New Books

Auberon Waugh and the art of writing about wine. Tasting notes include stale cardboard, French train stations, old penknives, and a dead chrysanthemum... more »

The anthropologists who coined “cultural relativism” discovered that, in fact, not all cultures were equal. American culture, they felt, was inadequate... more »

“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” wrote Vonnegut about semicolons. Why does punctuation inspire such strong feelings?... more »

“Philosophy progresses, not by producing better theories, but by the elimination of confusion through the clarification of what, in some sense, we knew all along.”... more »

In Greece, Byron’s doctor diagnosed epilepsy and siphoned off half the blood in his body. But perhaps it was the poet’s diet that did him in... more »

Seamus Heaney is famous for poems of bogs, ditches, and sectarian violence. But he became a poet of happiness... more »

Nicholas Coleridge has heard it all. Young people with sex tips; Prince Andrew on building a golf course; Margaret Thatcher ranting about the lottery... more »

The spectacle of celebrity entertainment coming home to rot was Norman Mailer’s foremost topic. No doubt he would have written a Trump novel... more »

Despite their love, Beauvoir found Sartre rather pathetic. His skirt-chasing didn’t help — nor did his performance in bed... more »

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, warned E.B. and Katharine S. White —nobody cares, and the frog dies in the process. Still academics persist... more »

Was one ménage à trois (featuring a famous mezzo-soprano, her art-dealer husband, and Ivan Turgenev) at the heart of Europe’s cultural boom?... more »

Ernst Jünger, it was said, had a good World War II. “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands”... more »

Computers were the best thing since psychedelics — early Silicon Valley had a cheery, hippie vibe. How things have changed... more »

Religion did not need the growth of secularism to spawn its own criticism; it already contained the challenges that have become commonplace... more »

“Secular liberals dismiss Christianity as a fairy tale, but their values and their view of history remain essentially Christian”... more »

Arthur Koestler's account of the unbearable toll of intellectual orthodoxy is what makes Darkness at Noon a subversive book even today... more »

Semicolons: Melville was promiscuous; Vonnegut swore them off as "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." Where do you stand?... more »

How Thomas Mann, who had written murky paeans to German nationalism, transformed himself into an antifascist polemicist... more »

A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright is convincing about his artistic greatness — and devastating about his essential humanity... more »

The internet asks us to optimize our appearance, to banish our “dark corners”; it turns our basic humanity into an exploitable viral asset... more »

The Yale philosopher Martin Hägglund’s call for “secular faith” is heartfelt. It is also monotonous and out of touch... more »

How we learn to write less badly. So much of the instruction and its fealty to fossilized rules are foolish and counterproductive... more »

Susan Sontag, envied by many, was without illusions about herself. She reviled her unattractive qualities. Not that she changed her ways... more »

The splendor and misery of Ivan Turgenev's love life. He said he could feel love only when a woman’s heel was pushing his neck into the mud... more »

What lifted Anne Frank's diary above so many other accounts of the Holocaust? Her remarkably intimate descriptions of coming of age in a kind of cage... more »

From the “Golden Age” of TV to “Peak TV,” two constants remain: an escape from reality and the quest for commerce... more »

During his attenuated lifetime, George Gershwin was the most modern guy around; 82 years later — guess what — he still is... more »

Malcolm Gladwell’s critics often accuse him of oversimplification. But he's really a master of obfuscation, imposing complexity on everyday life... more »

Susan Sontag urged us to avoid the “crude trap” of linking a woman’s appearance to her intellect. An irony, then, that her biographer falls into it... more »

George Orwell was a democratic socialist all his life. So why are 1984 and Animal Farm commonly read as indictments of socialism?... more »

“Free time” has become “recovery time,” to get ready to go back to work. True idleness is a more radical and complex endeavor... more »

Lucian Freud, pickup artist. So relentless was his pursuit of women — and their pursuit of him — that it's a marvel he found time to paint... more »

Oliver Sacks was the most story-driven clinical writer of the age. He also had a curious relationship with facts. “I don’t tell lies, though I may invent the truth”... more »

Empathy is a vague beat on which to build a writing career, but that's what Leslie Jamison did. Has she now lost faith in the ideals on which she staked her brand?... more »

Christianity's role in shaping the Western mind is a story of seemingly inconsequential events signaling grander things to come... more »

Vasily Grossman, chronicler of Soviet crimes, was also a master of psychological complexity and sensory detail... more »

What do we get from minor literary characters like Hamlet’s Queen Gertrude or Monsieur Bovary? A way to see the world together... more »

Thomas Chatterton Williams has a knack for eluding pigeonholes, blurring boundaries, and impaling pieties about race. Is he nimble, naïve, or foolish?... more »

Klaus Fuchs was a brilliant, high-minded nuclear physicist. He was also history’s most dangerous spy... more »

Essays & Opinions

The competing visions for modernism included “Make it new,” of course, but also: “Art is dead,” “Realism = Abstraction,” and “victory over the sun”... more »

“There is a cure for everything. Except longing.” The imprisoned Turkish writer Ahmet Altan on the role of the imagination in prison... more »

What does sober creativity look like? To find out, Leslie Jamison went to the archives. Early results weren’t promising... more »

How Saul Bellow thought about America. The novelist began his career as a critic. He ended it as an eloquent guardian of the nation's soul... more »

Nietzsche’s lonely, desperate intellectual heroism: “Wherever you travel, in sunny climates or in the shadowlands, Nietzsche has gone before you”... more »

Against street art. "Kitsch, contrived and uninspiring," it is "the act of an entitled, middle-class narcissist"... more »

What's the secret to good science writing? Cormac McCarthy has some thoughts. Among them: ease up on the adjectives... more »

“If they’re killing people for poetry, that means they honor and esteem it, they fear it, that means poetry is power”... more »

"You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling"... more »

Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for its containment? Zadie Smith weighs the evidence... more »

“The art of rest,” “how to do nothing,” “digital minimalism” — new self-help books abandon productivity tips for a celebration of solitude... more »

Your taste in literature, music, and painting used to say something about you and your values. Now we have something worse: a collective taste truce... more »

An inestimably vast grid of rooms linked by an endless spiral staircase. Borges’s “Library of Babel” is a terrifying glance at the horrors of infinitude... more »

Behold the prose poem, "a mode of writing that allows the stylist plenty of slack” — to be ponderous, vague, clichéd, and repetitious... more »

All Ayn Randers aboard! Set sail on the anti-Paul Krugman cruise, where every Pictionary guess is “Ron Paul!”... more »

Widely dismissed, William Blake managed to capture the heart of one wealthy, credulous benefactor. It helped that they shared a passion for séances... more »

In “a marketplace of ideas,” accurate information and incisive arguments win out. Too bad no such place exists in real life... more »

Are millennials hesitant to have children because childlessness is a moral response to climate change? Or are they merely selfish?... more »

Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, pointing to evidence that justifies outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable... more »

The road to dictatorship is depressingly predictable. But there is one quality that distinguishes modern tyranny: the cult of personality... more »

There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity. The first is that it's modern. The second is that it's ancient. Both are true... more »

After Rawls. He is the central figure in political philosophy, despite a sea change in our political reality. It’s time for something new... more »

Walter Gropius was mocked by his first wife, scorned by art critics, and pushed out of Harvard — all before Tom Wolfe’s character assassination... more »

What comes after liberalism? A network of Catholic conservative thinkers sees in our grim present the opportunity for a better world... more »

The political class feared John Ruskin’s anticapitalist thinking. “If we do not crush him … a moral floodgate may fly open and drown us all”... more »

Eras of elite higher education: Christian college. Gentlemen’s college. Consumer’s college. Now a new era: Comfort college... more »

In the 1920s, Arendt was Heidegger’s “wood nymph.” When they met again in 1949, she found him childish and dishonest, a recluse lost in the hills... more »

Cutting edge linguistics research once meant an astute-eared German grocer surveying the nation by bicycle. Today, data miners do the legwork... more »

"For most of his life, Wendell Berry has written as a kind of elegist, detailing the tragic path that we have taken and recalling other paths now mostly fading"... more »

Poetry has grown boring, narcissistic, and precious — in short, easy to hate. It must recover its immediate, electric power... more »

Insults fly, the rowdy crowd beckons. But public incivility is truly righteous only under certain philosophical conditions... more »

Brown-corduroy suits, literary orthodoxy, and lots of D.H. Lawrence — inside the Leavisites’ ludicrous attempt to direct the reading public... more »

"Thinking together is riddled with pitfalls," says Agnes Callard, "but we can’t really claim to live together without doing it. That is why we need devil’s advocates"... more »

How exactly do literary prizes influence consumers’ book buying and academics' attention? Three professors crunched the numbers to find out... more »

Reading as therapy. Told to rest, a critic discovers that a personal, patient approach to literature can yield unexpected insight... more »

On March 27, 1961, Paul Robeson was found in the bathroom of a Moscow hotel with slit wrists and a razor blade in hand. Why did he try to kill himself?... more »

What does it mean to be serious? Who decides? How Emily Nussbaum uses the unseriousness of television to expose the machinations of seriousness more generally... more »

Peanuts, the philosophy: Life is hard. People are difficult. Happiness can and probably will vaporize. The best response: Laugh and keep moving... more »

Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, was published in 1959 under the name of Philip Rieff. For decades Susan Sontag claimed she wrote “every single word”... more »

The overtly political novel — genre of Orwell, Ayn Rand, Upton Sinclair — is thoroughly out of fashion. Does it deserve to be saved?... more »

The doctrine of the market — all desires are equal, all value only opinion — has led to the sacrifice of aesthetic judgment on the altar of consumer preference... more »

The Second Sex at 70. De Beauvoir, who claimed that a woman’s life should not be reduced to an erotic plot, has been reduced to an erotic plot... more »

From Babel to Orwell, Mao to Borges, the Cold War had a literary front. As Solzhenitsyn put it, books were “as dangerous as atom bombs”... more »

Apocalypse chic. Being radical used to be hard work. Now all one needs to do is succumb, conspicuously, to hopelessness... more »

Where books matter. Americans usually assume that literature exists to depict life, while Russians often speak as if life exists to provide material for literature... more »

No, Sally Rooney is not the “great millennial novelist.” This generation is too diverse for that — its books seek specific audiences, not universal ones... more »

Alcoholic writers are mythologized — but consider their pain. “Heavy drinking is a substitute for companionship,” Bukowski said, “and it’s a substitute for suicide”... more »

Charles Sanders Peirce was an intellectual titan, an American Aristotle. His obscurity stems from the abstruseness of his ideas and the machinations of his rivals... more »

The doomsayers rant that English is in decline, that we're speaking a degraded, faltering tongue. They've been saying so since the 14th century... more »

“Wake up, stay woke!” How a famously liberal liberal-arts college came to act like a small-minded, vindictive corporation... more »