New Books

“Young men should prove theorems,” a mentor told a young Freeman Dyson. “Old men should write books.” Now 94, Dyson is following that advice... more »

The artist the public loved and the critics loved to hate. Who but Leonard Bernstein would begin a New York Philharmonic performance by singing the Kinks?... more »

The political intrigue, the horseback escape from arrest, the serial cheating — Pablo Neruda’s life was meant for telling. So how does a new biography fall flat?... more »

In 1778, two women abandoned their routines and took to the Welsh countryside to write, think, read, and entertain literary guests. Is such a life still possible today?... more »

At least since Aesop, animals were seen as symbols useful for understanding human morality. Then, in 1668, Descartes’s work changed everything... more »

Not content with absolute power, dictators write long and tedious books. That's not to say tyrants are always poor stylists. Stalin's strengths were modest, but real... more »

For Hannah Arendt, thinking was a form of political engagement. She didn't just want to find a place for herself in the world. She wanted to change it... more »

What undergirds our commitment to equality? For Bernard Williams, it’s our ability to love and to suffer. For Jeremy Waldron, it’s something broader... more »

Edward Lear would produce paintings as a hostess gift, regale companions with jokes and stories, and sing while accompanying himself at the piano. Best dinner guest ever?... more »

For Joseph Conrad, international politics was subject matter — but with what kind of global vision? To Chinua Achebe, he was simply a “bloody racist”... more »

James Wood was well matched to the literary style of the 1990s — aesthetics were in, politics out. Now things have changed. Does Wood still matter?... more »

Most remarkable about Alexander von Humboldt's scientific achievements is that he didn't accidentally kill himself long before 1859, when he died just short of 90... more »

Our understanding of consciousness is not just a “hard problem” — it’s a scandal, a mess. Into the fray ventures Antonio Damasio with his theory of homeostasis... more »

The anecdotes, the famous faces bobbing in and out of view, the reams of office lore (sex on the desk, nervous breakdowns in the bathroom stall): What is Rolling Stone’s legacy?... more »

The two Tennessee Williamses. He made sure his wildly transgressive stories reached only a niche audience. His sanitized Broadway big-hitters were another case entirely... more »

As Kate Manne and Mary Beard plumb the depths of the patriarchy, a question emerges: Has anything changed since The Odyssey?... more »

Harold Bloom has had it with comma counters, gender commissars, and literary critics. He is, to his own mind, a lone voice in the wilderness... more »

Before modern philosophy, there were Erasmus and Luther. Their dispute stands as a lasting reminder that among the threats to human flourishing, misplaced certitude shouldn’t be underestimated... more »

Life with Doris Lessing. An author attempts to enact her radical concept of freedom. But can a life so liberated regain a conventional shape?... more »

What happens to anthropology when its fundamental divisions are undone — when magic and reason, and “primitive” and “modern,” no longer organize the field?... more »

The world’s least orthodox literary salon: a fascist lecturing to literary titans in an asylum. Ezra Pound’s visitors, the “Ezrologists,” pioneered the tale of the “bughouse” visit... more »

Baffled cows, depressed does, and conniving roosters. Science paints an ever-fuller picture of the inner lives of animals. But are we any closer to understanding their minds?... more »

Fatalism is a permanent temptation of politics. Optimistic fatalism competes with the pessimistic variety. Democracy requires finding a way between them... more »

Don't underestimate the power of an impertinent question. That’s what drove Oriana Fallaci, whose interview subjects usually regretted giving her the time. “Being a journalist means being disobedient”... more »

Each generation of historians conveys the Jewish past in a way that's bound up with its vision of the Jewish future. Those visions generally turn out to be wrong... more »

Is criticism influential? If so, is that influence beneficial or malign? The first answer is yes. The second answer is complicated... more »

“The two ways," Kierkegaard wrote. "One is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffered.” But few suffered as much as the woman who loved him... more »

Many of our best theories are not true in a strict sense, but rather are idealizations. Such concepts, useful in everyday life, are intellectually dangerous... more »

We used to know what people meant when they spoke about someone’s "reputation." Now it's supposedly an elusive concept... more »

The notion that history consists of a single grand narrative is almost universally regarded as a comforting myth. But not to Marcel Gauchet ... more »

The bloodiest genre: books by dictators. Mao's Little Red Book,, Gaddafi’s Green Book, Saddam Hussein’s Get Out, You Damned One! ... more »

Eugene Genovese found much to admire in the culture of the slaveholding Southern planter class. It's a view shared by few, if any, historians today... more »

Darwin had eczema, so he grew a beard; Dickens hid his receding chin. Then there was the matter of George Eliot’s hands... more »

As a nurse during the Civil War, Walt Whitman met thousands of wounded soldiers. He confronted the sheer physicality of death: The soul may move on, but the body remains... more »

Writers and their mothers. Is there any hope for a broken heart? Eva Larkin asked her son, Philip. He was the best-qualified person to answer, or the worst... more »

What happens when biography — which, after all, is embodied history — puts mouths, bellies, and beards back into the 19th century? A wonderful experiment... more »

A thousand pages of heavily redacted text, years of legal appeals, a censorious scolding of the FBI. James Baldwin’s FBI file has had a life of its own... more »

"Excellence," "profession," "symposium," "text,": Where did the language of academic life come from, and how do certain words become the property of one ideology?... more »

Agatha Christie's unsolvable mystery: In 1926 she vanished for 11 days. When she was discovered — at a British spa — she refused to discuss her disappearance... more »

Essays & Opinions

The field of complexity science tackles questions like: Why are there 10,000 species of birds on Earth, but only 5,000 species of mammals? A key insight: Scale matters... more »

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” thought Auden. But properly understood, books are a type of magic: “To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it.”... more »

43 years ago, Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze.” Is it still artistically justifiable for a man to paint a naked woman?... more »

We express our emotions physically, but now we mediate them digitally as well. As Don DeLillo put it, “Nobody knows how to feel and they’re checking around for hints”... more »

"We won. ... But having won, we have no sense of balance or modesty or graciousness," Jaron Lanier says about those who built the internet. "So we kind of turned into assholes"... more »

Did Orwell really did shoot an elephant in Burma? Did Sontag accurately represent a get-together? The vagaries of memory pose a special threat for writers... more »

The true story is always the oppositional story. Or so goes the logic of both literature professors and the right-wing media. What have the radical politics of humanities professors wrought?... more »

How to be an intellectual. Find three uninterrupted hours per day; overcome boredom; mind the distinction between intellectuals and academics... more »

John Gray takes a dim view of reason. Indeed, he takes a dim view of humanity. He is a "card-carrying misanthrope for whom human life has no unique importance"... more »

While science advances, philosophy stays the same, asking the Big Questions again and again. The field is still immature... more »

The cult of Tocqueville: How did a Frenchman who hasn’t been in the United States in over 185 years become the man everyone loves to quote?... more »

The death of Seamus Heaney lets us mourn not only an artist of rare verbal gifts but also the loss of a language that long mapped a way of living... more »

Samuel Beckett's relationship with his mother was long, tempestuous, and, he realized, formative. “I am what her savage loving has made me”... more »

What makes scientific theories true? Falsifiability or observability work in some cases, but the madcap ideas that push the borders of knowledge require a different approach... more »

The writerly imperialism of Dave Eggers. His work is a combination of twee visual details, Muslim characters, and a well-meaning American exceptionalism... more »

Beware the grammar bullies! Morality and language are linked, argued Ursula K. Le Guin. But morality and correctness are not the same thing... more »

James Baldwin in Hollywood. He was there to make a movie about Malcolm X. It didn't go well. “I would rather be horsewhipped ... than repeat the adventure”... more »

"Populism" is a label often used but little understood. It's incoherent an ideology yet not to be dismissed as deranged or imaginary. Populism is a disease in the body politic... more »

The poet Joan Murray died at 24. Her manuscripts, sent to be preserved, apparently fell off the back of a truck. Is it fair, then, to call her a minor poet?... more »

When fiction fuels the future. Sun-powered screens, electric weather, telepathy via battery — by picturing what’s to come, does science fiction help us invent it?... more »

Hyper-liberalism is the academy's legitimating ideology, says John Gray. "The result is a richly entertaining mixture of bourgeois careerism with virtue-signaling self-righteousness"... more »

Our old photos follow us online, and it’s become increasingly difficult to achieve distance from the past. That’s changed our politics and, perhaps, our thinking... more »

For James Wood, the novel is “the slayer of religions.” Rationalist writers like Ian McEwan agree — they want their craft to be more scientific, less spiritual. Is it?... more »

In Shakespeare's time, there were no directors. Plays were performed without scenery, on open stages. It's still something of a mystery what directors do... more »

When did the sum total of a college’s intellectual value become reducible to its willingness to host controversial speakers?... more »

Communing with art won’t make you money, burn calories, or help you network. It may, writes Claire Messud, help you find joy in the superfluous and glory in each day... more »

Science is thought to be cold and clinical, art warm and encouraging of wonder. The drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal reveal that divide for what it is: nonsense... more »

"I am sick to death of hearing about Karl Marx. I am sick of his name, his -isms, his undoubted genius, and his 'philosophy.' Most of all, I am sick of his 'relevance'"... more »

Workers get more education; their productivity and income go up. A nation gets more education; its productivity and income go up. Hogwash, says Bryan Caplan... more »

A crisis stalks the modern world: the hunt for manliness. It began in the 19th century and continues to contaminate politics and culture... more »

Whatever happened to alienation? It was once considered central to modern life, the stuff of Sartre, Camus, and Salinger. Now it seems to have vanished... more »

Was Eve “seduced” by the serpent? The question is familiar for being so ancient. Anne Enright has an answer: No... more »

Academic satire has gone the way of the theory-brandishing rock stars it once lampooned. Academics aren't laughing anymore; they're despondent... more »

Idleness, Virginia Woolf thought, could be both strenuous and catatonic. The Bloomsbury Group was lazy, and proud of it — they were theorists (and practitioners) of leisure... more »

We hear a lot about "the future of work." The future of leisure? Not so much. Finding fulfillment in free time is a talent, and we're losing it... more »

P.G. Wodehouse was not merely unserious but positively anti-serious, and therein lay much of his considerable charm — and the cause of considerable trouble... more »

The idea of privilege — the accusation of privilege — has moved many people to say things not only nonsensical and ungenerous, but simply untrue... more »

The finest art, felt the Greeks, was a perfect illusion of reality. “Aphrodite of Knidos” blurred the boundary between marble and flesh... more »

We like to think of liberal democracy as deepening its roots with every passing year. But democracy is in decline, and young people especially are disenchanted... more »

The male glance is the opposite of the male gaze. Rather than linger lovingly on women, it looks, assumes, and moves on. It is ruining our ability to see good art... more »

Albert Camus and Maria Casarès traded nearly 1,000 letters. Reading them, we discover a man we thought we knew and a woman most of us never knew... more »

Haters of literature bring four charges: abuse of authority, lack of morality, perversion of truth, and diminished usefulness. Yet they mask a more depressing reality — shared indifference to literature... more »

Since Rousseau, at least, we've told ourselves a story about the shape and direction of human history. Big problem: It isn't true... more »

What attracted a gregarious psychiatrist to a reclusive professor? Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze bonded over a mutual distrust of identity... more »

Who is more to blame for the crisis of liberalism over the past four decades: Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler — or Lawrence Summers?... more »

October 18, 1973: Sotheby's auctioned works by Twombley, Johns, and Rauschenberg. It was called the day the art world collapsed. Well, no, but it was the beginning of the end... more »

The incarnations of Bruno Latour. A devoted Catholic disdainful of universal truths, critic of science turned climate-science promoter, playwright, military collaborator... more »

According to Will Self, novels are a jungle gym for the mind. So choose challenging texts: “No one ever got smart by reading … Dan Brown”... more »

A taxonomy of unfinished novels. Common causes include writer’s block and death. Then there are those works whose unfinishability is an aesthetic virtue... more »

The history of anti-literature: Whether Plato's denouncing literary fantasy or Oscar Wilde's labeling art useless, they are unintentional tributes... more »