We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
Isaac Stern’s genial personality was well-suited for television. But the violinist was no mere crowd-pleaser... more »
Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality... more »
Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »
The life of an amanuensis: endless transcribing, discretion regarding personal life, writing lessons on the side... more »
There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. It was his literary strength — and his moral failing... more »
Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »
The medieval university duopoly. From 1334 to 1827, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge swore an oath not to teach elsewhere... more »
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. So held Paul Valéry, endless tinkerer, perfectionist, and pain to his publisher... more »
Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... more »
Before Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck was the name most likely to start an argument among jazz fans... more »
In the face of tyranny, most join the oppressors or remain silent. A few resist. This is the story of Berlin's intellectuals... more »
How should historians approach the here and now? As a rule, they are wary of “presentism.” But that’s changing... more »
George Scialabba's book began as a suicide note. “I was, fortunately, too exhausted and disorganized to plan a suicide, much less compose an elegant rebuke to an uncaring world”... more »
In the aftermath of World War I, four philosophers set about studying the same fundamental question: “What does language do to us?” They had four different answers... more »
Susan Sontag famously wrote about Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism. What does an antifascist aesthetic look like?... more »
"I’d been made a pariah," says Leon Wieseltier, "and I’ve read about pariahs all my life, so I guess I’m the wiser for it”... more »
How did a Harvard divinity scholar fall for a clumsy archaeological fraud? She had every reason to believe... more »
Arguments about Ezra Pound’s odious politics seem like ways to skirt the question of his literary merit. Is he any good?... more »
For Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, social theory was a way to make sense of distant cultures — and a lever against your own predicaments... more »
How to follow a perfect novel? After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison found events conspiring against his second act... more »
An allegation of systemic racism against a university is serious, says Randall Kennedy. Why is the evidence in some cases so flimsy?... more »
A eulogy for the secondhand bookshop. This most eccentric and likeable of institutions shows every sign of being annihilated... more »
“There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.”... more »
The mystery of the Vikings. We know of their heroism and cruelty, their riches and inequality. But their psychology remains unknowable... more »
How Longfellow mourned his wife. He had his own grave dug at the age of 30, he traveled, and he courted an 18-year-old... more »
We remember the Italian Renaissance for its artistic brilliance, but it came with a dark side: slavery, rape, and slaughter... more »
Shame has been under scrutiny in America for more than 200 years. No emotion is at once so ubiquitous and so disputed... more »
Bernard Bailyn, the scholar who overturned our understanding of the American Revolution, is dead at 97... more »
Described as a “monk and ragamuffin,” Francis Poulenc was a composer who melded the incompatible... more »
In his work, William Faulkner could not escape the Civil War’s aftermath or its meaning. Neither can we... more »
There’s a lot you don’t know when you see a painting online. Can that sense of mystery become part of the truth of the experience?... more »
In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did so many such instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »
In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-prone Joseph Banks helped earn it that reputation... more »
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 »
What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »
There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »
The socially distant art gallery: "A space of relaxation, leisure and education has become one of intense moral precarity"... more »
The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »
Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »
It’s time to end “the tyranny of words,” say some scientists, calling for brain-to-brain-interface technology. Not so fast... more »
Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »
Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »
Gayl Jones was a prodigy, hailed by Baldwin and Updike. Now she’s the best American novelist whose name you may not know... more »
Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »
Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »
Asked how she ended up with men as different as Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk, Françoise Gilot replied: “Lions mate with lions”... more »
To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »
Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »
Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »
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 »
Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »
Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »
The first generation of charismatic leaders. From the start, democracy internalized a new form of Caesarist temptation... more »
John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »
We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in complexity... more »
Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief pull it off?... more »
Isaac Stern’s genial personality was well-suited for television. But the violinist was no mere crowd-pleaser... more »
The life of an amanuensis: endless transcribing, discretion regarding personal life, writing lessons on the side... more »
The medieval university duopoly. From 1334 to 1827, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge swore an oath not to teach elsewhere... more »
Before Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Dave Brubeck was the name most likely to start an argument among jazz fans... more »
George Scialabba's book began as a suicide note. “I was, fortunately, too exhausted and disorganized to plan a suicide, much less compose an elegant rebuke to an uncaring world”... more »
"I’d been made a pariah," says Leon Wieseltier, "and I’ve read about pariahs all my life, so I guess I’m the wiser for it”... more »
For Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, social theory was a way to make sense of distant cultures — and a lever against your own predicaments... more »
A eulogy for the secondhand bookshop. This most eccentric and likeable of institutions shows every sign of being annihilated... more »
How Longfellow mourned his wife. He had his own grave dug at the age of 30, he traveled, and he courted an 18-year-old... more »
Bernard Bailyn, the scholar who overturned our understanding of the American Revolution, is dead at 97... more »
There’s a lot you don’t know when you see a painting online. Can that sense of mystery become part of the truth of the experience?... more »
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 »
The socially distant art gallery: "A space of relaxation, leisure and education has become one of intense moral precarity"... more »
It’s time to end “the tyranny of words,” say some scientists, calling for brain-to-brain-interface technology. Not so fast... more »
Gayl Jones was a prodigy, hailed by Baldwin and Updike. Now she’s the best American novelist whose name you may not know... more »
Asked how she ended up with men as different as Pablo Picasso and Jonas Salk, Françoise Gilot replied: “Lions mate with lions”... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
How do people feel when their world is falling apart? How do they salvage their lives? What do they cling to?... more »
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 »
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 »
The poet Fernando Pessoa published little, and usually under other names. Only after his death did the scope of his genius become clear... more »
Kafka and Nabokov gave great literary weight to the land-line telephone. Will mobile phones ever provide as much drama?... more »
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 »
A new magazine? In this economy? Inque isn’t like other magazines — for starters, it’ll have only one issue per year... more »
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 »
Infidelity, bullying, callousness, malice — Dickens’s demons were not secret. In his fiction, they appear in plain sight... more »
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 »
The neuroscience of nostalgia. How can we miss things we’ve never experienced firsthand? Science offers a clue... more »
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 »
Paperback writers. How Carr, Hobsbawm, Taylor, and Trevor-Roper became the first generation of British historians who wrote for a large, mainstream audience... more »
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 »
Against open letters. They are badly written. They are open to doubt. They aren't necessary. They look cowardly. They are contagious... more »
Scientists are trained to be precise and clinical. But emotions — especially the feeling of awe — are at the heart of what they do... more »
Silicon Valley “rationalists” have erupted at The New York Times in a debate over anonymity. Cue the conspiracy theories and irrational thinking... more »
Twenty years ago, Anne Applebaum was among history's winners as a liberal internationalist. Now she is a heretic among former friends... more »
The Shostakovich problem. What is it about the composer that makes some people withhold their approval?... more »
What was the origin of the novel? Perhaps it was Robinson Crusoe, perhaps Don Quixote. Or perhaps the question is nonsensical... more »
A bold broadside against a dogmatic intellectual culture? Or “fatuous, self-important drivel”? Artists, writers, and thinkers react to that Harper’s letter... more »
People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs... more »
Beware the reflexivity trap — the notion that awareness of a fault absolves one of that fault. It is rampant in millennial fiction... more »
Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality... more »
There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. It was his literary strength — and his moral failing... more »
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. So held Paul Valéry, endless tinkerer, perfectionist, and pain to his publisher... more »
In the face of tyranny, most join the oppressors or remain silent. A few resist. This is the story of Berlin's intellectuals... more »
In the aftermath of World War I, four philosophers set about studying the same fundamental question: “What does language do to us?” They had four different answers... more »
How did a Harvard divinity scholar fall for a clumsy archaeological fraud? She had every reason to believe... more »
How to follow a perfect novel? After Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison found events conspiring against his second act... more »
“There is no way around it, talking to the Google search bar like a human generates more relevant results.”... more »
We remember the Italian Renaissance for its artistic brilliance, but it came with a dark side: slavery, rape, and slaughter... more »
Described as a “monk and ragamuffin,” Francis Poulenc was a composer who melded the incompatible... more »
In 1774, Catherine the Great ordered a piano from England. How did so many such instruments of affluence end up in Siberia?... more »
What decided the outcome of World War II? First consider the strategic delusions that afflicted Mussolini and Hitler... more »
The lure of literary reviewing. For Frank Kermode, the trouble was that once you start, you can't stop... more »
Pity the author whose book was reviewed by Jenny Diski. Her first response was to be incredulous that the work even existed... more »
Literature permits us not only to work out what we believe, but also to reflect on the nature of belief itself... more »
To be close to Stalin was to risk death. What's it like to have been in his inner circle and survived?... more »
Vivian Gornick never tired of asking the same questions or revisiting the same books. There is power in loitering on well-trod ground... more »
Who needs a worldview? For Raymond Geuss, unified visions and conceptions of truth lead us astray. Instead, we should be pragmatic... more »
The first generation of charismatic leaders. From the start, democracy internalized a new form of Caesarist temptation... more »
To think like Shakespeare, enter the Elizabethan classroom, where curiosity, intellectual agility, and rhetorical felicity were paramount... more »
Meet the Mozarts. Their collective outings were grim and their correspondence scatological. And yet the family was gloriously alive... more »
The first modern philosopher. Kierkegaard's "massive oeuvre can be read as one long, compulsive, maddening attempt to understand who he was"... more »
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 »
Andy Warhol's artistic legacy is secure, in part because he recognized the durability of cynicism. Nihilism never goes out of fashion... more »
In the quixotic nature of writing — a craft that gently drives its practitioners mad — lies the reason it matters so much... more »
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 »
“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 »
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 »
Charles Péguy was neither a modernist nor an antimodernist. Rather, he was something quite distinctive, instructive, and relevant to our times: an amodernist... more »
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 »
In Martin Hägglund’s worldview, socialism is spiritual. But does that deepen our understanding of politics or distract from it?... more »
The last of the Enlightenment intellectuals. John Maynard Keynes pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design... more »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Culture, identity, psychology — Instagram takes the content of our private lives to digitize, feed through algorithms, and repackage for our consumption... more »
Philosophers like Dietrich von Hildebrand sought to distinguish moral values from aesthetic values. Does such a question still resonate?... more »
Humans are social animals, and yet we sometimes need to disappear. For inspiration on how best to do that, consider the vampire squid... more »
Does republishing George Eliot as Mary Ann Evans "reclaim" her lost female identity? No, it misses the point of writing pseudonymously... more »
Cancel culture is a new term, but the ideological coercions of the left are not. Paul Berman offers a history lesson... more »
Academia is a hotbed of proliferating identities and packaged narratives. But a person is not an identity... more »
How should historians approach the here and now? As a rule, they are wary of “presentism.” But that’s changing... more »
Susan Sontag famously wrote about Leni Riefenstahl and the aesthetics of fascism. What does an antifascist aesthetic look like?... more »
Arguments about Ezra Pound’s odious politics seem like ways to skirt the question of his literary merit. Is he any good?... more »
An allegation of systemic racism against a university is serious, says Randall Kennedy. Why is the evidence in some cases so flimsy?... more »
The mystery of the Vikings. We know of their heroism and cruelty, their riches and inequality. But their psychology remains unknowable... more »
Shame has been under scrutiny in America for more than 200 years. No emotion is at once so ubiquitous and so disputed... more »
In his work, William Faulkner could not escape the Civil War’s aftermath or its meaning. Neither can we... more »
In the 18th century, botany was a louche science. The foppish, braggadocio-prone Joseph Banks helped earn it that reputation... more »
There are many terrible books, but only one “worst novelist in the English language.” Meet Robert Burrows, the man who bore that moniker... more »
Mid-20th-century Brooklyn was full of striving, struggling immigrants. One thing set the Neugeboren family apart: The Complete Works of Charles Dickens... more »
Transfixed by his own melancholy, the literary “longing man” is a self-serious sap interested in intellectual romance. Just avoid him... more »
Gilles Deleuze’s letters reveal his ability to be clear and uncomplicated. So why is most of his writing so impenetrable?... more »
Daphne Merkin had been at work since the 1980s on a novel about erotic obsession and sexual submission. Then came the #MeToo movement... more »
Gone are the days of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Philosophers once wrote to be understood; now they write to earn academic credentials... more »
Orwell in Havana. How did 1984 come to be released in translation by a Cuban publishing house?... more »
John Giorno was sleeping with Andy Warhol, starring in his films, accompanying him to parties. Then Warhol moved on... more »
Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult to trace... more »
What exactly distinguishes charismatic democratic rulers from charismatic authoritarians? As a new book reveals, the line is vanishingly thin... more »
We are witnessing a shift in how we think about free speech. Stanley Fish is an intellectual godfather of this moment... more »
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 »
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 »
“The Flatterer,” “The Chatterer,” “The Coward.” Theophrastus’ character types, more than 2,000 years old, are readily recognizable today... more »
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 »
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 »
What’s the difference among a gadget, a thingamabob, a doohickey, and a gimmick? The last one promises more and perhaps delivers less... more »
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 »
Before “prestige” TV, the medium was considered the “idiot box.” With new shows like Floor Is Lava, the pendulum is swinging back again... more »
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 »
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 »
Irving Fisher and the quantification of everything. The economist died in 1947, but he anticipated the temper of our own times... more »
How did Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, achieve such success as socialism was in decline? He was a master of argument-driven synthesis... more »
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 »
YouTube, as Nicholson Baker explains, is an “indispensable, life-enhancing tool, and also a source of poisonous neo-medieval yammering”... more »
“Masque of the Red Death. Statue of Pericles. Tigers.” Patricia Lockwood shares her notes from living with coronavirus... more »
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 »
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 »
Matisse was a lover of women. Karen Wilkins explains the layered richness of his response to the female body... more »
The melancholy of reading Max Weber resonates today, maybe more than ever, even if he offers little illumination and less consolation... more »
“Britain’s a world/By itself,” says a typically villainous Shakespearean character. The Bard has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet... more »
The miseries of the male libido were obsessions of Bellow, Roth, and Updike. Now, if male novelists take up the subject at all, they force sex into a neat moral framework... more »
Max Weber’s troubles were at least in part sexual — castration was discussed as a cure. That changed when he met Else Jaffé in his later years... more »
Do theoretical asides — like those in The Magic Mountain — happen on the level of plot? The novel of ideas is full of such riddles... more »
"Time exists, as love exists, as a myth: real because contingent, real because constructed, a catch-all term for phenomena bigger"... more »
The Point, n+1, Jacobin — today’s little magazines all suffer from the same flaw: a congenital addiction to seriousness... more »
Henry Fielding, Adam Smith, and other 18th-century intellectuals found no food finer than the potato. It was Enlightenment superfood — the kale of its time... more »
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