Articles of Note
Bernard Bailyn, the scholar who overturned our understanding of the American Revolution, is dead at 97... more »
New Books
Described as a “monk and ragamuffin,” Francis Poulenc was a composer who melded the incompatible... more »
Essays & Opinions
In his work, William Faulkner could not escape the Civil War’s aftermath or its meaning. Neither can we... more »
Articles of Note
There’s a lot you don’t know when you see a painting online. Can that sense of unknowing become part of the truth of the experience?... more »
New Books
In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did these instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »
Essays & Opinions
In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-Prone Joseph Banks helped it earn that reputation... more »
Articles of Note
Britain boasts a history of theater criticism that goes back to Hazlitt and Shaw. That 200-year tradition is at risk of coming to an end... more »
New Books
What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »
Essays & Opinions
There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »
Articles of Note
The socially distant art gallery: "A space of relaxation, leisure and education has become one of intense moral precarity"... more »
New Books
The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »
Essays & Opinions
Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »
Articles of Note
It’s time to end “the tyranny of words,” say some scientists, calling for brain-to-brain-interface technology. Not so fast... more »
New Books
Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »
Essays & Opinions
Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »
Articles of Note
Gayl Jones was a prodigy, hailed by Baldwin and Updike. Now she’s the best American novelist whose name you may not know... more »
New Books
Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »
Essays & Opinions
Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »
Articles of Note
Asked how she ended up with men as different as Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk, Françoise Gilot replied: “Lions mate with lions”... more »
New Books
To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »
Articles of Note
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
Articles of Note
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
New Books
Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »
Essays & Opinions
Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »
Articles of Note
R.A. Fisher's eminence as a scientist is beyond doubt. So is the fact that he was a racist. How should the University of Cambridge remember him?... more »
New Books
Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »
Essays & Opinions
Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »
Articles of Note
Derek Walcott’s New Yorks. His were the off-Broadway scene of the '50s, the Shakespeare Festival in the ’70s, the West Village of the '90s... more »
New Books
The first generation of charismatic leaders. From the start, democracy internalized a new form of Caesarist temptation... more »
Essays & Opinions
John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »
Articles of Note
The poet Fernando Pessoa published little, and usually under other names. Only after his death did the scope of his genius become clear... more »
New Books
To think like Shakespeare, enter the Elizabethan classroom, where curiosity, intellectual agility, and rhetorical felicity were paramount... more »
Essays & Opinions
Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult to trace... more »
Articles of Note
Kafka and Nabokov gave great literary weight to the land-line telephone. Will mobile phones ever provide as much drama?... more »
New Books
Meet the Mozarts. Their collective outings were grim and their correspondence scatological. And yet the family was gloriously alive... more »
Essays & Opinions
What exactly distinguishes charismatic democratic rulers from charismatic authoritarians? As a new book reveals, the line is vanishingly thin... more »
Articles of Note
How to be an emperor. Often portrayed as hedonistic dilettantes or paper-pushing bureaucrats, the rulers of ancient Rome were in reality something else... more »
New Books
The first modern philosopher. Kierkegaard's "massive oeuvre can be read as one long, compulsive, maddening attempt to understand who he was"... more »
Essays & Opinions
We are witnessing a shift in how we think about free speech. Stanley Fish is an intellectual godfather of this moment... more »
Articles of Note
A new magazine? In this economy? Inque isn’t like other magazines — for starters, it’ll have only one issue per year... more »
New Books
What's college for? According to Zena Hitz, "much of what counts as education in the contemporary scene is the cultivation of correct opinions"... more »
Essays & Opinions
E.M. Forster’s funeral was an odd affair. Religion was banned, Beethoven piped in, the procession of cars was halted when a Rolls-Royce got stuck... more »
Articles of Note
The Letter, a post-mortem. Rarely has a open letter so riled intellectuals. Why are the cynics scoffing, and what did the authors think was gonna happen?... more »
New Books
Andy Warhol's artistic legacy is secure, in part because he recognized the durability of cynicism. Nihilism never goes out of fashion... more »
Essays & Opinions
Intellectual life is beset by a climate of censoriousness and self-censorship; Twitter gets the final say. Thomas Chatterton Williams explains the Harper’s letter... more »
Articles of Note
Infidelity, bullying, callousness, malice — Dickens’s demons were not secret. In his fiction, they appear in plain sight... more »
New Books
In the quixotic nature of writing — a craft that gently drives its practitioners mad — lies the reason it matters so much... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »
Articles of Note
Aristotle defended slavery, Kant and Hume were racists, Wittgenstein was sexist. Is it possible to set aside those positions? Is it wise? Depends on the philosopher... more »
New Books
The Churchills were famously terrible employers — Winston's wandering around naked didn’t help. Many a cook and kitchen maid left in tears; one reputedly went mad... more »
Essays & Opinions
Will Self has seen the future, and it's not pretty: increasing virtualization zooming us toward mass neuroticism in a ghastly synergy of fetishism and frigidity... more »
Articles of Note
The neuroscience of nostalgia. How can we miss things we’ve never experienced firsthand? Science offers a clue... more »
New Books
“No serious Black intellectual today thinks anti-Black racism is not a matter of life and death. The question is still the old one: What is to be done?”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Michael Walzer has leftist friends who regard consumerism as a capitalist vice and shopping as an activity to be avoided. But he is a shopping man... more »
Articles of Note
With her best-selling book and antiracism training sessions, Robin DiAngelo has illuminated the notion of white fragility. But what, exactly, is that changing?... more »
New Books
What to make of Wordsworth? For every line of his that intones the still, sad music of humanity, another drones the shrill, mad music of inanity... more »
Essays & Opinions
What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »
Articles of Note
Paperback writers. How Carr, Hobsbawm, Taylor, and Trevor-Roper became the first generation of British historians who wrote for a large, mainstream audience... more »
New Books
Charles Péguy was neither a modernist nor an antimodernist. Rather, he was something quite distinctive, instructive, and relevant to our times: an amodernist... more »
Essays & Opinions
The unpopularity of new smells. In 1657 a London barber was prosecuted for making “a liquor called ‘coffee’’ whose scent caused a “great nuisance” in the area... more »
Articles of Note
Almost from the time Wuthering Heights was published, a vocal minority has argued that Emily Brontë can't be the true author. Now that theory has been tested... more »
New Books
Believing falsehoods is one problem; not knowing the truth is another. To understand our moment, we must understand the anatomy of knowledge and ignorance... more »
Essays & Opinions
Before “prestige” TV, the medium was considered the “idiot box.” With new shows like Floor Is Lava, the pendulum is swinging back again... more »
Articles of Note
Against open letters. They are badly written. They are open to doubt. They aren't necessary. They look cowardly. They are contagious... more »
New Books
In Martin Hägglund’s worldview, socialism is spiritual. But does that deepen our understanding of politics or distract from it?... more »
Essays & Opinions
The plight of the plague specialist. As a pestilence once again rains down on humanity, what good is literary expertise in disease and disaster?... more »
Articles of Note
Scientists are trained to be precise and clinical. But emotions — especially the feeling of awe — are at the heart of what they do... more »
New Books
The last of the Enlightenment intellectuals. John Maynard Keynes pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design... more »
Essays & Opinions
What is this cancel culture? Is it even a real thing? It's complicated, says Ross Douthat, who offers a guide to the perplexed... more »
Articles of Note
Silicon Valley “rationalists” have erupted at The New York Times in a debate over anonymity. Cue the conspiracy theories and irrational thinking... more »
New Books
The business of being Beethoven. How to find a venue, how to get a score published, how much tickets should cost, how to attract rich sponsors, how to promote himself... more »
Essays & Opinions
Irving Fisher and the quantification of everything. The economist died in 1947, but he anticipated the temper of our own times... more »
Articles of Note
Twenty years ago, Anne Applebaum was among history's winners as a liberal internationalist. Now she is a heretic among former friends... more »
New Books
At his best, T.S. Eliot said a lot by saying relatively little. Unfortunately, he was not always — or even often — at his best... more »
Essays & Opinions
How did Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, achieve such success as socialism was in decline? He was a master of argument-driven synthesis... more »
Articles of Note
The Shostakovich problem. What is it about the composer that makes some people withhold their approval?... more »
New Books
As Martin Amis wrote, art “celebrates life,” increasing “the store of what might be lost.” Can art — at the same time — lament what will be lost in climate change?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Covid-19 has exposed Anglo-America as woefully lacking in crucial ways. In rebuilding, the world will turn to Germany, Japan, and South Korea... more »
Articles of Note
What was the origin of the novel? Perhaps it was Robinson Crusoe, perhaps Don Quixote. Or perhaps the question is nonsensical... more »
New Books
A pain “unlimited in both intensity and duration.” For George Scialabba, depression seemed as if it would never end, and life became an eternal, excruciating present... more »
Essays & Opinions
YouTube, as Nicholson Baker explains, is an “indispensable, life-enhancing tool, and also a source of poisonous neo-medieval yammering”... more »
Articles of Note
A bold broadside against a dogmatic intellectual culture? Or “fatuous, self-important drivel”? Artists, writers, and thinkers react to that Harper’s letter... more »
New Books
Culture, identity, psychology — Instagram takes the content of our private lives to digitize, feed through algorithms, and repackage for our consumption... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.” Patricia Lockwood shares her notes from living with coronavirus... more »
Articles of Note
Against “decency, morality, and good taste” the men of 1840s Brighton, England invariably swam naked. The problem was acute at low tide... more »
New Books
“She was a good old stick,” said Orwell, when his first wife died at the age of 39. But Eileen Blair’s story was more interesting than that... more »
Essays & Opinions
A hunger for auditory escape. Now 40 years old, the Walkman was the device that taught us social distancing. Its legacy lives on today... more »
New Books
To read Seamus Heaney is to experience a downward and backward pull. What drew him to bogs, slime, and ritualized violence?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Gregory Bateson was one of the most wide-ranging intellects of the counterculture. His ideas are attuned to the peculiar dysfunctions of our own time... more »