New Books

The chapter. It dates to 13th-century narrative units in the Gospels, before the separation of sentences and even of words

Humans make machines, and machines remake humans. Small devices have revolutionized humanity in big ways... more »

For the 11th-century Benedictine monk Saint Anselm, reading was a form of communion. It still is... more »

Who was the greatest writer of the Latin American Boom? Not Mario Vargas Llosa or Gabriel García Márquez, but José Donoso... more »

The liberal’s dilemma. Are they suffering from their own success, or from the fact that liberalism has never been tried?... more »

Dickens the devious? A new biography stretches credulity to portray the writer as pathologically deceitful... more »

Name something that has lost any vestige of utility yet remains a beguiling object full of detail, color, and wonder... more »

“To be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet.” Few live this maxim as publicly as Taylor Lorenz... more »

Aristotle condemned the “birth of money from money,” but even then it was a losing battle. The concept of interest has been around for over 4,000 years... more »

George Scialabba’s chief intellectual virtue is generosity. Yet being treated fairly by him — as Christopher Hitchens found — can be devastating... more »

Dwight Garner cannot read without eating, and because he is a New York Times book critic, he reads quite a lot... more »

Pageantries of power. Roman emperors were overworked bureaucrats tasked with theatrical displays of strength... more »

John Silber was famously impulsive and irascible. He was also a master of the art of cultivating academic prestige... more »

Antihumanism and transhumanism are dangerous and nihilistic revolts against humanity. Are they also irresistible? ... more »

In defense of vocal fry. We love to hate ways of speaking that do not accord with our own. But what if bad English is good?... more »

Camus’s 1949 book tour: “For the first time in my life I feel myself in the middle of a psychological collapse”... more »

Anthony Hecht’s darkness and light. The poet’s complex aesthetic insisted on art as a compensation for pain and disappointment... more »

“Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life.” Domesticity and patriarchy shaped Eileen Blair’s life. But pointing that out doesn’t recover her story... more »

Seamus Heaney and the art of translation. “You get the high of finishing something you don’t have to start”... more »

Not just genre fiction. The pulp magazine Weird Tales published the work of H.P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Ray Bradbury... more »

Books are big business, and trends in fiction are tied to marketing strategies. Yet these objects of art also resist the market... more »

Is indeterminacy the goal of the humanities? Or are actual political goals — organizing, coalition-building — within its remit?... more »... more »

The thoughts and the career of Don DeLillo, an old soul from another era, prefigures our own, even now... more »

Ibn Sina and Biruni were polymaths of the same time and place. But they differed in personality and perspective... more »

“Where authors find jobs, where they go to school, how they get published: These social facts have aesthetic consequences”... more »

John le Carré's serial philandering was more than a character flaw. It was integral to his literary life... more »

The tyranny of beauty. Empress Elisabeth of Austria washed her hair with raw egg and brandy, and sometimes she slept in a mask lined with raw veal... more »

You’ve heard it before: Digital disruption will sweep aside our staid universities. A new book asks: Has the time finally come?... more »

Lou Reed came to embody a New York that exists only in memory — a city of unbridled id and romantic sleaze... more »

In 18th-century London, literary clubs offered debate and fine dining to their gentleman members. Joseph Johnson’s club was different... more »

The 19th-century British literary celebrity Michael Field was not, in fact, a brilliant young man, but rather the nom de plume of two women... more »

For Martin Jay, intellectual life has both a transcendental side and a mundane side. The two are in conflict... more »

Edith Hamilton’s books on Greek and Roman mythology, written after she retired from teaching, were a publishing phenomenon... more »

What can we learn from the Dutch master painters? That beauty is to be taken seriously... more »

Hearing Homer. A recent translation of the Iliad gives a new generation of readers a clearer understanding of the epic... more »

Visions of utopia can be grand, like the mega-city planned in the Saudi Arabian desert. Or they can be far more humble... more »

The birth of Bond. Agent 007 was forged in a crucible of Ian Fleming's marital strife and worsening health... more »

The anarcho-socialist musings of Jonathan Crary occasionally approach paranoia. That's in part why he's so interesting to read... more »

The U.S. Constitution is, “for one half of the country, a structural support, and, for the other, an imperilled instrument of the marginalized”... more »

Essays & Opinions

A best-selling philosophical text on Amazon is the decade-old dissertation of a writer best known as Bronze Age Pervert... more »

Rescuing Pushkin from commemoration and co-optation: He “deserves to be stripped of his official veneration to reveal the irreverent poet underneath”... more »

Censorship is a widespread problem among scientists. It’s most often driven by the scientists themselves... more »

Do animals need complex brains to experience consciousness? New work on scallops, jellyfish, and crabs suggests not... more »

When Gawker went girly and created a home for radical self-disclosure and all-abiding contempt. Moe Tkacik looks back... more »

My queue, myself. Ordering DVDs from Netflix served as a kind of biography of the various phases of my life... more »

Whether the conglomeration of the publishing industry has been good or bad is beside the point. Artists adapt... more »

George Packer: “In taking political action, writers and artists are likelier to betray than fulfill the demands of their vocation”... more »

The cultural position of aliens has changed radically. We can expect to hear a lot more about them in coming years... more »

No Christian saint described levitation in as much detail — or complained about it with as much vigor — as Saint Teresa of Avila... more »

Russell Kirk and the gothic cast of the conservative mind. What do his ghost stories reveal about his political outlook?... more »

The varieties of loneliness: We can feel isolated from strangers, from loved ones, even from ourselves... more »

Anthropologists once balanced a range of moral obligations. No longer. The field is now governed by its efforts in anti-racism... more »

Italo Calvino’s purpose was to exalt the imagination — to evoke images so powerful that the “real” world disappears... more »

Writers’ legacies were once preyed upon by snoopy biographers. Now the heirs seek to monetize every last shred of creative output... more »

Philosophy’s plight: The serious books are incomprehensibly narrow; the broad, grand books are full of silly self-help... more »

In the decades-long battle over Louis Armstrong’s legacy, Armstrong himself ensured he’d get the last word... more »

“A perfect photograph is a lyric poem. It gestures towards narrative, but does not spell it out”... more »

Jeanette Winterson on the upsurge of women writing about their experience: “I find it quite boring”... more »

Art in a time of war. In a bid to do something, anything, artists and intellectuals are signing open letters... more »

Tom Wolfe’s eye for the jugular. If you worry about people’s feelings, he said,  “you’re no longer writing, you’re involved in public relations”... more »

Both literary style and gender are “imitation games we play with pre-existing forms and norms.” Namwali Serpell explains... more »

“How did a heartfelt writer like Elizabeth Gilbert come to adopt the neutered rhetoric of brand management?”... more »

A student stood up and said: ‘This author is a misogynist.” Gale Walden on dating, loving, and teaching David Foster Wallace... more »

A good novel is a good novel, and a bad novel is a bad novel, regardless of who – or what generative AI – wrote it... more »

Unfairly besmirched as screechy, hectoring, and juvenile, the exclamation point is in dire need of a reputation reclamation... more »

We celebrate the humanities and we bash the humanities, but rarely do we pause to ask: What the hell are the humanities?... more »

George Eliot offers us “neither a gospel, nor imitable heroines, but a kind of negative wisdom about our relations”... more »

As memoirists know, it is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. But memory is wet sand... more »

Teaching “problematic” writers is a minefield. Affronted students can generate a social-media scandal — and bad course evaluations... more »

“Restructuring your inward being … is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business”... more »

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Evolution is not over... more »

Ben Lerner writes beautifully about meritocracy’s discontents. He has also “perfected the humblebrag as auto-fictional style”... more »

The René Girard resurgence puts envy, rivalry, and scapegoating center stage in diagnosing the modern human condition... more »

RIP, literary fiction. The genre, born in response to conglomeration in 1980, has become an anachronism... more »

The varieties of feminism can be seen in the magazines their advocates created: Ms., Bitch, Bust, Sassy, Feministing, Jezebel... more »

Christian Lorentzen on the new alienations, obsolete vanities, and petty, unfulfilled apolitical careerism of his generation... more »

Bookstores are full of tales of wizards, ogres, and barely-clad elf queens. Who’s behind all this? Lester del Rey, inventor of fantasy... more »

Is there a greater dismissal of American literature’s achievement than the withholding of the Nobel from Don DeLillo?... more »

Alchemy, phrenology, astrology — it’s easy to know when an intellectual project fails. But how does one succeed?... more »

“Technophobia is explicit in the text and implicit in the format of Liberties; the medium and the message are perfectly aligned”... more »

“The violence of death had the appearance of a strange generosity.” Rachel Cusk explores grief, loss, and the ugliness of change... more »

The key to understanding connections among ancient texts? Nicander, an obscure Greek poet who wrote mostly about snakes... more »

“The strength of a reading public is the result not of the free circulation of ideas in itself, but rather of the careful, even microscopic, study of those ideas by readers”... more »

“Less wedlock means more woe.” Pundits think marriage is the solution to almost everything. It’s not that simple... more »

Most scholars view John Donne’s poem “The Flea” as clever, witty, and erotic. For Katie Kadue, it’s a rape joke... more »

Today’s public intellectuals dumb down ideas and pander to their readers. Their snobbish, alienating tone is unmistakable... more »

Simone de Beauvoir held fast to the ideas of freedom and reciprocity, as well as to the idea that women would not always be the Other... more »

In 1942 Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Heisenberg were a world apart in every way. They still converged on the same idea... more »

“You’re nobody until somebody hates you,” Tom Wolfe told his daughter. By that metric he was a great success... more »