New Books

Is criticism influential? If so, is that influence beneficial or malign? The first answer is yes. The second answer is complicated... more »

“The two ways," Kierkegaard wrote. "One is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffered.” But few suffered as much as the woman who loved him... more »

Many of our best theories are not true in a strict sense, but rather are idealizations. Such concepts, useful in everyday life, are intellectually dangerous... more »

We used to know what people meant when they spoke about someone’s "reputation." Now it's supposedly an elusive concept... more »

The notion that history consists of a single grand narrative is almost universally regarded as a comforting myth. But not to Marcel Gauchet ... more »

The bloodiest genre: books by dictators. Mao's Little Red Book,, Gaddafi’s Green Book, Saddam Hussein’s Get Out, You Damned One! ... more »

Eugene Genovese found much to admire in the culture of the slaveholding Southern planter class. It's a view shared by few, if any, historians today... more »

Darwin had eczema, so he grew a beard; Dickens hid his receding chin. Then there was the matter of George Eliot’s hands... more »

As a nurse during the Civil War, Walt Whitman met thousands of wounded soldiers. He confronted the sheer physicality of death: The soul may move on, but the body remains... more »

Writers and their mothers. Is there any hope for a broken heart? Eva Larkin asked her son, Philip. He was the best-qualified person to answer, or the worst... more »

What happens when biography — which, after all, is embodied history — puts mouths, bellies, and beards back into the 19th century? A wonderful experiment... more »

A thousand pages of heavily redacted text, years of legal appeals, a censorious scolding of the FBI. James Baldwin’s FBI file has had a life of its own... more »

"Excellence," "profession," "symposium," "text,": Where did the language of academic life come from, and how do certain words become the property of one ideology?... more »

Agatha Christie's unsolvable mystery: In 1926 she vanished for 11 days. When she was discovered — at a British spa — she refused to discuss her disappearance... more »

On his last legs, Oscar Wilde wore expensive clothes, smoked gold-tipped cigarettes, and requested fresh toiletries and cologne. He was, he insisted, “dying above his means"... more »

The automobile, Renoir said, was an "idiotic thing"; trains were a "crazy idea." His crankiness, however, was tempered by self-awareness: "I am the worst old fogy"... more »

Biographers establish facts, collect anecdotes, link cause and effect so that a life can be made whole on the page. But why should a personality hang together?... more »

Paris's Left Bank during the war: Strict rationing, shocking poverty, and yet: “I lived in a kind of blessed island, in the middle of an ocean of mud and blood”... more »

The value of not understanding. For Grace Paley, “write what you know” was a guarantee of dullness. Art comes from exploring the unknown... more »

The Jewishness of Jewish comedy shows itself in only obscure ways, because the comedians didn't want to identify themselves as Jewish... more »

Do animals possess language, culture, morality, a soul? “It would be less interesting to know what animals are, if it were not a means to know what we are”... more »

Wanted on charges of homosexual activity, Oscar Wilde was given time to flee to France. Even his mother urged him to go. Yet he would not... more »

In the 1920s, John W. Dunne, an aeronautical engineer and fly fisherman, set the literary world on fire with an idea: Dreams can predict the future... more »

Isaac Newton’s views included Arianism, alchemy, Egyptian theology, and the Noachian faith. Why was such a seemingly modern thinker so obsessed with ancient ideas?... more »

The East German writer Christa Wolf grew up under state surveillance. Later, in her diaries, she continued a sort of spying on herself... more »

The persistence of fairy tales. From Angela Carter onward, authors have retold, revised, and remixed classic stories. Today the genre is delightfully chaotic... more »

Zadie Smith’s talent is writing dialogue — an intellectual, imaginary impersonation. In this way she contains multitudes. Her point is that we all do... more »

The historian Yuval Harari champions “Dataism”; thinks emotions are simply algorithms; and says people will become like gods in the future. He is wrong, says David Berlinski... more »

As a young writer, Philip Roth would begin each morning by shouting “Attack! Attack!” at himself in the mirror. Why would such a man cease writing?... more »

David Jones — engraver, soldier, painter, poet— overcame war, a nervous breakdown, and episodes of erotic frustration. He was the greatest modernist Britain ever produced... more »

King Arthur was actually a Roman centurion named Artorius — or so holds an intriguing if implausible theory. Dipping into Celtic history is dangerous for writers’ reputations... more »

The historian Reinhart Koselleck proposed that world history be divided into three epochs: pre-horse, horse, and post-horse. Now horses are “ghosts of modernity”... more »

Jack Kerouac: mindless hedonist and word-vomiting miscreant. Or the humblest, most devoted American religious writer of the 20th century?... more »

Tina Brown has fame, fortune, and little respect. Even her successes are seen less as the result of her editorial vision than of her willingness to spend money... more »

We may not always know why we kiss, but we do it all the time, which is kind of disturbing, and absurd when you think about it. Kristen Roupenian explains... more »

Owls are the most human of birds, fixtures of mythology and literature. They're remarkable, but can they really cure certain medical conditions?... more »

For Rob Rieman, there's nothing wrong with Europe that its own best traditions can’t cure. Specifically, a rekindled nobility of spirit -- whatever that means... more »

Martin Amis said he was done insulting people in print, but he merely turned his ire on older writers. Is there glory in dissecting the frailties of one’s elders?... more »

Self-help has become the optimization industry. The advice remains interesting rather than useful, and the gurus are still muscular middle-aged men with shaven heads... more »

Essays & Opinions

Communing with art won’t make you money, burn calories, or help you network. It may, writes Claire Messud, help you find joy in the superfluous and glory in each day... more »

Science is thought to be cold and clinical, art warm and encouraging of wonder. The drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal reveal that divide for what it is: nonsense... more »

"I am sick to death of hearing about Karl Marx. I am sick of his name, his -isms, his undoubted genius, and his 'philosophy.' Most of all, I am sick of his 'relevance'"... more »

Workers get more education; their productivity and income go up. A nation gets more education; its productivity and income go up. Hogwash, says Bryan Caplan... more »

A crisis stalks the modern world: the hunt for manliness. It began in the 19th century and continues to contaminate politics and culture... more »

Whatever happened to alienation? It was once considered central to modern life, the stuff of Sartre, Camus, and Salinger. Now it seems to have vanished... more »

Was Eve “seduced” by the serpent? The question is familiar for being so ancient. Anne Enright has an answer: No... more »

Academic satire has gone the way of the theory-brandishing rock stars it once lampooned. Academics aren't laughing anymore; they're despondent... more »

Idleness, Virginia Woolf thought, could be both strenuous and catatonic. The Bloomsbury Group was lazy, and proud of it — they were theorists (and practitioners) of leisure... more »

We hear a lot about "the future of work." The future of leisure? Not so much. Finding fulfillment in free time is a talent, and we're losing it... more »

P.G. Wodehouse was not merely unserious but positively anti-serious, and therein lay much of his considerable charm — and the cause of considerable trouble... more »

The idea of privilege — the accusation of privilege — has moved many people to say things not only nonsensical and ungenerous, but simply untrue... more »

The finest art, felt the Greeks, was a perfect illusion of reality. “Aphrodite of Knidos” blurred the boundary between marble and flesh... more »

We like to think of liberal democracy as deepening its roots with every passing year. But democracy is in decline, and young people especially are disenchanted... more »

The male glance is the opposite of the male gaze. Rather than linger lovingly on women, it looks, assumes, and moves on. It is ruining our ability to see good art... more »

Albert Camus and Maria Casarès traded nearly 1,000 letters. Reading them, we discover a man we thought we knew and a woman most of us never knew... more »

Haters of literature bring four charges: abuse of authority, lack of morality, perversion of truth, and diminished usefulness. Yet they mask a more depressing reality — shared indifference to literature... more »

Since Rousseau, at least, we've told ourselves a story about the shape and direction of human history. Big problem: It isn't true... more »

What attracted a gregarious psychiatrist to a reclusive professor? Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze bonded over a mutual distrust of identity... more »

Who is more to blame for the crisis of liberalism over the past four decades: Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler — or Lawrence Summers?... more »

October 18, 1973: Sotheby's auctioned works by Twombley, Johns, and Rauschenberg. It was called the day the art world collapsed. Well, no, but it was the beginning of the end... more »

The incarnations of Bruno Latour. A devoted Catholic disdainful of universal truths, critic of science turned climate-science promoter, playwright, military collaborator... more »

According to Will Self, novels are a jungle gym for the mind. So choose challenging texts: “No one ever got smart by reading … Dan Brown”... more »

A taxonomy of unfinished novels. Common causes include writer’s block and death. Then there are those works whose unfinishability is an aesthetic virtue... more »

The history of anti-literature: Whether Plato's denouncing literary fantasy or Oscar Wilde's labeling art useless, they are unintentional tributes... more »

A well-intentioned culture of positivity has pervaded contemporary book reviewing. The result? Advertisement-style frippery. Bring back the hatchet job... more »

The awfulness of pop culture. It promises to deliver pleasure — then fails. It suggests aesthetic freedom — but is only a mirage. Or so thought Adorno... more »

Marcuse for the new millennium. The philosopher’s insights into automation are key to understanding our work-obsessed age: Busyness makes us bad thinkers... more »

In Egypt, Flaubert grew ““ignobly plump,” took in striptease shows, and was dazzled by the country's colors. The color eau de Nil stems from such Egyptomania... more »

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Mailer, Carver, Lish: the literary sections of magazines like Esquire and GQ were, for decades, a cult of maleness. Are they still?... more »

“Every passion, ultimately, has its spectator," wrote Barthes. That is especially true, Leslie Jamison explains, at Croatia’s Museum of Broken Relationships... more »

Lunch at the White House, parties with celebrities, hangouts with plutocrats in Aspen. Will Ta-Nehisi Coates’s proximity to power distort his perspective?... more »

Steven Pinker may be the most optimistic man in America. But his optimism curdles into despair at the way science is treated on many campuses... more »

Louis-Ferdinand Céline became famous suddenly and infamous soon after. Can we distinguish “good” Céline, the novelist, from “bad” Céline, the anti-Semitic pamphleteer?... more »

Publishing is an upper-class industry that attracts upper-class writers. This social and cultural sliver has a profound impact on whose stories get told... more »

Why do art collectors collect? To establish political legitimacy, to claim aristocratic roots, for tax write-offs — the reasons are as varied as the collectors... more »

Zadie Smith has been ordained a public intellectual, adopted the attendant seriousness, and learned a lesson: Middle age is no fun... more »

Depravity makes for bad art, but not always. It's a mistake to apply norms of social respectability to artistic expression. That way leads to moralistic kitsch... more »

Ready-mades before Duchamp, Cy Twombly-esque scribblings 40 years before his heyday. The work of mentally ill artists reveals their bold originality... more »

The strangely contested legacy of Antonio Gramsci. His thought is championed in the pages of Marxism Today and by pundits on the far right — why?... more »

For years, women only whispered about sexual harassment, for fear of reprisal from men. Now they fear other women. Katie Roiphe on the chilling effect of the new feminist orthodoxy... more »

Renata Adler, Lorin Stein, and Ann Coulter were there. Steve Bannon was not. Wine, whiskey, water, but no one drank much. Michael Wolff's book party... more »

Innocence and guilt are legal standards. When we talk about Woody Allen, we deal with murkier issues. A.O. Scott on what most troubles him... more »

Fear that democracy in the West is in terminal decline is understandable. But the argument that democracies die when they become too democratic is not. Sheri Berman explains... more »

The human brain is a kind of machine, but don’t expect machine learning to understand language anytime soon. For example: Google Translate... more »

Paul Robeson was a deeply political figure; his endorsement of Stalin is the tragedy of his life. But it's a mistake to twist every action into a political statement... more »

Rongorongo is the only script native to the Pacific. It resembles no other writing system on earth. In fact, it was not written but carved. And no one has been able to decipher it... more »

Philosophers haven’t had much to say about middle age, but Schopenhauer is an exception. His view of the futility of desire -- getting what you want can make you unhappy -- illuminates the darkness of midlife... more »

Thomas Kuhn has been charged with ambiguity, relativism, and irrationality. But his vision of how science evolves still dominates. Why?... more »

In 1959, Robert Oppenheimer warned of "an alienation between the world of science and the world of public discourse.” Can poetic language bridge the divide?... more »