New Books

Isaac Newton’s interest in alchemy was long regarded as an embarrassment. Now it's seen as the very foundation of all his endeavors... more »

Editing Isaiah Berlin: “You will surely by now not be surprised by my total inaccuracy, vagueness and tremendous distortion of quotations"... more »

Misogyny is often treated as a question of psychology. But for Kate Manne, the problem is one not of motivation, but of politics... more »

The internet was shaped by utopian-minded intellectuals who valued respect and transparency. So how did we end up with the internet of today?... more »

When America read. In the 1940s, people of all backgrounds devoured plays, novels, poems. One hundred million paperbacks went to soldiers alone... more »

For his Stoner, John Williams has been called "the man who wrote the perfect novel.” So why are his other books so resoundingly terrible?... more »

The unobtainable lightness of being. For Plato, thinness was tied to lofty goals. But, as a cultural history of fat reveals, bigger was traditionally better... more »

History has been unkind to John Ruskin, he of the beard and the wedding-night disaster. In fact, he was a prophet for our times... more »

Gandhi: compassionate unifier, public intellectual, holder of classist and racist ideas. As he held, every “case can be seen from no less than seven points of view”... more »

Isaiah Berlin’s impostor syndrome. “I remain unshakeably convinced that I have all my life been overestimated,” he confessed. “All I write … is by nature dishevelled"... more »

Humans are by nature violent, yet also cooperative. How did we evolve this way? By killing off the most violent among us, argues a new book... more »

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 »

Essays & Opinions

The rise of the pedantic professor. When academic self-regard becomes an intellectual style, no nit is too small to pick... more »

The “female Byron.” With her amorous poetry and drug addiction, Letitia Elizabeth Landon was ill-suited for her increasingly Victorian times... more »

Philosophers tend to speak to one another. But so-called public philosophy aspires to liberate the field from the academy. Is that a good thing?... more »

Lionel Trilling is known foremost as a critic and professor. Turns out he didn't want to be either. He yearned to be a novelist... more »

Jordan Peterson’s collection of Soviet-era artworks, comprising more than 300 pieces, has taught him something: "Nothing is powerful enough to stand in the way of art"... more »

The film project Dau began simply enough, as a biopic about a physicist. It became something else entirely — either a work of genius or total madness... more »

Failure is at the heart of both learning and moral complexity. It was David Foster Wallace’s master theme, his tool for evoking irony and tragedy... more »

The continuing uglification of our world. Modernism, with its place-destroying structures, has transformed architecture. It’s time for a return to aesthetics... more »

It’s time for Diderot, long overshadowed by Voltaire and Rousseau, to receive his due: He was not only a founder of modernity; he was the first postmodernist... more »

Artists may pooh-pooh the idea of being cool, but a few of them had it down pat. Consider Warhol’s catatonic effortlessness or Bukowski’s timeless advice: “Don’t try.”... more »

What do almost all ancient myths and folktales have in common? They deal with danger and death and offer highly pragmatic lessons... more »

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 »