To stand in front of a Brutalist building is to be humbled, "confronted by a chunk of eternity. That can be comforting — or disconcerting" ... more »
Simone Weil produced a fragmentary oeuvre, almost none of which appeared in her lifetime. Her posthumous mythology makes her hard to pin down ... more »
George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward? ... more »
A film maudit, French for a cursed film, is one that is widely panned but staunchly defended by a devoted few ... more »
Do terrible photographs make us feel real empathy, or make us more apathetic toward misery? ... more »
Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists ... more »
In 2002, Maya Angelou set out to master the two-sentence epigram. She had a deal with Hallmark ... more »
The New Journalism style long ago gave way to the cult of the personal essay. Rachel Kushner is bringing it back ... more »
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It's been decades since anyone has felt guilt about a guilty pleasure ... more »
“About 40 years old, 175cm tall, slender, with an elongated face, black thinning hair, light-rimmed glasses": Philip Roth's Czech KGB file... more »
Consider the strongman. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s new book on dictators elides the political and cultural conditions that allow for their rise ... more »
You can write poems about sex or excrement, but not business or money. Those are the only two obscene topics left. Dana Gioia explains... more »
Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books, has died. He published works no one else would publish, from the edges of American life ... more »
Stephen Hawking’s elusive character, revealed: self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think ... more »
Zora Neale Hurston was the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest internal critic. But she found her voice in the swampy muck of Florida ... more »
We used to fear unpredictable robots we could not restrain. Now we worry about using machines to restrain unpredictable humans... more »
In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... more »
In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »
Midnight's Children at 40: "For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight" ... more »
Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »
Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »
"War to war, wife to wife, novel to novel." Hemingway's most constant mistress, says James Parker, "may have been concussion" ... more »
For Hebrew to become a modern language, it first had to become a flexible instrument, a religious language put in the service of a secular literature ... more »
Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not ... more »
Of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, says Katha Pollitt, decades-old children’s books are low on the list ... more »
The first musical note on earth was sounded 165 million years ago. It was an E natural. What did our ancestors use music for? ... more »
American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign ... more »
"The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions” ... more »
Though sometimes celebrated by liberals, cognitive meritocracy has eroded social solidarity, increased inequality, and precipitated right-wing populism ... more »
Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too ... more »
Was Foucault abusing children in Tunisia in the late 1960s? A sordid story makes the rounds in Paris ... more »
Covid-19 is “the great reset,” argues a new book — humane, techno-elite Davos Men will save the day. Cue the nightmare scenarios ... more »
Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough? ... more »
As early as 1957, Philip Larkin noted, poetry was losing its audience. The situation is worse now. Why don’t readers care?... more »
Joyce, Picasso — when we think of Modernism, we often think of men. But as a new book shows, there may well have been no Modernism without lesbians... more »
David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »
Paul Theroux at 79. "I was once a hotshot, I was once the punk. And anyone who has once been a punk, eventually you're older, and you see the turning of the years as it is" ... more »
Derrida's insights are fundamental to many fields: literature, law, film theory, theology. But he was a specialist in a subfield of his own design ... more »
Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness ... more »
Can a white person translate a Black poet? A fracas has broken out over identity and the translation of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” ... more »
The semicolon is odd but impressive, the interrobang a good idea that never got traction. The hashtag was dead until some guy at Twitter revived it ... more »
“Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing? ... more »
The mess at Medium. As the company’s latest “pivot” suggests, billionaires’ whims and sustainable journalism aren’t always compatible ... more »
The power of Elena Ferrante’s fiction is in chaos and terror — a magma of dread that infuses her novels with energy... more »
“Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away” ... more »
Falsification promises to help us separate science from pseudoscience. Only one problem: it doesn't work very well ... more »
What Van Gogh read. "For him, it was not important to physically possess books, but to make them his own." ... more »
There is something mildly shameful about literary pilgrimages. They are a kind of emotional and intellectual junk food. And yet... ... more »
The cadaver known as Harriet Cole — a representation of the nervous system — is a product of anatomical bravado. But where did Harriet come from?... more »
Frantz Fanon has become a near-mythical figure in antiracist discourse. The cost of that achievement: a watering down of his political commitments... more »
Evelyn Waugh on being interviewed by Jacques Barzun: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He... gave me a viva in history” ... more »
Forget traditional majors — the humanities should organize itself around modules like Social Justice, Migration Studies, and The Problem of God ... more »
As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” Indeed, the history of the idea of freedom is one of paradox and contradiction ... more »
Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive... more »
The handshake, past and future. The gesture is so culturally fundamental that something important will be lost if it disappears ... more »
If life exists on any of the Milky Way’s other 100 billion planets, Darwinian selection would be at work there, too ... more »
The birth of the audiobook dates to the 19th century, when Tennyson and Browning recorded poems for phonographs ... more »
Edward Said’s Orientalism started a politics of blame that rapidly spread in the academy. He spent decades trying to stanch it ... more »
Helen Frankenthaler and the mainstreaming of the avant-garde. In 1950s New York, painting's culture looked like pop culture ... more »
The new literary moralism. Is this frenzy for censure and the expansion of the definition of harm how we’ll correct the inequities of our time? ... more »
Alfred Hitchcock was afraid of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict. Fear was his creative fuel ... more »
While autofiction asserts a kind of apolitical license, the bar for ethical fiction keeps getting higher and higher ... more »
Polymaths are one thing, freaks of intellect quite another. Even reading about these monsters of learning can leave one exhausted ... more »
To stand in front of a Brutalist building is to be humbled, "confronted by a chunk of eternity. That can be comforting — or disconcerting" ... more »
A film maudit, French for a cursed film, is one that is widely panned but staunchly defended by a devoted few ... more »
In 2002, Maya Angelou set out to master the two-sentence epigram. She had a deal with Hallmark ... more »
“About 40 years old, 175cm tall, slender, with an elongated face, black thinning hair, light-rimmed glasses": Philip Roth's Czech KGB file... more »
Giancarlo DiTrapano, founder of Tyrant Books, has died. He published works no one else would publish, from the edges of American life ... more »
We used to fear unpredictable robots we could not restrain. Now we worry about using machines to restrain unpredictable humans... more »
Midnight's Children at 40: "For a writer in his mid-70s, the continued health of a book published in his mid-30s is, quite simply, a delight" ... more »
"War to war, wife to wife, novel to novel." Hemingway's most constant mistress, says James Parker, "may have been concussion" ... more »
Of all the racist, sexist, classist things children are exposed to, says Katha Pollitt, decades-old children’s books are low on the list ... more »
"The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions” ... more »
Was Foucault abusing children in Tunisia in the late 1960s? A sordid story makes the rounds in Paris ... more »
As early as 1957, Philip Larkin noted, poetry was losing its audience. The situation is worse now. Why don’t readers care?... more »
Paul Theroux at 79. "I was once a hotshot, I was once the punk. And anyone who has once been a punk, eventually you're older, and you see the turning of the years as it is" ... more »
Can a white person translate a Black poet? A fracas has broken out over identity and the translation of Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb” ... more »
The mess at Medium. As the company’s latest “pivot” suggests, billionaires’ whims and sustainable journalism aren’t always compatible ... more »
Falsification promises to help us separate science from pseudoscience. Only one problem: it doesn't work very well ... more »
The cadaver known as Harriet Cole — a representation of the nervous system — is a product of anatomical bravado. But where did Harriet come from?... more »
Forget traditional majors — the humanities should organize itself around modules like Social Justice, Migration Studies, and The Problem of God ... more »
The handshake, past and future. The gesture is so culturally fundamental that something important will be lost if it disappears ... more »
Edward Said’s Orientalism started a politics of blame that rapidly spread in the academy. He spent decades trying to stanch it ... more »
Alfred Hitchcock was afraid of policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds, heights, water, and conflict. Fear was his creative fuel ... more »
Jane Cornwell was far more than a typist; she was John le Carré's first editor and indispensable collaborator ... more »
Jessica Krug, Rachel Dolezal — lefty academics’ identity hoaxing may involve trading mundane traumas for grander narratives of oppression ... more »
Music unheard and books unread are an affront to our sense of hope and the individualistic tenor of our age ... more »
We remember Charlotte Perkins Gilman as a pioneering feminist, a social reformer. But look closer and you’ll see a Victorian white nationalist ... more »
In 1883, fragments of the "original" Book of Deuteronomy were declared a fraud. But what if this notorious fake is real? ... more »
George Saunders is the prince of the M.F.A. age. Key to his literary stardom and his writerly talents is his relatability ... more »
Daryl Michael Scott, critic of the 1619 project and of Ava DuVernay’s film 13th: “Bad history and worse social science have replaced truth”... more »
The paradox of Orientalism: While Edward Said's book castigated imperialism, it also weakened the anti-imperialist intellectual project... more »
The idea that people on their deathbeds gain a clearer view of what matters has a distinguished philosophical pedigree. That doesn't mean it's true ... more »
Carl Hart has used heroin regularly for years. “I am an unapologetic drug user,” says the Columbia University psychology professor ... more »
Paul Valéry hobnobbed with princesses, ministers, and scientists. By the 1930s, he was France’s poetic stuffed shirt extraordinaire ... more »
Originalism’s original sin. The judicial philosophy is best understood not in a legal context, but as an extension of biblical literalism ... more »
Two of the largest U.S. publishers want to merge. How many imprints will fold? How many jobs will be lost? ... more »
Jordan Petersen is rich, famous, and unhappy. His anxiety landed him in a Russian hospital. Now he's back from breakdown ... more »
Sherry Turkle, MIT’s “one-woman emergency empathy squad,” is a critic of technology amid its evangelists...more... more »
The tragic legacy of “comfort women” has divided South Korea and Japan for decades. Enter the dubious claims of a Harvard law professor ... more »
Parul Sehgal read 125 years of writing in The New York Times Book Review. She found mostly a dearth of style and a failure of criticism... more »
The book blurb requires too much work and induces too much guilt. As Viet Thanh Nguyen says, “Kill it. Bury it. Dance on its grave.”... more »
What happens when race, class, and power collide at an elite liberal-arts college? No one emerges unscathed ... more »
Simone Weil produced a fragmentary oeuvre, almost none of which appeared in her lifetime. Her posthumous mythology makes her hard to pin down ... more »
Do terrible photographs make us feel real empathy, or make us more apathetic toward misery? ... more »
The New Journalism style long ago gave way to the cult of the personal essay. Rachel Kushner is bringing it back ... more »
Consider the strongman. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s new book on dictators elides the political and cultural conditions that allow for their rise ... more »
Stephen Hawking’s elusive character, revealed: self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think ... more »
In Peter the Great's Russia, the bureaucracy was all. And no one chronicled its pompous, careerist, status-obsessed types better than Nikolai Gogol... more »
Intimacy was not Helen Frankenthaler's strong suit. She could be insensitive, manipulative, obtuse, competitive, and mercilessly self-absorbed... more »
For Hebrew to become a modern language, it first had to become a flexible instrument, a religious language put in the service of a secular literature ... more »
The first musical note on earth was sounded 165 million years ago. It was an E natural. What did our ancestors use music for? ... more »
Though sometimes celebrated by liberals, cognitive meritocracy has eroded social solidarity, increased inequality, and precipitated right-wing populism ... more »
Covid-19 is “the great reset,” argues a new book — humane, techno-elite Davos Men will save the day. Cue the nightmare scenarios ... more »
Joyce, Picasso — when we think of Modernism, we often think of men. But as a new book shows, there may well have been no Modernism without lesbians... more »
Derrida's insights are fundamental to many fields: literature, law, film theory, theology. But he was a specialist in a subfield of his own design ... more »
The semicolon is odd but impressive, the interrobang a good idea that never got traction. The hashtag was dead until some guy at Twitter revived it ... more »
The power of Elena Ferrante’s fiction is in chaos and terror — a magma of dread that infuses her novels with energy... more »
What Van Gogh read. "For him, it was not important to physically possess books, but to make them his own." ... more »
Frantz Fanon has become a near-mythical figure in antiracist discourse. The cost of that achievement: a watering down of his political commitments... more »
As Isaiah Berlin put it, “Total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs.” Indeed, the history of the idea of freedom is one of paradox and contradiction ... more »
If life exists on any of the Milky Way’s other 100 billion planets, Darwinian selection would be at work there, too ... more »
Helen Frankenthaler and the mainstreaming of the avant-garde. In 1950s New York, painting's culture looked like pop culture ... more »
While autofiction asserts a kind of apolitical license, the bar for ethical fiction keeps getting higher and higher ... more »
Defending Derrida against his critics is easier than defending him against his followers ... more »
One of Francis Bacon’s lovers burned down his studio; another threw him out of a second story window. For Bacon, pain was indicative of true emotion ... more »
Novels are increasingly autobiographical, which puts reading at the risk of becoming a tiresome test of authenticity ... more »
Will the pandemic hasten the use of gene-editing technology? Engineering our bodies to resist disease might not sound so radical right now ... more »
John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald were two men who struggled to make it as writers. Does the connection go deeper? ... more »
Life is awful, or so said the cynical and perhaps nihilistic Graham Greene. But art — that could at least make life seem worthwhile ... more »
Does the future of postcolonial thought necessitate a return to Indigenous epistemologies, or can at least some modernist ideas be salvaged? ... more »
Humanists should be skeptical of our increasingly analytical world. Unfortunately, Lev Manovich’s new book is full of gee-whiz-ism ... more »
A sense of so-called “decency” long kept women out of art studios. Indeed, the history of art is "the history of many women not receiving their dues” ... more »
Robin Dunbar’s science of friendship: Human beings can sustain at most 150 acquaintances, of which only five are intimate ... more »
The White Operation. For decades, Dr. Robert J. White pursued his quest: to transplant a human head. He came close ... more »
High society in interwar England: late nights, hangovers, petty insecurities, ghastly conversation, and fascist sympathies ... more »
Soviet shame culture. The party constantly invented new mistakes. One could never be free from the risk of humiliation — or worse ... more »
How do we pin down an artist who has meant so many things to so many people? The revolutionary contradictions of Richard Wagner... more »
What can we learn from Philip Roth, master careerist? Lawyer up early, listen to critics while scorning them publicly, sell out whenever possible ... more »
What Freud got right. According to a new book, his ideas weren’t just ahead of his time — they are ahead of ours ... more »
At a white-tie ball in 1949, a tipsy Princess Margaret belted out a tune and was greeted by "thunderous booing." It was Francis Bacon... more »
René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »
George Scialabba asks: If we decide, as a society, to reject consumerism and technological addiction, is there a path forward? ... more »
Prompted by the growing risks of art, says Anthony Julius, new fears deform the creative decisions of writers and artists ... more »
Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It's been decades since anyone has felt guilt about a guilty pleasure ... more »
You can write poems about sex or excrement, but not business or money. Those are the only two obscene topics left. Dana Gioia explains... more »
Zora Neale Hurston was the Harlem Renaissance’s greatest internal critic. But she found her voice in the swampy muck of Florida ... more »
In American education, student freedom is brought low by two systems: meritocracy and narratives of overcoming oppression... more »
Shakespeare has been studied in high schools in 1870 and still bestrides the curriculum like a colossus. That turns kids off literature... more »
Robert Lowell's early work is a reminder that most young poets are terrible until suddenly they’re not ... more »
American academics are not smuggling radical ideas into France. Rather, Macron is using universities as a pawn in his anti-Islamic campaign ... more »
Naomi Wolf is now a fringe thinker and Covid conspiracist. But what about her celebrated feminist work? It’s a mess, too ... more »
Art is one response when tragedy strikes, but the critic can offer only meek condolences. Is that enough? ... more »
David Sloan Wilson marshals evolutionary research to challenge the gospel of individualism. He has come to bury the ideas of Ayn Rand... more »
Secular critics of Marilynne Robinson focus on grace, family, and redemption, as if her Christianity were nothing more than kindness ... more »
“Trauma,” “depression,” “triggers” — clinical therapy-speak is now everywhere. Is that a good thing? ... more »
“Today’s academy is in the business of producing at best detritus, at worst excrement, all fated to be swept away” ... more »
There is something mildly shameful about literary pilgrimages. They are a kind of emotional and intellectual junk food. And yet... ... more »
Evelyn Waugh on being interviewed by Jacques Barzun: “They sent me an apostate frog called professor Smart-Aleck Baboon. He... gave me a viva in history” ... more »
Philip Roth ensured that he had an extremely sympathetic biographer. But in the resulting biography, he still comes across as a spiteful obsessive... more »
The birth of the audiobook dates to the 19th century, when Tennyson and Browning recorded poems for phonographs ... more »
The new literary moralism. Is this frenzy for censure and the expansion of the definition of harm how we’ll correct the inequities of our time? ... more »
Polymaths are one thing, freaks of intellect quite another. Even reading about these monsters of learning can leave one exhausted ... more »
From the Aztecs' “divine food” to the 18th-century smoke enema, the history of smoking is odder than typically presented ... more »
A consensus has emerged on the right and the left, among the regressive populists and the progressive populists: liberals are the villains... more »
Literary studies argues wrong. Because scholars value critical style over substance, academic culture grows misguided ... more »
Many people are committed to the idea that they’re biologically superior. Does social-science genetics give them scientific cover? ... more »
Being overshadowed by genius has destroyed many literary careers. For the Canadian critic Robert Fulford, something like the opposite occurred ... more »
College admissions is one of the few situations in which it’s rich people scrambling for a scarce resource. The result: our insane system of private schools... more »
Liberal and center-left political parties — once champions of the working class — have become home to meritocrats, hence the party of the new aristocracy... more »
When Robert Lowell left Elizabeth Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood and England, Hardwick decried his infidelity — both to her and to American literature ... more »
Remember the televangelists? We now have the Instavangelists, hawking a blend of self-care, wellness, astrology, and left-wing politics ... more »
Lolita’s greatest champion? Véra Nabokov. She saved it from fire and thought to publish it abroad, decrying domestic “strait-laced morality” ... more »
The French journal Le Débat is no more. Cause of death? American social theory. How the intellectual tides have turned ... more »
Camus, metereologist. At the Algiers Geophysics Institute, he grew increasingly disenchanted: “Observation here represents an arbitrary slice of reality” ... more »
Harold Bloom’s final books reveal that he was never the cosmopolitan we took him to be. Rather, his work is a beautiful, narrow province ... more »
We disagree not just over values and facts, but also over our very standards for determining what the facts are... more »
"Americans’ dogmatism about democracy strengthens their attachment to it," says Mark Lilla, "but it weakens their understanding of it" ... more »
A social movement has successfully pushed the idea that people get to choose their own pronoun. How will things look a decade from now? ... more »
Wealthy colleges talk a lot about equity. But a chasm exists between symbolic gestures and real social progress ... more »
Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors ... more »
Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification? ... more »
“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman” ... more »
Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »
In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »
In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust ... more »
Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »
"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »
Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »
Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system ... more »
Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist” ... more »
Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances ... more »
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