New Books

A tip from the alchemists of yore: Tag your books with a little Greek graffiti for an impression of academic credibility and a hermetic mystique   ... more »

A worldview based on identity and suffused with grievance is ascendant. Is it here to stay?  ... more »

Critical race theory stems from a small corner of legal academia. But conservatives, citing Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, are caricaturing its significance as something very different... more »

Meet Ruben Blum, historian, Jew, fictional creation of Joshua Cohen, and the center of a campus novel that is also a novel of ideas... more »

Jhumpa Lahiri has inspired a school of good immigrant fiction: Lahirism, in which pretty prose and realist narrative culminate in subtle revelation  ... more »

The age of swagger. Late Victorian and Edwardian England was marked by empire builders, activists, and rich men behaving badly   ... more »

Why does a piece of art endure? Is it the quality of the work that matters most, or the artist’s skill at self-promotion and provocation?  ... more »

D.H. Lawrence long endured a reputational deep freeze. What he needed, most of all, was to be saved from himself  ... more »

Milman Parry died at 33, the victim of an accidentally jostled handgun. He'd already changed the humanities forever   ... more »

Joan Didion learned how to read at the University of California at Berkeley. She learned how to write at Vogue... more »

Aerial bombardment, war ethics, and the bloodiest six hours in all of human history... more »

By the end of his life, Edward Said's arguments were being directed at him. He'd run afoul of the PC brigade  ... more »

Simone Weil was an idiosyncratic extremist who managed to alienate everyone. Yet it's difficult to find nothing compelling in her work... more »

What’s to be learned from Blake Bailey’s Roth biography? Judith Shulevitz unpacks a bad book by a bad person ... more »

If it's true that we are born with differing academic abilities, is it fair to connect status and wealth to intelligence? ... more »

The least-loved member of the Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell earned his bad reputation. But his contributions to modernism are real   ... more »

What are the odds that the intellectual openness characterizing American universities for the past half-century will survive 50 years from now?  ... more »

On the origin of exercise. Socially productive effort has degenerated into fake toil. Work has become working out. Is capitalism to blame?  ... more »

“I dread the whole of the rest of my life,” the academic Monica Jones wrote in her 30s. Death has done little to rescue her reputation... more »

Alison Bechdel will cure your PTSD! Sappho will improve your love life! Enough with the calculated utilitarianism of our aliterate age... more »

The shared moral project of the next decades is to green the economy. Rowan Williams explains  ... more »

A new biography of Faulkner is “among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist” ... more »

Dürer prepared the way for modern art in two ways: by embracing existentialism, and by maniacally self-publicizing... more »

The 20th-century American novel is stuffed with stuff: baseballs, red wheelbarrows, and other bric-a-brac. What’s the point?... more »

Traversing the internet, Patricia Lockwood finds a surfeit of self-righteousness recorded for posterity  ... more »

The tragedy of Edward Said: By his life’s end, the causes for which he fought had been defeated... more »

Thorstein Veblen’s reputation for adultery has been exaggerated. But his relations with women did affect his career... 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 »

Essays & Opinions

She was born in Germany; he was born in Newark. Their differences were obvious. But Hannah Arendt and Philip Roth had common cause   ... more »

Why did Stephen Hawking support kooky ideas like the building of ultra-tiny spacecraft? He needed money  ... more »

Why are architectural awards going to buildings that are drab and lifeless? Modern architecture has taken a wrong, wrong turn... more »

The tyranny of the footnote. In the age of Google, chasing one literary citation leads to another, and down a digital rabbit hole   ... more »

Bloated by methodological hot air, literary studies is charged with callow polemicizing and careerist branding. Time to take a step back  ... more »

Ross Douthat scans the landscape for novelists, filmmakers, intellectuals, and everywhere sees torpor and repetition   ... more »

Are literary scholars aesthetic experts or moral experts? They haven’t claimed either mantle, and the result is a vacuum of expertise... more »

Life as an underemployed academic can be paranoid, anxious, stupefying. It's the stuff of literature  ... more »

Humanists like Jill Lepore see data as an enemy epistemology. That doesn’t have to be the case   ... more »

It's not unusual for philosophers to receive death threats - especially if they are philosophers who deny that humans possess free will... more »

What determines the thickness of novels? The 19th century favored lengthiness, the early 20th brevity. Now they’re long again. Why?... more »

The authenticity hustle. Be yourself! Stay true to yourself! Find yourself! That's what the conformist poseurs say  ... more »

In a time of sanctimony literature, novelists and novels are stupefyingly smug and egregiously simplistic. Becca Rothfeld explains   ... more »

When did we start believing that colleges transform lives and change society? What happens when that notion starts to crumble?... more »

Who determines what science means? For Andrew Jewett, the answer is philosophers, pundits, and polemicists — not scientists themselves  ... more »

In 2017, Black writers for the first time won more literary prizes, 38 percent, than writers of any other race or ethnicity   ... more »

“It is more than a terrible irony that a biographer of a man so dogged by claims of misogyny should himself stand accused of violence against women” ... more »

“The first printed miscellany of English poetry,” which had “mouldered in manuscript,” Songes and Sonettes paved the way for modern anthologies... more »

While Coleridge’s poetry has entered the pantheon, his philosophical tomes have mostly collected dust. It’s time to revisit them... more »

Maria Stepanova: “Poetry is maybe the main thing happening now in Russian literature: powerful, daring, cutting-edge, diverse”  ... more »

Wilhelm Reich, who coined the term “sexual revolution,” is remembered as the orgasm man. Do his ideas deserve a serious look?  ... more »

A debate: What does it mean for the future of humanity if we soon share our living space with conscious machines?... more »

If it weren’t for the fall of Rome, Walter Scheidel suggests, we’d all still be ploughing the fields, living in poverty, and dying young... more »

Philip Johnson's Nazi past was long overlooked as he was showered with commissions. Twenty years after his death, the debate heats up  ... more »

John Palattella: “No matter the allure or elegance of its rhetoric, apocalyptic thinking is a poor way of understanding change”   ... more »

“Trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration"   ... 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 »