New Books

What's with the persistent and tedious confusion of male authors who mistakenly regard their own quotidian horniness as windows into existential wisdom?... more »

Sex lives of the modernists. The racy relationship of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe — nude portraits, pet names for sex organs, etc. — was mimicked but never matched... more »

A Kierkegaardian biography of Kierkegaard — an appealing concept. And yet a “sphere of infinite depth” turns out to be a poor model for lucid writing... more »

Sluicing through the sludge of paperwork. Collectively, we spend billions of hours filling out forms. Is there any hope for reducing the tedium and monotony?... more »

Bret Easton Ellis, the thinking man’s shock jock, has made his first foray into nonfiction. The result: a rambling, self-aggrandizing mess... more »

Andrea Dworkin's frizzy hair, dumpy overalls, and uncompromising positions came to epitomize radical feminist hostility. Is her work less threatening today?... more »

Frederick Douglass, a kind of Old Testament prophet, was a pragmatist who never abandoned his radicalism. His quest for freedom gave rise to a heroic literary style... more »

Early modern alchemists feared that their research would trigger social collapse. And so they employed an obfuscatory jargon not rivaled in complexity until postmodernism... more »

Was Shakespeare a “punk poet,” a “proto-rockstar,” a “16th-century Russell Crowe,” and also a talentless middleman? Indeed so, says a new book... more »

The genre of books about growing old is nearly as old as old age itself. They fall into three categories: the scientific, the personal, and the political... more »

Pamela Hansford Johnson was romantically involved with Dylan Thomas and C.P. Snow. Naturally, she developed a talent for depicting conceited men... more »

Has the internet changed the way we think? At the least, it convinced fans of Brain Pickings to confuse a grab bag of mildly cool factoids for real insight... more »

Autism was not a new term, but Hans Asperger gave it new meaning. He identified a spectrum and urged "proper understanding, love, and guidance." But his benevolence went only so far... more »

Part of the allure of the British Empire was the promise of exotic thrills in distant lands. But the age of pith helmets was mostly just boring... more »

In Indonesia, where it’s apparently cool to quote Hitler, the newsstands offer magazines devoted to U-boats: evidence of German excellence. The weird afterlife of Nazism... more »

Mikhail Sholokhov drank to escape Stalinism, which displeased Stalin. Sholokhov’s reply: “From such a life, Comrade Stalin, anyone would turn to drink”... more »

Charles de Gaulle, intellectual. He hated Proust, enjoyed the work of Henri Bergson, and, even as president, read two or three books a week... more »

After Eve Babitz dropped a lit match on herself while driving, she gave up writing. Now she stays home and listens to conservative talk shows... more »

Intelligent design has been dismissed by scientists and courts as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” But its advocates persevere. They're just getting dumber... more »

The “Invisible College,” a secret brain trust of scientists and billionaires, is embracing a new religious mode: belief in UFOs... more »

The poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon died in 1838 in a castle in Africa. She was 36, an emblem of insipid girlishness. The truth was far darker... more »

What the American West really means. A “limitless frontier,” a “safety valve” for the nation? Greg Grandin unpacks our euphemisms... more »

Oft satirized and generally considered a “dry old stick,” Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, actually had a touch of charisma... more »

Alfred Stieglitz offered “new ways to see the world.” His vision attracted Georgia O’Keeffe and wove a tangle of personal and professional ambitions... more »

Between 1917 and 1923, anti-Semitism mutated into something new: the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. It was a toxic gloss on an ancient hatred. It made Adolf Hitler... more »

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 »

Essays & Opinions

In old age, Ingmar Bergman grew exasperated with filmmaking and turned to a mode of expression that he pursued with startling intimacy: novels... more »

How to appreciate bad books. Works that appear devoid of value — a 17th-century history of medicine, a trashy romance novel — often contain surprising depths... more »

The digital humanities are doomed, victimized by shoddy logic and bad math. Maybe. Or maybe they promise a sunny intellectual future for a suffering field... more... more »

"I’ve never thought about death in my entire life," says Vivian Gornick. "The people I know who talk about death are very banal and bore me to death"... more »

Toni Morrison’s writing refuses to comfort, to seduce, or to pander to our expectations. Instead she is unabashedly, unapologetically difficult... more »

Tchaikovsky, futurist? Though deeply conservative in life and in art, he embraced avant-garde concepts in order to counter them... more »

Philosophy's anti-Semitism problem. To what extent has the field's history, as well as its professional habits and pieties, been shaped by religious intolerance and other forms of bigotry?... more »

Literary parties are generally awkward disasters. This holds in fiction and in life. As John O’Hara put it, they are about “terrible people” getting “gloriously drunk”... more »

Hannah Arendt knew that being human in inhuman times is hard, occasionally impossible work. She is a thinker of the difficult, a thinker for now... more »

“I detonate around him.” It’s easy to mock bad sex writing — especially that of Lawrence, Mailer, or E.L. James. But does that get us any closer to good sex writing?... more »

J. Edgar Hoover sought to destroy Nelson Algren’s career — and was largely successful. Now Algren’s proletarian literature is back in fashion... more »

A history of the color black. From Goya’s terrifying “black paintings” to Tristram Shandy’s entirely black page, the color has a singular power... more »

Who has the gall to tell the entire human race how to feel? Philosophers, that's who. Their counsel: Calm down, be rational. Is anyone listening?... more »

The cheery, bland age of “books coverage.” Reviews have been replaced by listicles, gift ideas, and promotional Q&As. We deserve better... more »

Call it what you want – the fix, the bunco, the gyp, the sting – what exactly is it that we find so compelling about con artists?... more »

We celebrate foreignness in literature — but only the sort that we recognize in our own lives. A true acceptance of international writing requires more... more »

A scourge has taken hold of English departments: niceness. Where once political criticism thrived, fandom now reigns... more »

Were John Ruskin to see our society, he would find its two most notable features to be hatred of beauty and worship of machines. Alan Jacobs explains... more »

In defense of Instagram poetry. As Samuel Johnson said, “to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer”... more »

Murdering to Mozart. Once, classical music was the backbone of popular entertainment. Now it's portrayed as a handmaiden to sadism and psychopathic violence... more »

Vonnegut’s moral clarity. More than any other writer, he cut through cant and sophistry to expose self-deceptions for what they are... more »

Richard Rorty took a therapeutic approach to philosophy. Indeed, he wanted to transform it into therapy. We're still dealing with the political implications... more »

The idea of a "good death" is commonplace, as if death were something at which we succeed or fail, something to achieve. Better to think of a "fitting death"... more »

Art forces us to consider the experience of others — but it that a good thing? For Paul Bloom, empathy is selfish and shortsighted. For Knausgaard, it's banal... more »

It's been said that if nature could write, it would write like Tolstoy. It's his unsurpassed realism that makes reading War and Peace unlike reading any other book... more »

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 »