New Books

Frederick the Great thought little of historians who merely compiled facts. He preferred architects of history, like himself... more »

Ten years ago, Roberto Bolaño was the height of literary fashion. Then the “Bolaño Bubble” burst. His work continues to limp out into the market... more »

John Stuart Mill is routinely seen by liberals and conservatives as a secular saint. Turns out he was decidedly less secular than we thought... more »

Can a theory based on evidence from a half-dozen continents, a dozen disciplines, several dozen species, and two million years explain the origins of morality?... more »

All of American intellectual history in 200 pages? "Even if it is a gateway drug for heftier works of intellectual history, it’s still a pretty decent hit"... more »

Bitter cold, hunger, and trips in packed freight trains did not create a literary ambiance. Still, Józef Czapski delivered prison-camp lectures on Proust... more »

The relationship between Catherine the Great and Diderot shows how the Enlightenment was both opposed and fostered by the monarchies it undermined — one of history’s ironies... more »

Happiness, trust, and life expectancy are on the decline — or so we're told. Doom-mongering is in fashion. Why?... more »

"The peculiar burden of nonrecognition, of invisibility, that is the condition of being an Asian man in America." Wesley Yang on the bitterness of being ignored... more »

The understated Nietzsche. Far from a bombastic prophet, he was mild-mannered, “uncomplicated,” a perfect gentleman... more »

Middlemarch turns on the beating of a squirrel’s heart; Dickens turns dogs into social commentary — what was it about Victorians and animals?... more »

A new book attempts to defend Henry Miller. But despite his talents, an insurmountable hurdle remains: He did not think hard enough about women... more »

An anthropologist sets out to prove Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. Was architecture better under socialism, too?... more »

Mikhail Sholokhov is remembered as a Soviet hack, ungenerous crank, and mouthpiece for Stalin. He was all of that, and a genuine literary talent... more »

“Cheer up,” implore the New Optimists — human history is full of progress. But that progress often results from pessimism and discontent... more »

“This age has always displeased me.” Petrarch cultivated a crotchety reputation to keep visitors away and his focus on the distant past... more »

When did campy misandry become contemporary shorthand for communicating one’s feminist bona fides?... more »

Jill Abramson’s new book is not a serious reckoning with journalism. It’s a poor swan song for the era of pre-internet news reporting... more »

When Chopin died, at the age of 39, it was after a lifetime of dodging close calls. How did physical frailty shape his creative choices?... more »

Robert Conquest enjoyed poetry, pornography, and palling around with Amis and Larkin. This was good training for becoming a Sovietologist... more »

Dissidents are always a little crazy by definition. Solzhenitsyn, a bold and eccentric man of ideas, was no exception... more »

Descriptions of Reddit tend to be accurate but unable to capture what it is. Here's a start: The website's struggles have been society’s struggles... more »

We make pro and con lists, conduct moral algebra, study emotion and logic. Does any of it actually help us make a decision?... more »

A tale of two composers. Liszt had a gargantuan personality and regularly played to sold-out crowds; Chopin, who rarely played in public, had incapacitating stage fright... more »

Gary Indiana was for a few years art critic at The Village Voice. He couldn't have cared less about those columns. That others did was a source of irritation... more »

In a life marked by grief, Elaine Pagels writes about religion without pious uplift or false comfort. In their stead: only a partial triumph over despair... more »

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History may have been wrong, but at least it was ambitious. His new book merely summarizes arguments that already feel dated... more »

Michel Houellebecq wrote about terrorism pre-9/11 and provincial protest pre-gilets jaunes. It’s like he’s hired the zeitgeist as his publicity agent... more »

At 39, listless and depressed, Winston Churchill took to the canvas. Although some of his works evoke paint-by-numbers, he was generally a “successful amateur”... more »

The 1943 cast recording of Oklahoma! put the Broadway musical at the center of American popular culture. It didn't stay there for long... more »

His works are not Gothic; they are not parody or satire; they are funny but not jokey. It's weird how Edward Gorey's art is ubiquitous but hard to characterize... more »

In 1889, Debussy visited the world’s fair, which featured the Eiffel Tower. What impressed him more was an opera featuring “a furious little clarinet”... more »

“I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great,’” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1933. Also revealed in her private writing: cattiness and casual racism... more »

From the French Revolution to 19th-century Germany to the founding of The New Republic, liberalism has lived many lives. Will it continue to survive?... more »

Iris Murdoch believed that description is never neutral, that our relentless egos block understanding, and that the answer to egotism is love... more »

Boethius is the patron saint of bullshit detection. His self-appointed heir apparent, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has made it a way of life... more »

“What have I in common with the Jews?” Kafka asked in his diary, adding, “I have hardly anything in common with myself.” He had an equally ambigious relationship with Zionism... more »

The idea of Eve Babitz — sexual outlaw, polymath of pleasure, gifted annalist of the delights and despair of Los Angeles — is more compelling than the author herself... more »

What happens to dead writers at the hands of exegetes or executors? It's a question of estate management, archival avarice, popular renown, and inheritance law... more »

Essays & Opinions

Revolutions in science, technology, health, and education have reshaped our world. But can things keep getting better?... more »

Look carefully, attend to people and their situations, learn what is right. For Iris Murdoch, morality was grounded in vision and action, not just metaphysics... more »

"It’s on me. I’ve said that again and again. And that is really all I’m gonna say. OK?" Jill Abramson talks with one of the writers she's accused of plagiarizing... more »

Has the internet made us collectively lose our minds? Patricia Lockwood looks at our tweets and gifs and wonders what the absurd avalanche of details was for... more »

For most of history, translating the Bible has been a religious commitment. For Robert Alter, who did it by himself, it's a literary act... more »

In 1994, Sven Birkerts worried that distractedness would win out, that a diminution of reading would diminish our sense of self. Have his fears come to pass?... more »

Since when is reading James Baldwin out loud in class an academic crime? Randall Kennedy on the anti-intellectualism and illiberal conformity ascendant in parts of the academy... more »

Instagram-friendly, immersive art spaces promise to transport to your happy place. But beyond the confetti dome is a bleak, desperate reality... more »

Beware the surveillance capitalists. “Forget the cliché that ‘if it’s free, you are the product.’ You are not the product; you are the abandoned carcass"... more »

What is most remarkable about the opprobrium heaped on Jonathan Franzen is how little it has to do with his actual work... more »

Studying American history used to mean studying the American nation. Then, in the 1970s, national history fell out of favor. Is it too late to restore?... more »

The unlikely return of Eric Hobsbawm to political fashion in the 1980s obscured the sharp-edged qualities that made him so interesting in the first place... more »

An adjunct professor of art tries to make rent. The result: a Thoreauvian quest for radical simplicity — and the birth of America’s tiny-house movement... more »

Lionel Trilling belonged to the last generation of academics who believed that they had something of social importance to communicate... more »

"He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors," said Heidegger, who would know. How should we read such dangerous thinkers?... more »

The bad behavior of artists is now used to dismiss their work. Who pays for this new puritanism? The arts consumer, says Lionel Shriver... more »

A mathematician tasked with translating Wittgenstein, Frank Ramsey was a crucial link between pragmatism and analytic philosophy... more »

Gregg Easterbrook wants to make optimism “intellectually respectable again.” First step: Don't confuse optimism with complacency... more »

"For God’s sake, for Dartmouth’s sake, and for everyone’s sake, keep the damned women out." Fifty years of coeducation at American colleges... more »

The philosophy of Josiah Royce: When evaluating your life, don’t ask, “How happy am I?” Ask, “How loyal am I, and to what?”... more »

Modern conservatism was shaped by defectors from left to right: Chambers, Burnham, Kristol. Why the shortage in the other direction?... more »

The New Atheists are no longer new. Long past the movement’s height, its critique of liberalism lives on, with help from friends in the “intellectual dark web”... more »

Journalism is faster, edgier, needier, angrier. As for its future, the problems are well understood, but solutions hard to see... more »

“Electric buttons have become the masters of the world,” complained a French nobleman in 1903. Technophobia has spread, but getting rid of technology isn’t the answer... more »

How Martin Seligman stopped worrying and learned to love writing pop psychology. “‘I’m rich,’ I announced to my mother on the phone”... more »

Is Twitter ruining book publishing? Lionel Shriver hits out at “morality clauses,” which make publishing contracts vulnerable to the whims of online outrage... more »

How do we judge abstract art? Do narratives make us more empathetic? These aesthetic riddles are suddenly the domain of experimental psychology... more »

The re-fructifying of Saul Bellow. After he recovered from a coma incurred in the Caribbean, his 80s may constitute the best final act in American letters... more »

How wide is the circle of ideas not worthy of discussion? Which beliefs should be judged as “out of bounds” — and who gets to be the referee?... more »

Death of the author? Barthes’s 1967 declaration made sense at the time, but authorship has been hard to do away with... more »

The philosopher’s penchant for argument is grounded in a conception of the good life and the duties of good citizenship. It also inevitably makes him come off as an arsehole... more »

A viciously critical review, with finely honed mockery and acid-tipped one-liners, is born of righteous fury. But it can become pure joy... more »

Victor Klemperer’s diaries, which recorded the creeping Nazification of German society, are masterful; his earlier reports are less so... more »

An American philosopher in Paris must contend with the noisome beast known as "French theory." And marvel at how Derrida was able to tantalize the Anglophone world... more »

Essays and essayists. The form requires a combination of exactitude and evasion, and — on writers’ part — sensitivity, tenderness, and slyness... more »

What did Homer mean when he described the sea as "wine-dark": red, white, or rosé? Such debates keep the classical language alive — and Mary Norris enthralled... more »

How do you judge fiction? How do you say one story is better than another? Doing so is hard to distinguish from deep prejudice. Or you can use a softer word, like taste... more »

We're years into an unprecedented social experiment: the moneyballing of human existence. The early results are in, and they're not encouraging. We now think algorithmically, subjectively... more »

The search engine, initially an attempt to map human meaning, now defines human meaning. It controls, rather than simply catalogs or indexes, human thought... more »

At 29, Percy Bysshe Shelley still looked like a child. He continued sailing paper boats into adulthood. Was his poetry similarly immature?... more »

Writing in 1956, Erich Fromm predicted the "disintegration of love in Western culture.” His words were prescient. We are falling out of love with love... more »

2018 featured memorable essays on our historical moment, on the viciousness of online life, and, weirdly, on tigers. David Brooks gives out his Sidney Awards... more » ...... more »

The ugly truth about Alice Walker. For years she has expressed odious views about Judaism. For years she was given a pass. Perhaps that's changing... more »

In old age, everything droops, wrinkles, falls out, detumesces, or dries up. But, as Susan Gubar explains, literary life continues... more »

Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889. He’d published only a few poems, and there was no great clamor for more — before a beguiling 1918 edition was released... more »

Although he played up his eccentricities in public, Edward Gorey was a shy, private man who took perverse pride in the dullness of his own existence... more »

Einstein's "God Letter" is by reputation a definitive statement from a renowned genius. It isn't. It's an artful declaration of a conventional belief... more »

The fifth-century British writer Pelagius was trounced in his debate with Augustine, dismissed as a “huge, bloated Alpine dog, weighed down with Scottish oats.” Still, Pelagius had the last laugh... more »

Lionel Trilling is an anachronism, though one with much to say about the present moment. He is salient for all the ways he did not think and act like us... more »

What is an aphorism? A record of fleeting, sometimes contradictory, moments of certainty. They don’t cohere, which is part of the fun... more »