New Books

The bunker is one of the oldest building types made by humans, dating to around 1200 BC. Its dark charisma endures... more »

All is not minimalism. According to Kyle Chayka’s recent book, Duchamp, Wittgenstein, and Marx all inform modern minimalist lifestyles. Not quite... more »

Why do people swim? "To witness metamorphosis, in our environment, in ourselves. To swim is to accept all the myriad conditions of life"... more »

The scientist J.B.S. Haldane is best remembered as an example of how someone so smart can be so dumb when enthralled by ideology... more »

How to be alone. Solitude is not about alienation, isolation, or even physical surroundings. It's a state of mind... more »

Innovation is prized but misunderstood. We don't how it happens or how to nurture it. We can't even agree on what it is... more »

Driverless cars are not primarily about saving lives. They are about eliminating contingency and replacing it with machine-generated certainty. That's terrifying... more »

All shall be saved. Hell is a vestige of Christendom, not of Christianity itself. David Bentley Hart explains... more »

For Patricia Churchland, conscience is rooted in evolutionary biology; moral choices are explained away by neuroscience. Raymond Tallis isn’t buying it... more »

After years of correspondence, Thomas Wentworth Higginson finally met Emily Dickinson, who promptly unleashed — in a torrent — a literary manifesto... more »

Being Kierkegaardian precludes any dutiful fealty to Kierkegaard himself. Unfortunately, a new book misses this point... more »

Longfellow’s ode to Fanny Appleton was not welcome: “It is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches,” she said. They married four years later... more »

Military overreach, excessive spending and taxation, the rise of Christianity: many explanations for the fall of Rome. Was a pandemic to blame?... more »

The race for domination in publishing Trump tell-alls is between Simon & Schuster and Henry Holt. For now, Simon & Schuster is winning... more »

For Deirdre Bair, being Beckett’s biographer entailed exhausting hours spent on bar stools, keeping out of the reach of drunken Irish poets and professors... more »

Frida Kahlo's years in Paris were a high point of her life. She spent much of her time conveying disdain for French culture... more »

In 1911 Einstein moved to Prague, becoming part of an intellectual milieu that would influence Central Europe for decades to come... more »

“I’ve argued that humans have evolved to be fundamentally sociable creatures.” Apparently that passes for a bold claim these days... more »

How can a 976-page biography of Warhol fail to contain a single fresh idea? Gary Indiana on an “incredibly prolonged, masturbatory trance of graphomania”... more »

Gulch, hankering, woolypates, foofoo, squaw: Behold the promiscuous range of Walt Whitman’s vocabulary... more »

“It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil,” wrote Keynes. But his own story points to ideas' limited power... more »

“Origins and Entropy,” “Particles and Consciousness,” “Duration and Impermanence": How pop science became metaphysical self-help... more »

When Mary Bunting created an institute for high-achieving women, she knew she had to provide them with the material support that would allow them to succeed... more »

For James Wood, critics must always answer one fundamental question: “What’s at stake in this passage?”... more »

Reading lists won’t save us. Viral syllabi purport to answer our thorniest problems, but no matter how expertly curated, the reading itself is what matters... more »

Dickens’s fiction drew on the most painful secrets of his life. His gift: turning insecurity into a creative asset... more »

Simone and André Weil devoted themselves to the search for truth. He solved mathematical problems. She died before she could solve the problem of life.... more »

The key to understanding the modern human mind is found in the ancient hunter myths. Or so says Roberto Calasso... more »

The meaning of doubt. "Unbelief needs the believer’s reflecting gaze to better understand itself"... more »

Lydia Davis is a writer for whom the subject is always, on some level, writing itself... more »

John Rawls’s work can take on the quality of a sacred text. Was his appeal related to the declining status of Christianity?... more »

Martin Hägglund’s philosophical blockbuster, This Life, has been widely lauded. Yet for such a liberating text, it’s stunningly parochial... more »

For some “intellectually displaced” women in the 1960s, a haven beckoned — the Radcliffe Institute, feminism’s first think tank... more »

The world is turbulent and tragic, while philosophers are cool and rational. Their field would gain so much if they could be moved... more »

From Knausgaard to Lerner to Heti, we’re plagued by goodness — as if readers were scandalized by immoral characters in fiction... more »

Coffee, “the most grateful lubricant of the human machine,” has made — and destroyed — entire societies... more »

The poetry of Paul Valéry seems the work of a man behind his times. But beneath the old-fashioned veneer is the shock of the modern... more »

The art critic Hal Foster separated “good” from “bad” postmodernism. How real is that distinction?... more »

With his puncturing of ideology and his wild, hallucinatory tales, Robert Stone reshaped what the American crime thriller could be... more »

Essays & Opinions

The melancholy of reading Max Weber resonates today, maybe more than ever, even if he offers little illumination and less consolation... more »

“Britain’s a world/By itself,” says a typically villainous Shakespearean character. The Bard has always been somewhat miscast in the role of England’s national poet... more »

The miseries of the male libido were obsessions of Bellow, Roth, and Updike. Now, if male novelists take up the subject at all, they force sex into a neat moral framework... more »

Max Weber’s troubles were at least in part sexual — castration was discussed as a cure. That changed when he met Else Jaffé in his later years... more »

Do theoretical asides — like those in The Magic Mountain — happen on the level of plot? The novel of ideas is full of such riddles... more »

"Time exists, as love exists, as a myth: real because contingent, real because constructed, a catch-all term for phenomena bigger"... more »

The Point, n+1, Jacobin — today’s little magazines all suffer from the same flaw: a congenital addiction to seriousness... more »

Henry Fielding, Adam Smith, and other 18th-century intellectuals found no food finer than the potato. It was Enlightenment superfood — the kale of its time... more »

“The cat of the wood,” “the stag of the cabbages” — if there is magic in this world, no small part of it lies with that majestic creature, the hare... more »

Was the chilly stroll by Rudolf Carnap and Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929 the moment that analytic and Continental philosophy truly split?... more »

What has the coronavirus revealed? For many, the answer is: “Whatever I thought was wrong with the world before, well, this proves it”... more »

Can American racism be seen in the same terms as the murderous ideology of the Nazis and be similarly discredited? No, such a comparison only confuses... more »

“The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1965, in words that echo today... more »

In his 90s, Habermas is increasingly consumed by questions of faith and religion. His latest book spans more than 3,000 years and 1,700 pages... more »

Loud, constant parakeet chatter, the squawking of crows – there is no such thing as bad birdsong, a welcome respite from self-absorption... more »

How to decide which statues can remain standing and which should be toppled because they honor racists? Julian Baggini offers a rational... more »

“The intractable problem for thinking beyond the nation-state is that its imputed obsolescence can neither be easily forced nor messianically awaited”... more »

Is an exhausted liberalism being supplanted by a successor ideology that's apparent everywhere? Ross Douthat makes the case... more »

Descartes argued that developing grand philosophical visions requires meditative solitude. Is such work incompatible with being a parent?... more »

“The real point about Communists,” wrote Vivian Gornick decades ago, is that they “were like everybody else, only more so.” Her point is finally sinking in... more »

Minimalism was in, KonMari was all the rage, and then a pandemic hit. Now clutter is useful as never before... more »

Charles Portis, author of True Grit, died in February at 86. He was a master of American vernacular... more »

To see the Third Reich captured in 100 vile objects is to realize how good the Nazis were at photography and industrial design... more »

Want a job in academia? No problem — as long as you specialize in Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, and everything else... more »

Wesley Morris: "The most urgent filmmaking anybody’s doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones”... more »

To Richard Russo, time spent arguing over cultural appropriation might be better spent extolling the triumphs of the literary imagination... more »

We have developed an ill-advised self-seriousness about the novel — so much so, says Dave Eggers, that we have overlooked one of the wittiest books ever written... more »

Literary culture is tactile, embedded in our social environment. When cities go quiet, and intellectual life happens remotely, much is lost... more »

Do aphorisms convey wisdom or merely impersonate it? For Plato, they were enigmatic evasions — the scattered utterances of clever men... more »

After the pandemic. Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, and others try forecasting a dark future... more »

A culinary mystery: Vinaigrette has been hailed as a triumph of French culture — but is its origin actually Italian?... more »

"The trolley-problem problem." Thought experiments are as old as philosophy itself, but are they a useful way to reason about ethics?... more »

As an experience and an idea, solitude is no simple matter. It is both a necessary refuge and a public health menace... more »

Success requires flirting with the public, said George Bernard Shaw. He was more accomplished as a flirt than as a playwright... more »

László Földényi leads an assault on rationalism. In his prosecutorial zeal, is he missing the bigger picture?... more »

The value of science as a credential seems stronger than ever. Is this ubiquity a symptom of its decline?... more »

John Cage stroking bits of wire, Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Ninth: The strangely addictive joy of classical YouTube... more »

The rise of individualism is linked to that of infectious diseases. Leo Robson traces the inevitable effect on literature... more »

For Locke and Rousseau, home schooling was ideal. For many parents now, not so much. What’s the basis of a moral education?... more »

The impulse to compare contemporary political events to the past lives on. But such analogies hinder more than they help... more »

Greil Marcus isn’t afraid, as one reader put it, to let “everything remind him of everything else.” It's both a gift and a liability... more »

“Art breathes from containments and suffocates from freedom,” said Leonardo da Vinci. Contemporary art is suffocating... more »

During London’s Great Plague, Samuel Pepys was resigned to his fate yet found much to rejoice in. Pandemics are complicated... more »

Heiner Müller was a poet, playwright, and Stasi informant. The messiness of his life speaks to the complexity of postwar Germany... more »

Critics once assessed the value of books. Now they use reviews as opportunities to showcase their erudition... more »

According to Peter Turchin and others in cliodynamics, historical material can be used to predict the future. Historians are skeptical... more »

Fiction is no good in a crisis, and it dislikes confronting world events head-on. So you'll have to wait for that coronavirus novel... more »

“Thou art a boil / A plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle.” Shakespeare didn’t write much about the bubonic plague, but it did provide good insult material... more »

The word "nostalgia" did not originally mean what it means now. It was coined with a longing for a time when there was no word for what it described... more »

Our reading problem. Yes, we shouldn't idealize the past. But that doesn't mean we have no crisis in the present... more »