New Books

Thinking about thinking. We think, says Alan Jacobs, because we hope to become “more than we currently are.” Therein lies both the promise and peril of a life lived thoughtfully... more »

Elizabeth Bishop had astonishing control and poetic technique. But below the surface was a gushing emotional register. Was she the loneliest person who ever lived?... more »

The past should be studied only to expose its failings. Or so goes liberal logic. How disparaging the past become a mark of intellectual respectability... more »

Many of Alexander Calder's greatest works have their genesis in children’s toys. He was an overgrown man-child with a deep affinity for play
... more »

Hitler sought to construct an empire of both military and cultural dominance. So did Mussolini. Their method: attract artists who were not themselves fascists... more »

The midlife crisis, first described by psychologists in 1965, is a first-world problem, but it's a problem nonetheless. The first rule of crisis prevention: avoid self-absorption... more »

Giorgio Vasari was a second-rate artist and a first-rate gossip. Behold his catalog of piquant trivia about Renaissance Italy ... more »

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was not just a historian but an "action-intellectual," driven by his commitments and a belief that politics is more a war of will than of ideas... more »

E. O. Wilson suggests that evolution can “make sense” of art. But the relationship between biology and creativity is more complicated — and less determinative — than that... more »

Did F. Scott Fitzgerald fancy himself a social critic, a foe of market capitalism? Well, he wouldn't be the first such critic to relish capitalism's fruits... more »

How to interpret experiences that resist interpretation? What's the point of sowing terror if the terrorized can't understand you? Translating in concentration camps... more »

In the early 1930s, Nazi jurists debated how best to create a racist regime. They found inspiration in American law... more »

Sylvia Plath at Smith. “I’m so happy here I could cry!” she wrote to her mother. In her journals, she struck a different note: “God, who am I? ... I’m lost.”... more »

James C. Scott faults civilization for destroying the freedom and equality of our ancestors. But civilization is why we value such ideals in the first place... more »

“As a child,” wrote Roland Barthes, “I was bored often ... and it has continued my whole life.” His boredom was powerful: the intensity of a lack of intensity... more »

The novelist as journalist is a rich tradition but an uneven one. In the case of Martin Amis, the problem isn't so much his performance as his subjects’ worth... more »

Here is the story of a privileged young adult. He suffers neither intellectual disappointment nor spiritual disillusion nor emotional setbacks. He is Adam Gopnik... more »

Isaac Newton is remembered for his work on gravity, cosmology, mathematics, and the color spectrum. But his writings on Christianity are among the most daring works of the early modern period... more »

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essays have become major events. Is he a literary aberration, a Baldwin acolyte, or something else entirely?... more »

To see “how difference operates inside people’s heads,” said Stuart Hall, “you have to go to art, you have to go to culture — to where people imagine, where they fantasize, where they symbolize”... more »

Alain de Botton wants to teach you how love really works. So he wrote a novel full of insights too trite to be even superficial... more »

T. S. Eliot thought poets should be scholarly and offer justification for their work. Poets who followed this vision would embrace “the glamour of overwork”... more »

The “eerie, queery, sometimes weary” Edward Lear. A gay man in Victorian times, he lived a life full of sadness. Nonsense helped fill the void... more »

Montaigne was a politician, soldier, bureaucrat, and courtier before he became a philosopher. His work stands as a reminder of the permanent necessity of judgment... more »

Consider the couch. From the supine symposia of ancient Greece to Freud’s psychoanalytic sessions, horizontality has been associated with deep thinking -- why?... more »

Modernity brought speed, stress, and sensory bombardment. In Austria, this “nervous age” drove the ideas of psychiatrists and architects together... more »

What writers wear. Updike’s look, like his prose, was “normcore with flair.” Beckett cultivated a “nonchalantly seductive” look via turtleneck. And then there’s Knausgaard... more »

A poem is a machine, "one that for the reader produces discoveries, connections, glimmers of expression,” says Matthew Zapruder. How should that machine function?... more »

Books by Charles Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin number 7,500, with 160 more titles each year. Is there anything new to say on the subject? Yes... more »

A.E. Housman's work is suffused with the pain of life, and the beauty of that pain. Yet his emotional armor was heavy. How to explain the gulf between poet and poetry?... more »

"The essay is subject to laws that are not less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable,” says Brian Dillon, who attempts the thankless task of defining those laws... more »

Five and a half years. That's how long Otis Redding's career lasted. Given where he came from, it's astonishing that his career happened at all... more »

John McPhee is the maestro of 40,000-word nonfiction articles. He spent weeks staring at the sky thinking about how to begin. Can anyone still afford to write like that?... more »

The Enlightenment emerged from a 150-year “staccato burst” of European philosophy. Why did these thinkers — Hobbes, Descarte, Voltaire, Rousseau — write as they did? ... more »

Over three years, Mozart composed eight piano concertos, three symphonies, and The Marriage of Figaro. He also bought a pet starling. Coincidence?... more »

What happened to the public intellectual? She became a partisan. Hannah Arendt warned about translating philosophical insight into political commitment ... more »

Does what you eat reveal the content of your character? "While extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women, food makes them recognizable"... more »

If we were to take a lesson from the Iliad, it would be to resist the seductions of rage. But beware of authors touting lessons from ancient Greeks... more »

The Quran is an allusive text. Precisely that difficult and poetic style, says Sari Nusseibeh, is what makes it a "progenitor of reason"... more »

Essays & Opinions

“If the rise of humanism was a sunrise, then in this present time we are seeing an eclipse.” Marilynne Robinson on the value and fate of the humanities... more »

"The fate of artists and of art itself is in the hands of too few persons, who share kindred tastes and cultish dogma," says Jonathan Meades. It is a cult of "puritanical, po-faced, censorious nothingness"... more »

Poor George Orwell. The bare-knuckled revolutionary has been reduced to a cuddly, bipartisan grandpa. Orwell’s deradicalization has a long and shameless history... more »

After a decade of hype, the digital humanities has merely confirmed what should have been obvious all along: More information is not more knowledge... more »

Whether in a scholar’s attempt to live like a badger or in recent nature writing, one question stands out: What is looking back at us through other species’ eyes?... more »

In an age when truth is dismissed as fiction, the novel matters more because we all live by fictions. It’s how we get to the truth... more »

"The infatuation with portents — with the supposed relevance of voices from the past — is neither bread nor circus. It’s an obsession with history that can also be a form of amnesia"... more »

The nonstop crescendo of Allan Bloom's assault on the modern university made it easy for liberals to dismiss him — too easy. Todd Gitlin explains... more »

Coleridge and Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley. We’ve long celebrated male literary friendships while labeling female authors isolated eccentrics. Time to correct the record... more »

“What are these pines & these birds about?” wondered Thoreau. “I must know a little more.” So he embarked on his masterpiece — not Walden, but his journal... more »

Dinged as a sex-obsessed, money-hungry charlatan, Anthony Burgess earned a reputation that merits a different distinction: His work was a late triumph of modernism... more »

Henry James transformed the novel form into something new. Turn to chapter 27 of The Portrait of a Lady to see the birth of the psychological novel... more »

The Instagram poet Rupi Kaur outsells Homer 10 to 1. Her secret? Human experience, aestheticized and monetized, rendered inspirational and relatable... more »

Few women were associated with Partisan Review, and even fewer had identities as something more than literary wives. Consider Elizabeth Hardwick... more »

Leaves of Grass did not come to Walt Whitman gradually. It flowed from an epiphany. The evidence: a dozen pages he stuffed into a silly novel... more »

How wonderful to hear Beethoven’s Fifth at its 1808 premiere: 50 mediocre musicians playing on weak instruments in an unheated concert hall conducted by a deaf man after one rehearsal... more »

Do literary scholars align with the powerful against the powerless? Imagine what A People’s History of Literary Studies would look like... more »

Virginia Woolf declared the death of the personal essay in 1905. And the obituaries have kept rolling in. But the personal essay isn’t dead; it’s just no longer white... more »

Who was Elie Wiesel? He personified what it was to visit hell and come back. He did the work of grief for us, and we were grateful. But there were two Wiesels... more »

We experience art in collaboration with computers. Our cultural horizon is shaped by news feeds, inboxes, and search results. What will become of critical judgment?... more »

“It is as if Chekhov had written Lolita.” That’s Philip Roth describing Richard Stern’s novel Other Men’s Daughters. But the similarities don’t mean much... more »

"I thought, if I give Foucault LSD, I’m sure he will realize that he is premature in obliterating our humanity and the mind as we know it"... more »

Democracy can be an unsightly spectacle. Much of the demos is ignorant or has just enough knowledge to screw things up. Is "epistocracy" the answer?... more »

Why has the concept of truth become so problematic? It's a consequence of the opening of a distinction between truth-as-meaning and truth-as-fact... more »

Why is Gottlob Frege, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, largely unknown today? For starters, little was recorded of his personality -- except his virulent racism... more »

The latest neuro-nonsense, “empathetics” is the scientific (and corporate) attempt to map empathy biologically. How did this neo-phrenology come about?... more »

Evelyn Waugh's prose, known for its lethality, is seen by some as inconsistent with his Catholicism. But he couldn't have been a great satirist were he not a Catholic... more »

James Burnham, Trotskyist turned CIA operative, wasn't an unscrupulous shape-shifter. He was a committed activist who never tired of hawking himself... more »

Pankaj Mishra: “Longing for the ancien régime increasingly defines the Atlantic seaboard’s pundits as much as it does the fine people defending the honour of Robert E. Lee”... more »

The idea of "white people" has a history, but it’s a short one. It was invented on October 19, 1613, the brainchild of the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton... more »

HBO, TED, podcasts, documentaries: Those cultural totems of the educated elite are entirely consistent with the lazy nature of elite intellectual activity... more »

French was “the pinnacle of logic”; Flemish was the true first language. Behold the folly of early linguistics, a field full of crackpots... more »

Paris’s Bureau of Found Objects includes a wedding dress and a human skull. People who come to claim a lost possession often lose another in the process... more »

Every generation discovers its own Edgar Allan Poe. Now gig-economy writers have a kindred spirit: Poe, too, was a broke-ass freelancer... more »

For a time, the personal essay colonized the internet. Now the boom is over. Sadly, nobody told Joyce Maynard... more »

Poet-critics long ago traded the patronage of aristocrats for that of the government, foundation, or university administrator. That system is now partially in ruins... more »

He couldn’t sing and didn’t know anything about the music, yet James Baldwin called himself a blues singer. What does it mean for a writer to be a blues singer?... more »

Philip Levine was the poet of the left wing of the left wing of the past, the bard of workaday exhaustion and routine. Paul Berman has come to praise him... more »

"The term 'resilience' was coined in the 1970s," says Edgar Jones. Before that, "everyone was assumed to be tough, so there wasn’t really a word for it"... more »

Meet Henry George — economist, pamphleteer, journalist. Once famous, now dead and forgotten, he's the guru whom Silicon Valley doesn't know it needs... more »

"All that is solid melts into air," wrote Marx in the 19th century. He was premature. Postmodernity, which aspires to melt solids, arrived a century later. A pre-history of post-truth... more »

Vivian Maier was a street photographer with hoarding tendencies who produced startling and memorable images. Most else about her life is a cloud of unknowns... more »

Few have played as central a role in the long, slow destruction of literary study as Stephen Greenblatt. And few have profited from it as much, professionally and financially... more »

When Norman Mailer heard that Elizabeth Hardwick was reviewing him in Partisan Review, he pre-emptively bought an ad defending himself. She got the last word, of course... more »

Nobody played Schubert like Sviatoslav Richter. His secret: tempo. Slow, even glacial, or making no sense at all, but all mesmerizing... more »

How did religious freedom come to the West? Spinoza and Locke are often invoked, but in reality, persecution simply became too expensive... more »

The author of a novel is not always well placed to interpret it. Ask Orhan Pamuk, who has spent a decade reflecting on the pitfalls of teaching his own books... more »

Emotions are seen as something to be tamed by cool reason. This seductive view of intelligence reflects a bogus view of the brain... more »

The e-book of The Godfather amounts to a million bytes. A picture of Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone: 35,000 bytes. We know this thanks to Claude Shannon... more »

If the pleasures of reading are not too far removed from the pleasures of life, becoming a good reader is akin to learning to live well... more »