Articles of Note

The Searle-Derrida dispute. How a narrow question about language led to accusations of ignorance and the split between analytic and continental philosophy... more »

"Tell me what you like,” said John Ruskin, “and I’ll tell you what you are.” Such was the spell he cast, people of culture didn't know what to think until he told them... more »

Jane Jacobs was a writer of caustic, lucid, vigorous prose, and an activist with a slippery political orientation... more »

Can polyamorous relationships be made boring and respectable? Carrie Jenkins makes a philosophical case for multiple loves... more »

Think tanks are modern, but they can be traced to the humanist academies of the 17th century. They've always been caught between political interests and the common good... more »

Descent of a discipline. Once philosophers appeared on TV and guided heads of state. Now they write journal articles for one another... more »

Herbert Hoover and his wife translated a 16th-century text on the “nature of subterranean things.” Inside a strange saga of politics and philosophy... more »

Daniel Kahneman likened his relationship with Amos Tversky to a marriage. It was among the most successful marriage of minds in academic history. Here's how it broke up ... more »

Poets write honestly about everything. Everything except money -- and their lack of it. What explains the taboo?... more »

Camus and Sartre smoked together, womanized together, talked shop. Newspapers covered their every move. They were inseparable. Then Sartre read The Rebel... more »

Book collecting is many things: evidence of cultural refinement, humblebrag about one’s intellectual ambition, symptom of hoarding. But sexiness?... more »

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 »

New Books

Depression: Heidegger called it anxiety. Sylvia Plath likened it to being covered with a bell jar. Daphne Merkin experienced “a yawning inner lack." How do you write about a lack?... more »

Over four years, Hemingway evolved from an obscure experimental writer into a literary lion. His letters, pugilistic and patronizing, explain his transformation... more »

Self-confident rogue with a gold hoop in his ear? Disoriented schlub with a vacant stare? What did Shakespeare look like?... more »

Freud and Bacon. Matisse and Picasso. Degas and Manet. Pollock and de Kooning. Friendship between artists is marked by the longing to be close and the need to stand apart... more »

In the small universe of academics who theorize about the true nature of conservatism, the ranks are split by two historiographical enemies: Mark Lilla and Corey Robin ... more »

A corporeal poet, Catullus was privileged, outrageous, and sexually prolific. Appalled to learn that Romans watered down their wine, he wrote a poem about it... more »

A sense of modesty was central to Elizabeth Bishop's art. She published only about 100 poems during her life. "I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it” ... more »

Vinyl-record sales are up and creative types cling to their Moleskines. What if the benefits of digitizing everything turn out to be drawbacks?... more »

Jane Austen's juvenilia. She was bawdy at 14, indulging in lewd intimations and poor taste, and hinting at the sharp irony to come... more »

The penny post, the telegram, email -- all were predicted to be the death of letter writing. Elizabeth Bishop and Philip Larkin shared this anxiety, but their correspondence debunks it... more »

Life as the daughter of Kenneth Tynan was never normal. Turning 21 was marked by lines of coke and a screening of Deep Throat arranged by Sammy Davis Jr.... more »

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 »

Essays & Opinions

What was it like to live before and during the invention of modern sexuality? Consider Edward and Minnie Benson and their five children... more »

“When I play with my cat,” Montaigne wrote, “how do I know she is not playing with me?” We can learn a lot from cats — contentment, for instance... more »

H.L. Mencken, America's foremost "village atheist," was unmoved by Christianity, but he could not help being intrigued by it... more »

The aquatic Kafka. His journal entry for August 2, 1914 reads: “Germany has declared war on Russia — went swimming in the afternoon.” Was this merely self-absorption?... more »

From pulp writer to religious messiah. L. Ron Hubbard despised science fiction but wrote four million words of it in his lifetime. Why? Because it sold... more »

Henry Green was a writer for radio's golden age, a master of sound, dialogue, slang. When he started to go deaf, he made a joke of it — at first... more »

“The joys of motoring are more or less fictional,” wrote Zelda Fitzgerald. So why, despite Kerouac and Nabokov, do we expect road trips to inspire great writing?... more »

What Victorians looked like. Darwin had a beard and eczema, Tennyson a strange set of false teeth, George Eliot a right hand much larger than her left... more »

In defense of jargon. Words like "performativity," "problematize," and "normative" are alienating, but now is not the time to mock. It's time to double down on them... more »

"Narcissism is the new herpes," says Laura Kipnis. You didn't get it on purpose, but you got it. "Now everyone's pointing fingers and trying to pretend they don't have it, too"... more »

Francis Bacon imagined New Atlantis; Gulliver traveled to the Land of the Houyhnhnms. Why are literary utopias so far away? Because the distance defines them... more »

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 »