi power actually began before Hitler... more »

For Victorians, their literature reflected the triumph of the British Empire. For African-Americans, Victorian literature was an unlikely source of inspiration... more »

Pankaj Mishra has taken on an enormous task: explaining the modern world. But in trying to write about everything, he ends up writing about nothing... more »

In what way, exactly, is pop music popular? Successful songs may be covered again and again, but even the biggest hits inevitably fade... more »

An anti-systematizer in an age of grand theories, Alexander Herzen was once as famous as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but died in relative obscurity... more »

What's the relationship between fact and fiction in Jane Austen's novels? Janeites take pride in discovering “truths," but Austen was fond of fabrication... more »

Is psychology the key to understanding the politics of resentment, antagonism, and self-contradiction? Pankaj Mishra enjoins us to revisit Rousseau, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche... more »

How did Wallace Stevens, who lived an excruciatingly mundane and superficial life, write some of the most inventive poetry of the 20th century?... more »

Freud and women, Freud the clinician, Freud with his cigars, Freud and cocaine: Despite the vast materials by and about him, or perhaps because of them, we still don't know who Freud really was... more »

Utilitarianism and other abstract theories promise elegant solutions to life’s challenges. But difficult decisions are part of what makes ethical thought ethical... more »

To read Bernard-Henri Levy is to read about Bernard-Henri Levy as told by Bernard-Henri Levy. Now he's gone in search of the "Jewish thread" of his life. Prepare for vain excess... more »

Two cultures of women’s writing rarely mix: the lofty abstractions of Virginia Woolf and the vulgar, popular approach of Cosmopolitan. Enter Elena Ferrante... more »

When Willem de Kooning heard of Jackson Pollock’s death, he celebrated: “I’m number one.” Why do some artistic relationships nourish artists, while others tear them apart?... more »

Barney Rosset began writing a memoir in 1987. Over the years, 20 people worked on it. Result: It’s unclear not only who wrote the book, but even who it’s about... more »

With three hearts pumping blue-green blood, eight tentacles, kaleidoscopic skin, and half a billion neurons, the octopus is a distinct experiment in the evolution of the mind... more »

His name is synonymous with seduction and charm. His life was a nonstop, transcontinental parade of fornication. Why was Casanova so horny?... more »

Thanks to the CIA, the Cold War's so-called “free market of ideas” was hardly free. But weaponizing ideas is a tricky business... more »

P. G. Wodehouse was no stranger to the joys of booze. He developed his own euphemisms -- “tanked to the uvula” -- and a taxonomy of the six varieties of hangover... more »

Jonathan Swift's underwear. He anticipated anti-consumerism, anti-makeup feminism, and animal rights. He was also ahead of his time on matters of personal hygiene... more »

Sometimes the point of a sentence is to jar, sting, or offend. In that case, nothing performs quite like profanity. So why use a euphemism?... more »

Alcohol has been ubiquitous in the history of war, and stimulants have fueled conflicts since World War II. Whatever the substance, war is rarely fought sober... more »

Günter Grass was a mischief maker, a master of hypocrisy as well as of metaphor. He knew that his last work wouldn’t be his finest, but he wrote it anyway... more »

Part artist, part scientist, Andrew Solomon has written on Libya, identity, and Chinese food. His work is so wide-ranging, he seems to come from an earlier century... more »

The Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer smiled and said the right things, but his friends were not fooled. “You are incapable of emotion,” they told him. “Your soul is arid”... more »

Sensory overload. After 500 years, Bosch’s demonic art continues to confound. How to understand an oeuvre that took one observer a year to absorb?... more »

His previous novel said too much. "The true work of art is the one that says the least," he now believed; silence invites readers to imagine depth. How Camus wrote The Stranger ... more »

To consider Pablo Neruda is to raise questions about politics and poison. But, as his lost poems show, he spoke to quiet, humanistic moments as well... more »

Patrick Leigh Fermor sought both the upper crust and peasant bread. He seduced duchesses but for much of his life had no home of his own... more »

Essays & Opinions

Thomas Friedman — oracular New York Times columnist, bard of the C-suite, irrepressible fount of thought leadership — has a new mantra: “Naïveté is the new realism”... more »

Renaissance artists looked to classical Greek and Roman works; we fetishize the aesthetics of the 1980s and '90s. The nostalgia gap seems to be shrinking.... more »

What is humanity’s greatest idea? It may be atomic theory — that all things are made of atoms. A tragedy, then, that the works of its originator, Democritus, were lost... more »

In praise of profanity. It arises from a meeting place of anger and gaiety. Are swear words, as a new book has it, just “good dirty fun”?... more »

The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyze them – is at the heart of the crisis of liberal democracy. Welcome to the post-statistical society... more »

Truth takes shape in debate. It demands doubt, patience, self-critical inquiry — not qualities of the current moment, when truth functions as a commodity... more »

From Emerson and Carlyle to Lamarck and Darwin, thinkers have debated agency. But where does debating the free will of squirrels, rocks, and robots get us?... more »

Most novelists don’t make a living at it. "The entire fiction-writing profession resembles a pyramid scheme swathed in a dewy mist of romantic yearning"... more »

What's to blame for the death of the Western artistic tradition and the beginning of something entirely new? The dangerous idea of creative genius... more »

Because the study of logic ended with Aristotle, Kant believed, the field had run its course. But what was logic for in the first place?... more »

What literary categories define the Obama age? Christian Lorentzen unpacks autofiction, the new meritocracy novel, the retro novel, and the trauma novel... more »

We know Frantz Fanon for his advocacy of violence, but behind it was a radical humanism. At a psychiatric hospital he introduced theater and a teahouse... more »

Written with seen-it-all skepticism and pseudo-philosophical detachment, the feuilleton was part journalism, part prose poem. The reaction to the new form? Utter contempt... more »

The arriviste Montaigne’s ascent as mayor of Bordeaux was based on bribes and payoffs. But are the local politics of the father of modern liberalism beside the point?... more »

Success in parenthood is uncertain, and apparent only after a lifetime of battle and worry. Is this why so many fathers of philosophy remained childless?... more »

Science's biggest dilemma isn't funding, replicability, or lack of public respect. It's language. Science has an English problem, and that means a lot of lost knowledge... more »

What would Plato tweet? Social media feels like liberation because it seems to unburden us of our shame. But a man without shame, Plato warned, is a slave to desire ... more »

John Brockman's Edge question for 2017 asks scientists and other thinkers: What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?... more »

If Kepler, Darwin, and Einstein had not come along, would their theories have been discovered by others? Were they indispensable? An alternative history of great ideas... more »

Delmore Schwartz made his debut in 1937. Ten years later, he was the most widely anthologized poet of his generation. Twenty years later, he died alone in the hallway of a sleazy New York hotel... more »

We think of Beethoven as socially inept: fiercely individualistic, careless about hygiene, occasionally rude and abrupt. Yet he longed for companionship... more »

The Argentine novelist Antonio Di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured by the military government in 1976. His coping mechanism: therapeutic forgetting... more »

The power of “yuck!” and “ew!”. Disgust, which comes from our evolutionary fear of germs, goes a surprisingly long way toward explaining our manners, morals, and religion... more »

Fielding vs. Richardson, McCarthy vs. Hellman, Nabokov vs. Wilson. Literary feuds, which once raged over serious intellectual disagreements, have been ruined by tweets and TV... more »

John Stuart Mill believed that nobody can be a good economist who is just an economist. Yet most study nothing but economics. "Economists are the idiot savants of our time"... more »