New Books

Is Lucretius a useful guide to the American political situation? Martha Nussbaum thinks so. She's not so much wrong as oblivious... more »

Alcibiades punched his future father-in-law, bit his wrestling opponent, and tried to seduce everyone. How an appalling man became so appealing... more »

The memoir as manual is a most irksome publishing craze. As if life were a tidy moral lesson, and every idiosyncratic experience worthy of extrapolation... more »

To unpack the debate over “Afro-pessimism” and the theories of Frantz Fanon and Fred Moten, consider the work of the poet Aimé Césaire... more »

Horror, wonder, awe. To observe jellyfish is to experience both the beauty and the danger of the natural world... more »

A campaign against humanity. Invalided from civil service for alcoholism, Flann O’Brien turned his ire on publishers, television producers, and James Joyce... more »

A farrago of politics, preaching, and fireworks. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is the literary equivalent of the Fourth of July... more »

“Actuality is continually outdoing our talents,” noted Philip Roth. This anxiety — that reality is more creative than fiction — is key to the work of Laurent Binet... more »

Stephen Greenblatt's tour of Elizabethan-era tyranny is reassuring: Shakespeare believed that tyrants ultimately fail. But it is also deeply unconvincing... more »

“Writing about football is nonsense,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard, in a book about football. Before punk rock, cigarettes, and women, he found joy in the beautiful game... more »

The writing and enjoyment of intellectual works are often predicated on exploitation. Should one feel guilt — or gratitude — for such privileges?... more »

What do Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag have in common? They'd all have delighted in eviscerating a new group biography of them... more »

“The only man who has ever stuck a knife into the queen.” Joseph Lister operated on royals, fought gangrene, and drew inspiration from the Great Stink of 1858... more »

Who is Paul Theroux? A man split between art and commerce, America and Britain. A solitary nomad most at home with expats and oddballs... more »

In 1989, researchers linked low self-esteem to social problems, prompting a wave of concern about self-worth. That study amounts to a fraud... more »

The timeless art of suckering tourists. Armed with “authentic” engravings of Roman monuments, a 17th-century Swiss Guardsman plied his trade... more »

“Evolution is cleverer than you are.” Or so goes the old saying in biology. But does it hold in our age of Crispr and computer-powered gene editing?... more »

The prevalence of such terms as "no offense," "with respect," and "kind regards" are among the signs that we are in the midst of an unfortunate epidemic of politeness... more »

Philosophy is dead. Excitement, creativity, and inventiveness have been replaced by dutiful recitations and historical re-enactments... more »

Elif Batuman thinks literature, literary theory, and their study at elite universities can be the stuff of a good novel. But is it a book people would want to read?... more »

When improv comedy is done poorly, which is often, it's excruciating. But even at its best, improv is almost always inferior to prepared material... more »

How did Germans see Nazism? Not as we see it. Habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness made terrible things possible... more »

Inspired by Pride and Prejudice, Annabella Milbanke decided to fix Lord Byron’s flaws. The two were wed, but he was no Darcy, and she no Elizabeth Bennet... more »

Lorrie Moore has thought a lot about what it takes to become a writer. “Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands”... more »

Pick your literary role models carefully, lest you end up chasing down disappointing lovers, or chanting The Waste Land in the desert heat... more »

Politics may be a necessary evil — but viewing everything solely through a political lens is an evil that we’re choosing. We should stop... more »

When Saul Bellow was bad. His nonfiction reads like a hodgepodge of facts combined with ideas dreamed up simply to have something to say... more »

If there’s one thing science-fiction authors love more than cosmic terror, it’s arguing about what constitutes “real” science fiction. That's a fight with high stakes... more »

In the West, the filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi is seen as an earnestly didactic opponent of authoritarianism. It’s time to move beyond such reductive political readings... more »

Did you know that Aristotle spoke with a lisp? That Socrates enjoyed dancing? The third-century gossip of Diogenes Laërtius is fascinating, if not always factual... more »

Picture Mary Shelley summoning Percy to a tryst; imagine her pregnant and seasick, eloping across the English Channel. Do these scenes reveal or obscure her personality?... more »

How not to write a biography: Choose a figure about whom we known almost nothing, make liberal use of the word “presumably,” invent a timeline where none is justified... more »

Benedict Arnold's treason seems not to matter much anymore. But it's fascinating: Spies and counterspies, suspense and close calls, a beautiful woman, Alexander Hamilton... more »

Social scientists study beauty as physical appearance. The natural sciences study it as pattern and structure, fractals and spheres. But a messier form of beauty is coming into view... more »

A rose is red because we experience it as red. But our experience is itself mysterious. Daniel Dennett ponders the manifest and the scientific image of the world... more »

We're hooked on mirages: meaningless stimuli from an algorithm. Jaron Lanier offers 10 arguments for quitting social media right now... more »

Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Mark Antony: Shakespeare's tyrants can tell us much about the puzzling psychology and spectacle of villainy... more »

The dominant image of Samuel Beckett is that of a man not merely apolitical but antipolitical, a disengaged pessimist offering disempowering despair. Don't believe it... more »

We live in an age that prizes efficiency. So how to explain the proliferation of pointless jobs? They make little economic sense. Their function must be political... more »

Essays & Opinions

Privilege: We hear that word a lot these days, usually as an indictment lobbed by the privileged themselves. Why? Matthew Crawford has a theory... more »

Our culture scoffs at Freud and Jung and puts its faith in science and statistics. One hole in this pervasive rationality: the magic of coincidences... more »

The Western canon emerged from a textual culture. Now we're in a digital age, when information is infinite. What authority do the Great Books still possess? ... more »

Have we fundamentally misunderstood our relationship with the earth? Bruno Latour, suspecting so, goes to meet the 98-year-old behind the “Gaia” hypothesis... more »

The lone male artist has often been taken as a genius; the lone female artist as a muse or “art monster.” But art does not have to be masculine or feminine... more »

Donald Hall’s poetry could be dismissed as patriarchal, capitalist, and nationalist. But it also teaches persistence, practicality, and farsightedness... more »

The good life, according to Aztec philosophy: The goal was not the pursuit of perfection but rather rootedness, moderation, prudence, and courage... more »

The conflict between the sciences and the humanities isn't resolvable as long as we disagree about what it means to be an educated person... more »

In 1838, Frédéric Chopin and George Sand went on vacation in Majorca. Thus began the most notoriously unsuccessful holiday in the history of classical music... more »

A boomlet of “death of liberalism” writing is underway. But look back: It first died in the 1870s and has been dying almost continuously since 1920... more »

Frida Kahlo’s ashtray, her eyebrow pencil, her prosthetic leg — they convey only emptiness, alienation, and loss. They are displayed in museums, but they are not art... more »

Nothing is more American than to proudly declare yourself outside the mainstream. And so we've become a herd of people busily declaring ourselves not part of the herd... more »

Neuroscientists chase incorrect theories; brain-imaging studies suffer from statistical mistakes; economics embraces faulty premises. Does bad science spread?... more »

Writing from Arles, France, van Gogh told his brother, “I’m in Japan here.” As French neoclassicism ran out of gas, his turn was to the East... more »

Fondling in the library, seduction in the bookstore — why do sex and literature go together? Edmund White on reading, writing, and romance... more »

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a young black painter who became the darling of rich, mostly white, collectors. We've had a hard time making the two go together easily. So did he... more »

Looking for a best-selling book for girls? Chances are it has a title like Bygone Badass Broads or Women Who Dared. But well-behaved women, too, make history... more »

Beethoven and #BlackLivesMatter. To be black and a classical musician is considered a contradiction, as if loving a Haydn sonata is somehow to betray black culture... more »

Has Julia Kristeva's reputation been damaged by revelations that she used to work for Bulgarian intelligence? In truth, the damage was done long ago... more »

Finding his riffs on dead babies unappreciated, Wayne Koestenbaum dropped out of a writing workshop. What does his perverse poetry stand for?... more »

Being Leonard Bernstein’s daughter. Hearing of her dad’s sexual exploits was one thing; his showing up at Harvard to party was something else entirely... more »

Attempts to justify the humanities are, too often, self-congratulatory fantasy: I read better books, so I’m a better person. Stanley Fish has read the best books. He's not a better person... more »

The gazillion books and articles, the conferences, symposia, and reading groups — all a waste of time? A scholar breaks up with James Joyce ... more »

Anthony Domestico had been a book critic for seven years when he realized that no editor had ever asked him to review a female author. He thinks of two possible explanations... more »

With Couples, John Updike brought “down-and-dirty sex" into the literary mainstream. Fifty years later, the novel seems less about sex than about loneliness... more »

The metaphysics of water. Lakes, river, the ocean — they spur us to reckon with the immense and the unknown, to confront life’s fluidity.... more »

Paul Gauguin abandoned Paris and his wife and children to paint in Tahiti. Does his artistic brilliance justify the moral cost?... more »

Maybe we really have lost the vocabulary for talking about death, depending instead on euphemism, lies, and ambiguity. But there was never a time when we did death well... more »

“There are no easy solutions. And yet a principled compromise is possible.” Yascha Mounk wants to save liberal democracy — but is mature reasonableness the path forward?... more »

Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner promoted a distinct ideology of the South. For black Southern intellectuals, things weren’t so straightforward... more »

"Every truth becomes false when you take it to its extreme," says David Brooks. Affluence, for example: "People take money and translate it into loneliness"... more »

Modern life has deprived us of mystical rites, epiphanies, and inward reflection. Could the key to regaining such missing illumination be psychedelics?... more »

Gullibility is alive and well among us. Consider the intellectual rot at the foundations of physics. Or the persistent popularity of anti-rationalism... more »

Cumberland Clark was a Shakespeare scholar, a serious writer and critic, and no fool. Yet he's also the author of reams of ludicrous doggerel. Is he the second-worst poet in English?... more »

Goldman Sachs has been depicted as the central villain of the Great Recession. Yet little has been said about its most egregious sin: the lobby art... more »

Jordan Peterson is many things, most notably an archetypal victim and beneficiary of our polarized times. One thing he is not: a dangerous far-right radical... more »

Cheating and drinking and child-raising and defying the prevailing fantasies of a woman’s place: Country music is the soundtrack of American domesticity... more »

“Past results are no guarantee of future performance, yet in book publishing they are pretty damn reliable.” Is a minor writer destined to a career of mediocrity?... more »

As a teenager, Reynaldo Hahn composed hymns to love and sang in Parisian salons. An affair with Proust, who called him “Mon petit Reynaldo,” followed... more »

Jordan Peterson has much to say about masculine despair. But he offers no antidote, instead trying to make men feel better while failing to address the problems: misogyny and racism... more »

Heinrich Heine was neither deep nor strikingly original, and he did little to advance the intellectual debates of his time. What made him a major figure was his indomitable spirit... more »

A work of art can be incisive, beautiful, discomfiting, or representative, but not necessary. So why do critics keep using that word?... more »

Leonardo and the riddle of authentication. His works have resurfaced with surprising frequency. Can an expert eye really detect when it's the real thing?... more »

“Performance art” once involved raucous Dadaists; now it’s a Lady Gaga performance or Kanye West tweet. Why have pop stars started dealing in high-concept abstractions?... more »

In higher education, the ubiquity of innovation-speak masks a dearth of actual innovation. The latest fad: design thinking. It's a boondoggle... more »

When erotic misadventures and poetry became tiresome for Byron, he turned to military command, with 600 Greek troops and an audacious plan. Fiasco followed... more »

The Enlightenment started with philosophical insights spread by a new technology. We face a dominant technology — artificial intelligence — in search of a philosophy... more »

Dickens heard his characters speak. Woolf heard birds singing in Greek. The treatment for hearing voices has long been: ignore them. What if we listened instead?... more »

Is an intellectual’s responsibility to think, or to enact a political argument? The question once distinguished little magazines from think tanks, but that has changed... more »

Travel writing is a genre prone to indulgence but also capable of carrying considerable weight. Patrick Leigh Fermor was a master at managing that tension... more »