New Books

Ecclesiastical control of universities, the Galileo affair, the Inquisition — what happens when science and religion clash? Dialogue is impossible; conflict, inevitable... more »

The bookishness of Bolsheviks. Their acceptance of apocalyptic violence wasn’t suppressed by the literary fraternity of their upper echelon... more »

By itself, travel does produce epiphanies. But it also makes clear that the language of location is relative — everywhere is to the east of something and to the west of something else... more »

Africa did not live up to Michel Leiris’s expectations. The Nile seemed a “common canal”; the insects were awful. His conclusion? “Writing a travel book is an absurd undertaking”... more »

Christian Wiman has written about the correlation between the quality of a poem and a poet’s capacity for suffering. But does he understand joy?... more »

“To Be Liked by You Would Be a Calamity.” Marianne Moore’s poems could be funny, tart, and conversational. But they had to have intensity... more »

Desire for booze lubricated the course of history: agriculture, civilization, revolution. What is it about getting drunk that we love so much?... more »

Joseph Conrad fell out of favor long ago. There's the racism, of course, and his obsession with courage and honor. Yet he anticipated our world... more »

For all the claims of paranoia, dislocation, and fragility, Joan Didion offers what none of her critics suspect: solidity. Patricia Lockwood explains... more »

For a time, Edward Garnett was known as the best reader in London. In reality, he was something like a literary mafia boss, nurturing his "cubs" and dispensing with others... more »

The rise of the Instapoets. Often dismissed as “not real poetry” or for “greeting-card verse,” the works of Rupi Kaur and other social-media scribes deserve our attention... more »

Intellectual writing on music is not for everybody. When Mitchell Cohen attends an opera, he sees and hears layer upon layer: politically, socially, and historically... more »

David Bentley Hart is a scholar of old ideas, like those published in the New Testament. But he is a modern writer. The evidence: He is very rude... more »

“Darwin was wrong,” says A.N. Wilson, whose book is quite often wrong, too. Indeed, it's an object lesson in how not to write the history of anything... more »

Hoaxes succeed by promising us what we wish for. P.T. Barnum called it “humbug,” a form of fakery that doesn't deceive so much as fill its beholder with wonder... more »

Patrick Leigh Fermor began walking in 1933. Until his death, in 2011, he was all generosity and enthusiasm, arcane knowledge and irresistible wit... more »

Goethe was an uninhibited pagan who boasted of his "pretty wild life" and knowledge of girls. Yet biographers suggest he didn't have sex until he was nearly 40. What gives?... more »

Toril Moi believes literary theory has corrosive consequences. She wants to transform the way we think about language. But her version of literary studies has no literature... more »

Biographers describe Oscar Wilde after prison as a broken man, a spent force. Nonsense. Until his final illness, he “carried himself with a threadbare majesty”... more »

Evelyn Waugh, who dropped out of Oxford, spent much of his life keeping the academy at bay. Now, perhaps inevitably, he’s the subject of a mountain of scholarship... more »

"So far as we love seriousness, as well as life," Susan Sontag wrote, "we are moved by it, nourished by it.” But what does it mean to love seriousness?... more »

A showdown with Pelé, a reconciliation with Edmund Wilson. Nabokov’s dream diary moves from the mundane (lost dentures) to the cosmic... more »

People make music, dance, paint, tell stories, adorn objects and themselves. The creative impulse is universal. Why? E.O. Wilson on the invention of art... more »

Sex and communism. Max Eastman — poet, editor, nudist, suffragist, war resister, socialist, libertarian conservative — lived a life of ideological and personal displacement... more »

Historically, books were read out loud, to an audience — lighting was expensive, illiteracy common, and reading was deemed dangerous... more »

“Let me confess something.” “Let me summarize.” “Let me give a couple of examples.” Writers don't ask permission. It’s your book, do what you want... more »

Clifton Fadiman was desperate to break into the WASP intellectual establishment. His plan: signal refinement by drinking the best wine... more »

What can we learn from a tell-all on literary women of the 1970s? That gossip is gold, and that the literary world is naturally mean, sad, and predatory... more »

“I had no idea that ____ was so interesting!” Canoes, oranges, the Merchant Marine – how does John McPhee get us to care about such subjects?... more »

Utopian ideas are supposed to be unrealistic. So can there be such a thing as a “utopia for realists”? It’s a question of improvement: progress, not perfection... more »

Politics and the prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder "lamented the arrival of the grasshoppers on her land but accepted it as divine retribution for the New Deal"... more »

Modernity makes us forget history. Or so argues a new book. But who or what is “modernity,” and how does it manage such a feat?... more »

Edward Garnett, who launched the careers of Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, was a businessman, critic, and muse — the sort of character unique to literary London in the 1890s... more »

“I’ve taken to eating the occasional date,” writes Alan Bennett in his diary, an exhausting but entertaining catalog of the mundanities and absurdities of contemporary life... more »

Some 165,000 years ago, people on the South African coast started to eat molluscs and to use the shells as adornments. That’s when humans became human... more »

To join the Martin Amis Canon of Approved Writers, you must be a virtuoso at the sentence level. It also helps to be male, straight, and white... more »

“In my poetry a rhyme / Would seem to be almost insolent,” Brecht wrote in “Bad Time for Poetry,” just before the Nazi invasion of Poland. He nonetheless kept crafting quatrains... more »

Techno-optimists once prized testicular material from apes; today they plan to upload human minds. As always, one person’s dream is another’s nightmare... more »

Millennials are portrayed as brittle. But they're not fragile — they're overstretched. "Efficiency is our existential purpose, and we are a generation of finely honed tools”... more »

Essays & Opinions

“Factuality” in fiction. For Mary McCarthy, novels had to do one thing above all else: communicate the truth, unpopular as it may be... more »

Knausgaard writes about doing housework, making tea, buttering sandwiches, the ordinariness of his daily existence. What makes his writing so compelling?... more »

Romain Gary was a clown prince of French literary life. Little of what he said was true, though he was essentially honest. He personifies the distinction between fabulist and fraud... more »

Derided by the public, attacked by politicians, a scapegoat and strawman for left and right alike, the humanities will nonetheless endure — even if there is no case to defend them... more »

Sexual liberation in fiction. Edith Wharton’s writing on sex was informed by Whitman, Nietzsche, and Wilde, and an affair with a journalist... more »

What does biology teach us about human nature? That there is no such thing as human nature. We have to make it up as we go... more »

A good education provides tools for understanding the world. Indoctrination offers just one lens. On many college campuses, that lens is power and privilege... more »

Even friends of Mary McCarthy could muster only backhanded praise for her work. What put them off? Her perverse honesty, for one thing... more »

The art of conducting. While you can demonstrate stick technique, you cannot teach a budding young conductor how to cultivate a magnetic personality... more »

It does not take long to sense something false in Andrew Wyeth. His art was his artifice, and his compelling images carry the stamp of inauthenticity. James Panero explains... more »

“I am almost sickened by my basic honesty,” wrote Clarice Lispector, who broke with superficial truths to expose deeper ones. She had a complex relationship with veracity... more »

Writers are told to fan out across genres, to expose themselves to everything. Bad advice. Don't read widely. Most work is middling and should be ignored... more »

As we rush to impose moral clarity on human desire, remember: Sex is not a solvable problem. Let's minimize the number of its victims... more »

Jerry Fodor was a skeptic, including in his own ideas about how cognition works. He was treated as a crank — a beloved crank... more »

Pseudoscience, by definition, should not appear in scientific publications. But peer review is a porous gatekeeper, and “predatory publishers” are shameless... more »

Freud’s theories don’t mesh well with modern science. Yet he represents something important for neuroscientists: the possibility that laws govern mental life... more »

Campaigns against "cultural appropriation" are bad for politics and bad for art. To put identity over aesthetics is to render art meaningless... more »

Writing and thinking are intimate activities. Does that suggest brilliant men pay an intellectual price for mistreating women? It's comforting — and certainly false — to think so... more »

“A writer must refuse to let himself be turned into an institution,” wrote Sartre, turning down the Nobel. Thus began the Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal... more »

Equality is a modern idea. Its detractors have included Plato and Aristotle; indeed, for most Western thinkers, humanity was marked by chasms of distinction... more »

What is painting? With its increasing complexity, definitions are futile. At heart, though, painting is a means to find transcendence... more »

With Rousseau, it's never quite clear where clever contrarianism ends and brash delusion begins. His intellectual style has found new adherents on the left... more »

The speed of philosophy. Philippa Foot, a “dreadfully slow thinker,” wrote little. The challenge of the field, as she saw it, was to be slow enough... more »

Who was the audience for Mein Kampf? Scribblers and middlemen. Indeed, the disregard of academic readers was essential to Nazism from its inception... more »

To be French is to argue about what it means to be French. At the least, it means a fondness for adversarial politics and abstract notions... more »

Whiteness has replaced racism as the problem that bedevils the world. It's a profound and beguiling change in the intellectual terrain... more »

The Closing of the American Mind, today. As Allan Bloom had it, our society requires elites but demands that they justify their existence in democratic terms... more »

If the birth of states meant disease, famine, drudgery, and bondage for so many, why deplore their collapse? For James Scott, it’s complicated... more »

Whatever you think of Foucault and Rorty, they were genuine scholars with a distinctive vision of reality. Even so, they opened the way to fake ideas and fake emotions... more »

Among the New York Intellectuals, Elizabeth Hardwick was considered a gentile sophisticate. She was, in fact, a master of articulate contempt... more »

The Orwell cult. His lionization as a moral giant and a prophet is overdone. But one thing really grates: the idea that he's a monument to human decency... more »

Narrative-puncturing was a way of life for Joan Didion. Even the reputation of her great-great-great-grandfather, supposedly a snake-slaying pioneer, wasn’t safe... more »

About 95 million images are uploaded to Instagram every day. This behavior seems new. But it was prefigured by an earlier aesthetic movement: the picturesque... more »

What does it mean to be a jerk? It is to be ignorant of the value of others and the merit of their ideas. Maybe you know one. Maybe you are one... more »

We knowingly assert that civilization “collapsed” on Easter Island. The truth is more complicated. After all, history isn’t about conveying neat moral lessons... more »

From hippie fun to shell of its former self: Rolling Stone is a mirror of the baby-boom generation. The reflection isn't pretty... more »

What’s it like to be from “an abstract nowhere”? Midwesterners have a regional identity built on the idea of unqualified normality. But that isn’t as simple as it sounds... more »

How do we engage with the past? Archaeology, art, coins, legal documents, living witnesses. For Thomas Carlyle, however, literary works were unsurpassable... more »

The fortunes of free speech and the fate of universities are intertwined. Expedient attempts to appease students will further weaken the academy's intellectual prestige... more »

Economics, for all its pretensions, envies the hard sciences, while the humanities is just plain embarrassed. In reality, they need each other... more »

We tend to valorize paying attention, but should we? As Diderot had it, distraction allows ideas to strike against or reawaken one another... more »

Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is brilliant, readable, and short. It's also bad history, bad economics, and bad theology... more »

Readers of biography, beware. You lean too heavily on anecdotes, and you construct false visions of the past. When you study the dead, tread lightly... more »

The fake machismo, the boozing, the braggadocio -- Hemingway kept up the facade of the hairy-chested artist for as long as he was able. But who was he really?... more »

Stendhal compared Rossini’s reach to Napoleon’s, but life went bad for the composer. He lost his pension, his protégé died, his gonorrhea worsened... more »

"Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean," says Jonathan Franzen. "But it is one good way"... more »

The job of the critic is changing, says Lionel Shriver. It's not to assess a book’s storytelling, but to castigate writers guilty of any crimes of the imagination... more »

Does the pursuit of knowledge trump the pursuit of ethical behavior? That question fueled Foucault's turn from madness and sexuality to politics... more »

Kant thought entire civilizations incapable of philosophy. Derrida said China had no philosophy, only thought. Why did Western philosophy turn its back on the world?... more »

“Alexander Calder wanted to be clear and unfussy, to get straight to the point. At the same time, he liked to linger over life’s oddities and obscurities”... more »