New Books

Black power and Black arts were “so twinned and joined at the hip that it is impossible, really, to tell where one begins and the other ends”  ... more »

Ali Baba, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: These fairy tales endure because they respond to a deep human need ... more »

Pablo Picasso, emotional monster. His genius was rivaled by his talent for manipulation — as is evident in his art ... more »

“Hobbes’s story is still our story.” For David Runciman, the state — not democracy — is central to modern political experience ... more »

An emphasis on “relevance” in art is troubling Jed Perl. Where does the threat come from? He won’t say ... more »

In the critic Harold Rosenberg’s hard-drinking milieu, cultural and political sparring sometimes erupted into fistfights ... more »

Jane Austen had six novels published in six years. But her writing life was spread across three decades... more »

Is Slaughterhouse-Five evidence of Kurt Vonnegut’s undiagnosed PTSD? Wrong question ... more »

“As inventive and inspiring as Emerson and Thoreau often were, their zeal for ‘individual freedom’ has curdled into a socially destructive force” ... more »

Is Gauguin redeemable? Probably not. Would he want to be redeemed? Almost certainly not ... more »

Consulting psychology and data, Jonathan Gottschall has determined that storytelling is everything. Timothy Snyder begs to differ ... more »

What does it mean to consult the papers of a person or institution when they're stored not on paper but in digital flotsam? ... more »

Duels that didn't prove fatal often gave rise to friendship. "Facing death together prompted a mutual respect"... more »

John Tierney raises a glass to the civilization-building power and distinct hedonic satisfaction of a stiff drink — or two... more »

What to read in 2022? W Magazine... FT... WSJ... Time... Vogue... BuzzFeed... Guardian... NYT... more »

John McWhorter’s Woke Racism caricatures antiracist thinking and reads like an extended Twitter rant ... more »

A critic’s lament: Too many books, too little time. Michael Dirda on 12 overlooked titles... more »

When men are mistaken for gods, what follows are questions of identity, myth, and intellectual inferiority... more »

Often overlooked for contemporary novels like Lolita or Catch-22, Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge is a quiet masterpiece... more »

"I can't tell if it's ignorance or cynicism, but for Andrew Sullivan to condemn tribal thinking is like watching an arsonist call the fire department"  ... more »

As interviewer, essayist, editor, or critic, Donald Hall produced prose that was always supple, probing, funny... more »

Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, as different as “a sea creature and a land animal,” kept up a 30-year correspondence... more »

When it comes to the stickiness of economic ideas, what matters more: stories or theories? ... more »

In 1792, Francisco Goya went deaf. He found a new language through sketching in pen and ink ... more »

It’s fashionable to think that the writing life is built on nothing but shallow notions of fame, success, and ambition. Why? ... more »

Among today’s Goth, New Age, and Wicca cultists, the monstrous has acquired a new seductiveness ... more »

We live in infantilizing times. Let us at least drink like adults. Eric Felten explains ... more »

“Babies among all that turpentine and paint rags.” The women of abstract expressionism suffered the most and were celebrated the least ... more »

Richard Rorty's optimistic genius. He could identify genuine philosophical progress in other people’s work. Daniel Dennett explains ... more »

Tom Stoppard’s politics: He opposed trade unions, supported the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and ignored boycotts of apartheid South Africa... more »

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight, despite what professors of “Great Books” courses may claim ... more »

Antonin Dvorak predicted that Black music would be the foundation of American classical music. What happened? ... more »

On the road with Borges. Polymathic and passionate, he dispensed anecdotes, literary advice, and, Quixote-like, meandered into mishaps  ... more »

Johnny Cash was neither an inscrutable saint nor an enigma. He was mostly just plain weird ... more »

Donald Antrim’s rhetoric of despair: generic descriptions, repetitive adjectives, worn-out declarations. Somehow, it works ... more »

Postmodernism, the propaganda wing of neoliberalism, has made it impossible to see politics as a communal activity. Or so goes a very mistaken argument ... more »

We don’t see the left make the case for classical education, which is why Roosevelt Montás is a necessary voice in the ideological wilderness ... more »

Being married to a brilliant and abusive man does not in itself make a woman interesting. Consider Anna Grigoryevna Dostoyevskaya... more »

The American university is dying not because humanists are bad at programming or archival research or scansion — but because it has no money... more »

Essays & Opinions

Has the Thomas Mann revival trivialized him, reducing the Great Ambiguator to an op-ed columnist? Alex Ross makes the case ... more »

The hatchet job is back, made for internet virality. These book reviews have even given rise to a new literary mode ... more »

“Thou shalt not…” “To be or not to be?” “I would prefer not to.” Words of negation like “not” have a mysterious power   ... more »

Does art serve social justice? Does social justice serve art? Such questions promote a narrow view of what art can do... more »

David Hume and a footnote. In one sentence, he forever tarnished his reputation. What lesson do we take?... more »

Martha Nussbaum: “With humor, with science, with kindness, let us resist the ignoble and damaging project of disgust”  ... more »

In praise of tackiness: Cheesecake Factory, Guy Fieri, the band Creed — where would we be without such low aesthetics?... more »

Louis Menand and Roosevelt Montás clash over the purpose of studying literature. Their disagreement is both interesting and important ... more »

W.E.B. Du Bois’s masterly “Black Reconstruction” got a vitriolic reception in 1935. The vitriol lingers on... more »

Secularism has given rise to substitute religions — Romanticism, communism, social crusades. Each has failed in turn ... more »

“While death can be an astute career move for underrecognized writers, it proved critically disastrous for T.S. Eliot” ... more »

What explains Amia Srinivasan’s popularity? Perhaps her tendency to avoid hard conclusions, argues Katha Pollitt ... more »

Even an obscure book by a great writer should never be considered obsolete. Consider the newfound relevance of Thomas Mann's Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man... more »

In 1865, Dostoevsky suggested a story idea to his editor and asked for 300 rubles. Thus Raskolnikov’s inauspicious origins... more »

Forget “blast!” or “confound it all!” Sometimes, as new research shows, proper swearing is what we need... more »

The history of the tractor. John Deere’s Model D squared off against Henry Ford’s Model F and an ingenious “Tractivator” ... more »

Once you are attuned to it, disgust is everywhere. But does it really define — and explain — humanity? ... more »

Hannah Arendt’s work is fundamentally about the discovery of human freedom and its gradual disappearance... more »

“In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status — our red badge of courage?”... more »

"If art ... performs any form of moral service, it does so by alerting us to the difficulties of being moral"  ... more »

Who needs English or political science, universities are wondering, when there’s engineering and computer science ... more »

Wittgenstein, who regarded philosophy as a “kind of magic,” noted more than a few parallels linking conjurers and philosophers ... more »

Robert Zaretsky is a professor devoted to reading in a world where his students are not. How absurd, right?... more »

Graydon Carter: “The Christopher Hitchens I knew and adored wouldn’t be like the majority of us, huddling in our trembling silence” ... more »

Confessions of a crossword constructor: The puzzle “acts as a window into our fantasies, tastes, and unyielding fixations” ... more »

Suicide has long been a concern of theology, philosophy, and, more recently, medicine. But what of the things no medicine can cure?  ... more »

George Steiner didn't give rise to a distinctive school of criticism. He was foremost a critic of critics  ... more »

Exhaustion, cynicism, a sense of ineffectiveness or diminished accomplishment — are we all burning out?... more »

Twitter encourages vulnerability among close-knit communities. It then rips such musings out of context, causing all hell to break loose  ... more »

Literature professors adopt a new humility but still must make their case: Why literature as opposed to, say, lawn care?... more »

Can a survey of philosophers’ views indicate the truth of philosophical ideas? Or does it yield just misleadingly tidy data points? ... more »

“People despise critics because people despise weakness, and criticism is the weakest thing you can do in writing,” said Dave Hickey, who died last month   ... more »

A great novelist requires a capacity for "determined stupor," an ability to retreat from the world. But the world never stops making demands... more »

Campuses get riled up about all sorts of things. But the university’s competence at educating students does not seem to exercise us at all ... more »

“Many of us today are in the grip of nostalgia for moral clarity, and so we hold onto unambiguous stories of injustice and resistance like planks from a sinking ship” ... more »

From his Byzantine Catholic upbringing to being anointed the Pope of Pop, what did Andy Warhol make of religion? ... more »

Is it possible to survey the state of philosophy? Despite a recent attempt, the field doesn’t neatly conform to a multiple-choice quiz ... more »

Even if you don't know what meta-ethics means, it can reveal a new way of understanding ourselves and others ... more »

“If self-care is a revealing cliché of the times, it may be about the amount of chatter that can be generated around questions of human need” ... more »

Late in a life of great loss, Robert Frost sought audiences to read poetry to late into the night - but never his most revealing work  ... more »

In the Age of Amazon, literature-as-culture has converged with literature-as-commerce ... more »

On being depressed. Instead of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” you’re left with “I can’t go on” ... more »

When corporations, hippos, gorillas, and rivers can all, legally, be classified as people, has personhood lost its meaning?... more »

The irony of the harpsichord: It produces delightful subtleties that can be heard only by the person playing it ... more »

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 »