New Books

Martha Nussbaum asks: What does justice for animals look like? Is it enough not to torture them, or must we help them thrive? ... more »

To understand 21st-century male ennui, should we try to understand “the manosphere”? Perhaps not ... more »

At Princeton in the 1930s, Thomas Mann waged a “militant humanist” war against Hitler. But America was not good to Mann for long... more »

Can minds exist in virtual worlds? David Chalmers considers this a question of some urgency. Is it, really? ... more »

It’s déclassé to browse the self-help section, but – as Sheila Heti points out – almost all literature is, implicitly, self-help... more »

“If I were a major artist…” Chekhov was too modest to accept that he was anything more than a fleetingly popular writer ... more »

Can the freedoms of poetry be reconciled with Soviet-style Communism? Welcome to the Stasi poetry circle... more »

Oxford during World War II was largely absent of men. Did this help women think against the grain? ... more »

Hunter S. Thompson’s drugs for writing: Dexedrine helped for a time. Cocaine followed, though it sometimes turned his brain into cement ... more »

When the typewriter came to China, it posed a problem: How to reconcile the language to a tool built on an alphabetic writing system? ... more »

Eugenics was rejected after the Holocaust. Now it goes by a new name: transhumanism. John Gray explains ... more »

The “sewage tide” is turning: Excrement is now seen as a fertilizing resource, filth serving to produce food ... more »

Stalin kept no diary and wrote no memoir. Instead, we have his library as a window into his mind ... more »

It’s a good thing that teasers on Arts & Letters Daily are brief, because we've all apparently lost our ability to focus... more »

In 1843, Kierkegaard published Fear and Trembling and predicted no one would read it. Why do we keep returning to this bizarre little book?... more »

A dictator and his books. Stalin scrawled abuse across pages with the same blue crayons he used to sign death warrants ... more »

David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Kurt Cobain — why were prominent artists of the ’90s so marked by tragedy?... more »

Ulysses is 100. The notoriously difficult novel has endured a "long and tortuous journey from oddity to commodity" ... more »

Comic books helped win World War II, then fell victim to moral panic and backlash ... more »

What leads people to treat certain mortals as deities? The human urge to worship something, anything ... more »

Ashtrays, slide rules, moon towers, paper dresses: What is lost when objects go extinct?... more »

Is the value of a human life measurable in dollars? Can satisfaction be scored on a 1-to-10 scale? Our intellectual regime is overly reliant on numbers... more »

Elizabeth Hardwick approached essay writing as an act of aggression. No opinion could be meaningful unless "an assault has taken place" ... more »

Did Indigenous critique and its emphasis on freedom and equality lay some of the intellectual groundwork for the Enlightenment?... more »

It’s not all media firestorms: Campus conflicts frequently end in anticlimax — and sometimes even in real conversation  ... more »

Ever since Foucault died, in 1984, readers have waited for his last words on sexuality. Now they’re here. But should they have been published? ... more »

On exercise: “To strive, to struggle, to sweat, is to be a human being in the fullest sense of the word” ... more »

H.G. Wells was short and stocky, sporting a comb-over. He looked like a seedy groper. He was irresistible ... more »

The unbearable mawkishness of Michael Ignatieff. He is never so platitudinous as he is regarding consolation ... more »

Socrates scoffed at grief. The Stoics regarded it as a messy distraction. Why has this central experience been overlooked by philosophers? ... more »

Black power and Black arts were “so twinned and joined at the hip that it is impossible, really, to tell where one begins and the other ends”  ... more »

Ali Baba, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: These fairy tales endure because they respond to a deep human need ... more »

Pablo Picasso, emotional monster. His genius was rivaled by his talent for manipulation — as is evident in his art ... more »

“Hobbes’s story is still our story.” For David Runciman, the state — not democracy — is central to modern political experience ... more »

An emphasis on “relevance” in art is troubling Jed Perl. Where does the threat come from? He won’t say ... more »

In the critic Harold Rosenberg’s hard-drinking milieu, cultural and political sparring sometimes erupted into fistfights ... more »

Jane Austen had six novels published in six years. But her writing life was spread across three decades... more »

Is Slaughterhouse-Five evidence of Kurt Vonnegut’s undiagnosed PTSD? Wrong question ... more »

“As inventive and inspiring as Emerson and Thoreau often were, their zeal for ‘individual freedom’ has curdled into a socially destructive force” ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Spotify, Kindle, and other vehicles for digital art have deprived us of one of life’s great joys: the lost art of browsing... more »

Eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost an intellectual monster, Eros commits crimes of thought... more »

Susan Sontag wrote an essay about cancer without ever mentioning that she had cancer. Now essayists always make it about themselves... more »

“Studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position” ... more »

It used to be that the CIA presented as genteel, patrician, trans-Atlantic. Now it offers a new dialect of power... more »

Stalin’s marginalia. He marked up every book he read. What — if anything — do such stray thoughts reveal? ... more »

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, sales of Black-authored books picked up. To one Black author, that wasn’t exactly a victory ... more »

Will Saletan began writing for Slate 25 years ago, hopeful that the information age would make us smarter. It hasn’t ... more »

Alchemists, worm doctors, magnetizers, prestidigitators, mountebanks, politicians — the charlatan endures across centuries ... more »

The internet is turning us all into cranks: obsessive writers of letters to the editor and avid collectors of fine and rare grudges ... more »

"What doleful days! What driveling times are these!" - pessimism permeated Britain's Georgian era... more »

On not making it in opera. "I’m bored of auditions. I’m bored of rejection. I’m bored of my voice type” ... more »

On Ulysses: The sentences of “Molly Bloom’s silent monologue make much of the feminist canon look like a sewing circle for virgins and prudes” ... more »

Why do we seek pleasure but choose to suffer? The experiences that are most central to our lives often involve sacrifice ... more »

The new pyroscape: Fewer fires are burning today than at any other point in human history... more »

Oxford moral philosophy: Does it “corrupt the youth”? Elizabeth Anscombe pulled no punches in her attack on the positivist consensus   ... more »

Never heard of the novelist Elizabeth Taylor? She’s one of the most psychologically penetrating English fiction writers of the 20th century... more »

Nicholas Cage is moviegoing's high priest; his performances are an ecstatic self-flagellation through which the viewer is cleansed   ... more »

What was the TED Talk? And what happened to the tech-enabled, utopian future it envisioned? ... more »

Cartoon images of apes, robots, and aliens are selling for millions of dollars. Is this really the future of art?  ... more »

The social meaning of art goes beyond academics’ dispassionate theorizing. Rita Felski explains ... more »

How to read the poetry of John Ashbery, who critic-proofed his work? With a healthy appreciation of paradox... more »

Alphabet, book, complete writing, diary, English, fire: Priscilla Long's A-to-Z meditation on writing... more »

Virtual reality promises to deepen immersive experiences of art. But there’s still value in unplugging ... more »

The tyrannical success of the oldies. Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, crowding out new hits  ... more »

Lucy Santé on becoming a woman at 67: “I am generally at peace … although now and then I am transfixed by the deep strangeness of it all”  ... more »

The humanities are increasingly a moral project of the American cultural left. Is there still a role for dispassionate research?   ... more »

Once, “vibe,” “mood,” and “energy” were watchwords of the counterculture. Now everyone uses them — and they have lost their force   ... more »

A literary injustice: The ambitious, serious Russell Hoban is best remembered for his children’s books about Frances the Badger  ... more »

“Art’s not a commodity,” held Donald Judd, a mainstay of the art town Marfa, Tex. Now the place confronts the NFT craze... more »

Has the Thomas Mann revival trivialized him, reducing the Great Ambiguator to an op-ed columnist? Alex Ross makes the case ... more »

The hatchet job is back, made for internet virality. These book reviews have even given rise to a new literary mode ... more »

“Thou shalt not…” “To be or not to be?” “I would prefer not to.” Words of negation like “not” have a mysterious power   ... more »

Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? Such questions promote a narrow view of what art can do... more »

David Hume and a footnote. In one sentence, he forever tarnished his reputation. What lesson do we take?... more »

Martha Nussbaum: “With humor, with science, with kindness, let us resist the ignoble and damaging project of disgust”  ... more »

In praise of tackiness: Cheesecake Factory, Guy Fieri, the band Creed — where would we be without such low aesthetics?... more »

Louis Menand and Roosevelt Montás clash over the purpose of studying literature. Their disagreement is both interesting and important ... more »

W.E.B. Du Bois’s masterly “Black Reconstruction” got a vitriolic reception in 1935. The vitriol lingers on... more »

Secularism has given rise to substitute religions — Romanticism, communism, social crusades. Each has failed in turn ... more »

“While death can be an astute career move for underrecognized writers, it proved critically disastrous for T.S. Eliot” ... more »

What explains Amia Srinivasan’s popularity? Perhaps her tendency to avoid hard conclusions, argues Katha Pollitt ... more »

Even an obscure book by a great writer should never be considered obsolete. Consider the newfound relevance of Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man... more »

In 1865, Dostoevsky suggested a story idea to his editor and asked for 300 rubles. Thus Raskolnikov’s inauspicious origins... more »

Forget “blast!” or “confound it all!” Sometimes, as new research shows, proper swearing is what we need... more »

The history of the tractor. John Deere’s Model D squared off against Henry Ford’s Model F and an ingenious “Tractivator” ... more »

Once you are attuned to it, disgust is everywhere. But does it really define — and explain — humanity? ... more »

Hannah Arendt’s work is fundamentally about the discovery of human freedom and its gradual disappearance... more »

“In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status — our red badge of courage?”... more »

"If art ... performs any form of moral service, it does so by alerting us to the difficulties of being moral"  ... more »