New Books

What did Stalin have in common with John Updike, Pablo Escobar, and Vladimir Nabokov? The intense discomfort of psoriasis... more »

Judaism, Kabbalah, Zen, the poems of Federico García Lorca: The mystical roots of Leonard Cohen... more »

"Writing is a very daunting activity and it will not make you happy,” said Elizabeth Hardwick. But happiness isn't the point ... more »

If genetic differences divide us, can we craft plausible interventions that might unite us? Kathryn Paige Harden thinks so ... more »

Speculative science fiction and “autofiction” dominate the literary culture. What we need is a resurgence of Balzacian sensibility... more »

When Picasso ended their long, vexed relationship, Dora Maar became a devout Catholic: “After Picasso, there is only God”... more »

Salvador Dalí was a showman; René Magritte was subtler, more cunning in the way he made his life into art ... more »

As a critic, Elizabeth Hardwick’s success was destiny. Her tumultuous marriage, however, was the great choice of her life  ... more »

What makes a racial group “real”? Jay Caspian Kang questions the authenticity of Asian Americanness ... more »

The library and its enemies. Books have everywhere and always been lost, stolen, vandalized, set afire, even deliberately bombed ... more »

W.G. Sebald was canonized quickly in the Anglophone literary world, but something seems off in his rapid ascent... more »

“Saying that racism is the fundamental fact of U.S. history will not supply a political strategy for the present”... more »

Hunter S. Thompson was many things, not least a drug-addled gun enthusiast and a fabulist. He was also a colossal jerk ... more »

To E.O. Wilson, James Watson is “the Caligula of biology.” To Watson, Wilson is a mere stamp collector... more »

"Postmodernism may be a historical fact, but it finds history itself a bore," says Terry Eagleton. "The past is simply a collection of styles to be recycled” ... more »

Everyone perceives color slightly differently — “a dance between subjects and objects, mind and matter” ... more »

“Obviously, all biographies are false," said Czeslaw Milosz. What would the exiled poet make of a new account of his life in California?... more »

For all D.H. Lawrence’s hateful misogyny, racism, and plain bad temper, there is something in his work that stays urgent and alive ... more »

Elizabeth Hardwick deplored biography as merely a “scrupulous accounting of time.” Does her own biography transcend that?   ... more »

Moll Cutpurse, who ran a criminal empire in 1600s London, was an early "queen of the underworld" ... more »

Ethical statements have no objective truth and are thus subjective. So went the prevailing Oxford moral philosophy of the 1930s and '40s... more »

One by one, major philosophers, physicists, and neuroscientists take on the hard problem of consciousness — and fail. Antonio Damasio is the latest   ... more »

René Magritte was a practical joker and occasional miscreant. He was also, perhaps, a little mad   ... more »

Greasepaint, face powder, new clothes, cold cream: Noël Coward noted every grubby particular of life in the theater... more »

The flight from meritocracy. Yes, it entrenches elites and inequality. But the alternatives are worse... more »

Like that of social justice, the language of victimhood is endlessly co-opted. For some, complaint is a sacrifice — for others, it’s a shield... more »

Far from the “the decade that taste forgot,” the Eighties was an era of big hair, bombastic riffs, and deep cultural significance  ... more »

Sea levels rise, oceans warm, and CO2 builds up in the atmosphere — a physicist takes on our harrowing climate future... more »

The tyranny of metrics has overtaken journalism, conflating consumer choice with democratic needs... more »

Racial, ethnic, and religious animosities have distinct origins. But are they fueled by the same psychic or social forces?  ... more »

Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg flowed with nihilism, egoism, materialism. All of it went into Crime and Punishment... more »

Is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” a mournful elegy to artistic devotion or — as a new book argues — a malicious catcall?... more »

“There is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature”   ... more »

David Graeber, who died last year, left a final gift: a wildly singular history of the past 30,000 years... more »

What explains the Elizabeth Hardwick revival? Her uncompromising style? Her near-incomprehensible metaphors?... more »

The inescapable Jonathan Franzen is not the novelist America needs, but the one America deserves... more »

Post-liberals agree on little: “They know something has gone wrong, and they suspect the origins of the problem date back several centuries”... more »

The idea of female chastity runs deep in Western culture. "Upon that," said Samuel Johnson, "all property in the world depends"... more »

“Anyone open to the idea of religious belief but uncomfortable with orthodox teachings should read Spinoza” ... more »

Essays & Opinions

According to Adam Phillips, what we need to be cured of are our cures, and our hankering for them. “There is no cure”  ... more »

Jasper Johns was an art-historical fixture at the age of 35. No wonder he entered his late style prematurely  ... more »

Philosophy cannot anchor politics. So held Richard Rorty, dashing the hopes of a long line of political philosophers ... more »

Stoic philosophy is awash in ancient self-help: imagine the unimaginable, rehearse undergoing future evils, anticipate suffering ... more »

The individualism of Emerson and Thoreau was not a precursor of libertarianism. But their outlooks bear remarkable resemblances  ... more »

In a Sylvère Lotringer classes, the syllabi were aspirational, constituting an entire curriculum, a mode of life... more »

The 1619 quandary: 1619 represents America’s “true” national founding — or a metaphor for it — or one origin story among many?... more »

How did a bowdlerized rendering of a marginal psychpathology — trauma theory — come to dominate our culture? ... more »

Talk to the hand. When a face is masked, the rest of the body tends to compensate   ... more »

Race, as Stuart Hall put it, is a floating signifier: At any given point, there is no agreed-upon definition of the concept  ... more »

The man who built “an ark to save learning from the deluge,” Sir Thomas Bodley reimagined what a library could be... more »

When Ta-Nehisi Coates wanted to escape the expectation that his work provide hope, he found a model in Tony Judt... more »

What differentiates humans from other animals? Our capacity and need for illusion   ... more »

Ever since Hammurabi’s Code, most societies have restricted a woman’s freedom to enjoy alcohol. Nevertheless, they persisted   ... more »

“I shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me,” boasted Emerson, who was extremely dependent on his family  ... more »

Is the purpose of studying U.S. history to create a consensus view, or to provoke argument?... more »

Something is rotten in the groves of academe. Political intolerance, exorbitant costs, weak leaders. Time to start over, says Niall Ferguson  ... more »

The influences of slavery are pervasive. And that makes it difficult to precisely identify its discrete consequences  ... more »

Hannah Arendt’s life was marked by three escapes: from a Gestapo cell in Berlin, from an internment camp in France, and from Heidegger... more »

“You stir some very deep part of my soul,” Iris Murdoch told Philippa Foot. Not lovers or merely close friends, what were they? ... more »

John Ashbery was a poet of experiment and verbal adventure, of charity and self-forgiveness, and also of “mandarin avoidance"... more »

Beware the “expert” who has suddenly reached some enlightened, politically convenient truth... more »

Rosalind Franklin was deprived of double-helix fame. Was that due to a conspiracy, or plain old sexism?... more »

The idea of exorcism is, in many ways, ridiculous. Yet it lingers, as if nasty spirits were everywhere.... more »

Steven Pinker’s forays into the humanities are like someone with muddy boots entering your house and arrogantly sticking his feet on your table ... more »

Literary study badly needs a new infusion of adrenaline, writes Marjorie Perloff. And so she turns to the work of Yuri Tynianov... more »

Dense, abstract, suspect: Hegel has long been out of favor among Anglophone philosophers. Why all the interest now?  ... more »

The methods of connection between author and reader are increasingly owned by Amazon. But ownership does not constitute possession ... more »

Milosz in Berkeley. The Polish-Lithuanian poet's seriousness was at odds with the divine madness of the times... more »

Carl Schmitt's ideas have fresh appeal in a time of authoritarian populism, and nowhere more so than in China  ... more »

Futurists are drawn to the sensational and the unlikely: brain uploading, magnetic floating cars. But the actual future will be more like today’s world  ... more »

What killed The Believer? For starters: financial distress, a scandal involving the editor, and callous mismanagement... more »

Stephen Crane died at the age of 28. Had he not been so reckless, American literature might now look quite different ... more »

It’s possible to imagine a diversity statement that isn’t an ideological test. But that’s not what we’re seeing on campuses... more »

25 years ago, Alan Sokal perpetrated his hoax on the postmodern professoriate. He won the battle but lost the war... more »

“The way Hannah Arendt lived her life will always be more instructive than the ideas she deduced from it.” ... more »

E.O. Wilson evinces a chummy, no-frills view of himself. It's genuine, as well as crucial to his expansive sense of wonder... more »

What's achieved by liberal and academic calls to "center the most marginalized?" Olúfémi O. Táíwò unpacks standpoint epistemology... more »

"We are all Foucauldians now — in the ways we think about gender, normalization, psychiatry, confinement, surveillance" ... more »

He was a shy college graduate; she was a neurotic 38-year-old mother of two. What was there between Henry Thoreau and Lidian Emerson?... more »

Just how closely related are chimpanzees and humans? A primatologist reflects on a career in ape-language studies... more »

"If you put censors like me in charge, you get a worse situation than if you have people with the freedom to speak up”... more »

Obscure writers squabble, a writer of thrillers makes dubious claims — why are we so enraptured by low-stakes literary misdeeds?... more »

Maggie Nelson’s anti-politics: Her book leaves readers with no permissible action, only a patronizing invitation to manage their own feelings ... more »

The trial of Oscar Wilde tends to be used to distill his character rather than to dramatize its contradictions... more »

Perry Anderson, purveyor of British backwardness, advanced the view that his nation was in perpetual decline. That’s not quite right... more »

If our challenge is to defend liberalism without falling into cynicism or naïveté, Henri Bergson is a thinker for our time... more »

“The sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it”   ... more »

The mystery of smell. Theoretically the human nose can detect up to a trillion smells — yet we struggle to describe them with any precision... more »

A Cambrian explosion in the world of natural-language processing raises a question: How much of what we write is essentially autocomplete?... more »