New Books

“I’ve got a writer’s block as big as the Ritz and as stubborn as a grease stain on a gabardine suit,” admitted Ralph Ellison. It was “like a bad case of constipation”... more »

Getting rid of the king was easy for Oliver Cromwell. Harder was what followed: governing as a dangerously ill-defined “Lord Protector”... more »

“My work is original not only in fact but in spiritual fiber.” Frank Lloyd Wright may have been a genius, but his character was appalling... more »

"Robert Lowell’s poems are at their most unsettling when they disclose his own moral recklessness, offering only themselves — the fact of art — as recompense"... more »

Wendell Berry is probably the best-known and most influential antimodernist alive. His prose is splendid. His political strategy is disastrous... more »

Ivan Turgenev and the birth of cosmopolitan Europe. The Russian-born, German-educated novelist was a one-man impresario of Continental culture... more »

Women writers struggled throughout the 20th century to be taken seriously. To an unusual degree, that struggle played out in London's Mecklenburgh Square... more »

There’s much to loathe about Silicon Valley. So why do even its critics have a hard time indicting it?... more »

How many children did Lady Macbeth have? To read fictional characters as “real” can be a balm for the soul — or an exercise in the absurd... more »

James Wood’s work is stately and professorial, full of close readings. Then there’s the hackwork he wrote under a pseudonym... more »

Randolph Bourne had no time for the well-to-do. His tribe was “the incompetent and the ugly, the queer and crotchety”... more »

Where Greta Garbo discussed how to play Hamlet; Charlie Chaplin discovered his musical ghostwriter; and Arnold Schoenberg chatted with Arthur Rubinstein... more »

From fleuron to frontispiece, the history of book design is odd and fascinating. Who knew that the dust jacket was invented in 1829, or that the epigraph has architectural origins?... more »

Much about Rembrandt is known. But not this: How a miller’s son from a provincial Dutch city became one of the most famous painters in the world... more »

An ironist in a literal time, Malcolm Gladwell takes unending flak from scientists and the self-serious, who miss that he’s OK with being wrong... more »

For Mel Brooks, excess was always the point. His comedy has a manic vitality. In private, however, he's deadpan, sullen, without personality... more »

When Gustav Klimt propositioned Alma Schindler, she quoted from Faust: “Do no favors without a ring on your finger”... more »

Melville became a poet after a decade of writing fiction. It was a midlife turn he pursued with great frustration... more »

“An orderly anarchy of words.” Can a new book accomplish the nigh-impossible: making learning Greek seem sexy?... more »

Richard Feynman in 1964: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." That remains more or less true... more »

Existentialism in the ring. After Gordon Marino found no success as a boxer, Kierkegaard’s works led him back to philosophy — and saved his life... more »

An unpopular color. How did yellow shed its pleasing associations with light and life and come to suggest something more sinister?... more »

As an essayist, D.H. Lawrence could produce something brilliant on almost any topic. Consider his tour-de-force “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine”... more »

Architecture has adopted an “International Style” of featureless walls, horizontal windows, concrete, and metal. One problem: It’s horribly unsuited to human beings... more »

Unesco was created to support the “intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.” Who could be against that? Many people, as it turns out... more »

The case for universality in music: Ethnographers have discovered that all of it has characteristics of formality, arousal, and religiosity... more »

“He was not crazy all the time.” Elizabeth Hardwick was wounded grievously by Robert Lowell. And yet they made up, sort of... more »

Aided by the “soft despotism of social media,” young leftists dismiss the hard-earned values of liberal democracy. Or so holds David Bromwich... more »

Virginia Woolf’s work suffered as a result of her pain and frustrations. But it suffered as well, at times, from her happiness... more »

Literature of constraints: A detective novel written entirely without the letter E, a book of 10 sonnets that share a rhyme scheme and sound... more »

Classical music once mattered so much it divided those who believed that art transcends politics, and those who don't... more »

For Nabokov, true writers must never be socially or politically embroiled, lest they devolve into that loathed creature — the journalist... more »

Animals that could incinerate acres of land with their terrible farts — such was the world of the medieval bestiary... more »

Thomas Mann was a serious writer, which meant standing above the political fray — until that became impossible to sustain... more »

When Clay Felker was at the helm of New York magazine, he made one demand of editors and designers: "Make it bigger"... more »

Cheap books create canonical authors. Jane Austen, it turns out, was popular for longer with more readers than previously thought... more »

The hipster cometh. Behind the “language of hip,” you’re likely to find white people appropriating black aesthetics. Lauren Michele Jackson explains... more »

The long, glorious history of beer. Consider the epic Gilgamesh: After seven jugs, our hero “was suddenly joyful, and sang aloud”... more »

A biographical dilemma. A new book purports to explain how Rembrandt became Rembrandt. But there’s so little new evidence to build on... more »

Essays & Opinions

The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb was a nuanced parser of the Enlightenment. When it came to Modernism, however, she could only recoil in horror... more »

What is the enemy of writing today? Fear — of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. The mob has the final edit... more »

Allan Bloom argued that a generation out of touch with great music, literature, and philosophy is a diminished generation. What's gleaned from reading him today?... more »

Anger, grudges, revenge — philosophers dismiss them as backward-looking and unhelpful. But there’s a moral case to be made in their favor... more »

Howard Jacobson confronts his Russianness: “The only reason my father never wrestled a bear is that there were none on the streets of Manchester”... more »

D.H. Lawrence's dark methods: Pseudophilosophize, free associate, conceal deficits of logic with phrases like "of course"... more »

The philosophy of small talk. Behind our pleasantries lies an existential query: Just who do you think you are?... more »

Consider hysterical critics: They point out some obvious moral lesson from art, then pivot to something more important: themselves... more »

For a time, doing philosophy meant grappling with the thought of Avicenna. Among his notable contributions: proving the existence of God... more »

How college became a commodity. Once-fringe libertarian ideas are now at the heart of how academe understands itself. That’s a travesty... more »

For Hume, poets were “liars by profession.” For Sir Philip Sidney, the poet "affirmeth" nothing and "therefore never lieth.” When, exactly, does literature lie?... more »

You've seen the studies: Reading fiction makes you more compassionate and generous. The bookish lap it up — and miss the bigger point... more »

Rock ’n' roll died between December 14, 1979, and October 17, 1980, a period bookended by London Calling and The River. It died of natural causes — mostly... more »

Most people think inequality is bad. But when asked to define what kind of equality is best, frustrations and complexity emerge... more »

Harold Bloom was deranged, oracular, and arrogant. Is it even possible to create art with his musings in mind?... more »

“The vehemence against yesterday’s martini-swilling, sport-coat-wearing taste-makers can lose sight that criticism is a discipline, not easily mastered”... more »

Nell Zink: “Dead writers are open yet thick-skinned, supreme angels of self-assurance, impossible to scare off — just the kind of friends I like best”... more »

“Own less stuff. Find more purpose.” Minimalism is a banal, saccharine exercise in faux epiphany... more »

How the restaurant review — "a journalistic luxury liner, designed to exalt lavish spending and indulgent dining" — became a vehicle of political protest... more »

Thanks to social media, celebrities now out-paparazzi the paparazzi. But self-surveillance comes at a steep cost... more »

Minority writing is suffused with the agony of being misunderstood. What happens, Hua Hsu wonders, when it joins the cultural mainstream?... more »

From youthful radicalism to middle-aged centrism, Daniel Bell never found a political project that did not disappoint him. Yet he avoided cynicism... more »

Jokes are exploratory as well as playful. In Stalin's Russia, though, they were no laughing matter. "The jokes always saved us," recalled Gorbachev... more »

From Spotify to Netflix, we consume culture that has been algorithmically shaped to our taste. But art is most potent when unexpected... more »

For Allen Ginsberg, mescaline brought ecstasy. For Walter Benjamin, philosophical irritation. For William James, vomiting and diarrhea... more »

The problem with letters of recommendation: A teacher’s vision for her students is blinkered by her own limitations. Agnes Callard explains... more »

Dictatorships conform to type. “We can control him,” for instance, is the perennial belief of the soon-to-be-killed collaborator... more »

Before “narrative nonfiction” or even Pulitzer Prizes, McClure’s magazine invented long-form journalism almost from scratch.... more »

From Hermes’ conical helmet onward, a rich historical lineage helps explain that mystical fashion, the magic hat... more »

Reading poetry aloud can be curious and complicated, says Philip Pullman, recalling the first time he read Paradise Lost — with his eyes, but also with his voice... more »

What if the death of God and the death of the humanities are the same death? Simon During explains... more »

The historical Buddha was born a prince and lived in luxury. Or in austerity, eating once a day and sleeping in the open... more »

The body, a guide: Adults touch their faces 16 times an hour. Humans can make up to 10,000 facial expressions. Tears come in three varieties... more »

Toni Morrison never asked for a proverbial seat at the literary table. She just pulled the entire table over to her side of the room... more »

Peter Schjeldahl, facing death, on how to live: “Don’t waste the chance to have truths, great and small, burst upon you”... more »

The OSS was the precursor to the CIA. Was it also a crucial birthplace of contemporary design? Nikil Saval makes the case: "It was the Bauhaus, but for war"... more »

Meritocracy is ruining everything, writes a Yale law professor. But take a step back: Does that merely reflect the elitism of academia?... more »

Jean Genet put the idea of evil at the heart of his thinking. He inhabited the dualistic universe of monotheism even as he inverted its core values.... more »

“Screw that arty-farty literary twaddle.” A month before Stoner, John Williams’s crass brother-in-law published a book. At first it outsold Stoner two to one... more »

Walter Benjamin wrote his last work on the backs of colorful envelopes — green, yellow, orange, blue, cream. They were written for a future he would never know... more »

What differentiates people from pigs? Perhaps just the existence of autobiographical memories, from which we construct a self... more »

Lucian Freud sought to "move the senses by giving an intensification of reality.” He wanted to “shock and amaze.” At that he succeeded spectacularly... more »

Just as the invisible man’s retreat is a hibernation preparatory to action, Ralph Ellison’s letters are a map of his planned advance... more »

A new science of humanity. In the first half of the 20th century, anthropologists were at the forefront of “the greatest moral battle of our time”... more »

Every era has its fashionable argot. Ours is rife with buzzwords that have gone mainstream: "privilege," "problematic," "cisgender"... more »

A more scientifically literate public, it’s presumed, could better distinguish truth. But our problem is not too little science in public culture, but too much... more »

The flummery of neuroscience: Defeated by the “hard problem” of consciousness, the field postulates one improbable theory after another... more »

Amid the grief, grievances, and betrayal in the marriage of Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, what remained was a need to write to each other... more »

What do the digital, medical, and legal humanities have in common? They subjugate the humanities to applied fields... more »

Wherever one looks in history, rationality is haunted and teased by its other, irrationality. Now the boundary is being abandoned altogether... more »