New Books

The invention of alphabetical order signaled a shift from a world with intrinsic order to one we must organize   ... more »

A new biography of Lucian Freud withholds gossip into “private affairs.” That’s a shame — Freud’s private affairs propelled his art   ... more »

Intellectual detours are key to learning, and the ability to take them is a skill to nurture  ... more »

Jew, poet, homosexual, painter, punster, novelist, critic, palm-reader, ether-addict, Kabbalist, Catholic: Who was Max Jacob?  ... more »

“Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics,” John Carey wrote. But not necessarily wiser... more »

The maddening Martin Amis. He denounces authors’ asides into dreams, sex, and religion… and then commits those very novelistic sins  ... more »

The voice of The Atlantic is authoritative, high-minded, empirical — and, once you’ve heard it enough, utterly tedious ... more »

The history of knowledge and its enemies was best summed up by Heinrich Heine: “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings” ... more »

Alexis de Tocqueville mastered many styles. He could be romantic, clever, or ruthlessly withering... more »

His legacy may be oppressive factory work, but in 1914 Henry Ford also gave America the $5 work day: “Social justice begins at home,” the company said  ... more »

“Some, though not much, poetic force.” “Great imitative power.” “Not quite a Tintoretto of verse.” Longfellow’s contemporaries were unimpressed  ... more »

The decade between World War I and the Great Depression featured intense intellectual creativity. Was this German philosophy's last great moment? ... more »

It's always been hard to make a living as an artist. But has the aspiration essentially become obsolete?  ... more »

The 2020 intellectual situation: The politics of consumerism, and of grievance, have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility  ... more »

"If you are reading this, you are very probably WEIRD," says Daniel Dennett. “But we are outliers on many psychological measures"  ... more »

John Steinbeck did not take feedback well. He scorned the Pulitzer and the Nobel. And criticism sent him into a rage... more »

Portrait painters live to please, Dr. Johnson said, and must please to live. Goya was not like that ... more »

Kafka, unfinished. To see the author as he was, turn to a new collection of his fragments... more »

Richard Hofstadter has entered the pantheon as a status-quo-defending liberal. But what of his radical roots?... more »

The knock on Derrida was that he was a peddler of gimmicks. He never shook the fear that those who saw him as a charlatan were right... more »

The 18th century brought an end to the age of the polymath. Specialization made it both more challenging and more important to seek holistic knowledge  ... more »

Is there such a thing as "the Viking Mind," a shared sensibility and worldview that emanated from medieval Scandinavia?  ... more »

For John Steinbeck, individuals revealed little of humanity. Our true nature could only be grasped in the plural — by groups and phalanxes   ... more »

Is there a better parodist and pasticheur alive than Tom Stoppard? But is he an artistic parasite? Hardly... more »

What was it about Nazi ideology, at least early on, that appealed to Germans? Its vagueness. People saw what they wanted to see... more »

The monstrosity at the heart of modern science. To get to the top requires “a degree of single-mindedness that is quite inhuman”  ... more »

Will Self is known for both his gloom and his antic joviality. His memoir reveals a life spent skirting every commitment — except to inebriation ... more »

What is a Shakespearean sensibility? Via musicality, rhythm, grandeur, "we seem to hear words pushing restlessly through the soil of thinking."   ... more »

Though their work is rooted in the visual, most art historians are readers rather than lookers. Leo Steinberg was different  ... more »

Streaming music is more efficient than CDs, right? Wrong. “The environmental cost of music is now greater than at any time”  ... more »

Walter Gropius achieved fame by passing off Lucia Moholy’s work as his own. Meanwhile, she lived in poverty  ... more »

In the ’60s, predictive voter analytics was taken as science fiction, as dystopian, as a scandal. Now we meekly accept it... more »

For Vivian Gornick, feminism was a new way of interpreting the world. Then, around 1980, she returned to literature  ... more »

Was Beowulf a bro? A new, feminist version of the epic paints a fierce picture of masculine weakness  ... more »

It’s been said that the correspondence of great artists and idealists is mostly about money. Van Gogh is no exception  ... more »

The Reformation was “one of the worst periods in the history of knowledge.” Why? Its fondness for book burning... more »

How to think about disaster. Accepting one’s place in a vast, complex, and violent world is healthier than it sounds... more »

When Christopher met Martin. It happened at the New Statesman in the early '70s. Now Hitchens is at the heart of Amis's new novel... more »

Neanderthals walked the earth for 350,000 years. We don't know how they disappeared, but we know more than ever before about how they lived  ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Why is autofiction so white? Perhaps it’s an inevitable result of a literary landscape dominated by white editors and critics   ... more »

Does history really “have its eyes on us,” as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s George Washington says? Where did this idea come from, anyway?   ... more »

Hannah Arendt is the most used and abused philosophical source to interpret American politics. Sam Moyn explains  ... more »

"The mob is drunk on the new power that surveillance provides them, seemingly unaware of the many ways it could come back to bite them next" ... more »

Political poems were “excruciating”; the “so-called arts of the left” were insincere — for George and Mary Oppen, politics and the arts did not mix   ... more »

Ruthlessly self-absorbed, obsessed with power, a sexual predator — Simone de Beauvoir was not a good person. But at least she stood for something  ... more »

What makes Chekhov unique? His perception, his ability to discern the subtlest emotional shades of human experience. Gary Saul Morson explains ... more »

"A grabby talky disorderly inferno of the spirit." William Gaddis's J R was almost comically ahead of its time  ... more »

What do we mean when we say a piece of art is "relevant"? The characterization says less about the work than about the audience... more »

The talents of the painter and poet Max Jacob were legion. Their fullest expression may have come in an overcrowded prison cell for Jews in Orléans in 1944  ... more »

James Wood has a suggestion: "Every professor of literature should stand in a classroom and announce (in effect): 'My god, this is beautiful.' And yes, do it every year, anew" ... more »

The meaning of a mustache. For Wesley Morris, it’s a way to connect to Blackness, and to a legacy of improving America ... more »

A bookstore is a place of reverie, digression, discovery. As efficiency-accustomed customers have discovered, it is not Amazon Prime... more »

Some poets harvest a narrow field. Robert Conquest had an appetite — and a satirical bite — for the world and all it contains ... more »

Stanley Kubrick demonstrated a contradiction: He was a rebel who succeeded, yet his films are about rebels who fail  ... more »

For seven weeks in 1726, it was believed that a woman, Mary Toft, could give birth to rabbits. It was a gift to satirists, but torment for Toft... more »

Many of us still believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch. Why? An improvisational millenarianism has taken root ... more »

Liberalism’s discontents. Does it, as Catholic intellectuals contend, offer “thin gruel” in lieu of deeper moral commitments?... more »

In a 50-year run at The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett produced more than 500 essays on jazz. They amount to a blueprint for arts criticism... more »

In America, self-storage is a national psychopathology. Behind it lurks the dream of infinite space... more »

Luc Sante on reality TV: “It’s like the stuff I’m interested in, but with all the poetry taken out and all the money put in”  ... more »

To understand seduction, we must consider both Pamela and the modern pickup artist. So claims a new book, dubiously  ... more »

As Homer shows, truth can be revealed in concentric circles radiating out from the plot. As Sebald shows, such narrative rings can also bamboozle   ... more »

Universities have long played host to eccentric ideas. But a tolerance for debate has survived. Is that now in doubt?   ... more »

Surrounded by revolutionary fervor in China, Eileen Chang chronicled smaller revolutions, in romance and lust. She would have been 100 today ... more »

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop exported a literature of individualism and domesticity, not of solidarity and big ideas. Creative writing is still recovering  ... more »

Beethoven, political leftist? The melodies have been dulled through overuse, their subversiveness no longer audible  ... more »

Are we living in a historical inflection point — the exact moment at which the most consequential human decisions are being made? Probably not   ... more »

Editing RBG. She was precise and unyielding. At the book party, she wore black-lace gloves. Scalia worked the door  ... more »

Camus didn't do inspiration. And hope, he believed, is for suckers. But that doesn't mean he condoned despair ... more »

The “encrappification” of America. From the Veg-O-Matic to Beanie Babies, the nation has a long, wasteful history of loving cheap stuff  ... more »

Before Robin DiAngelo, there was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both reveal the limits of reading in pursuit of social justice... more »

The tech gurus tell us that the future of higher ed is adaptive tutors, chatbots, AI, and virtual reality. They're wrong  ... more »

The tempo of life reaches a frenzy, and yet we feel stuck. One balm for our internet-accelerated age: read old books... more »

The internet is not what you think it is. For one thing, its intellectual roots go back to 19th-century conjecture on snail copulation  ... more »

The “bad old days” of academia were full of favoritism, prejudice, and indolence. But sometimes the professors showed up fully clad and sober ... more »

Down with the dons. English professors have all the book reviewer’s traditional faults — only more so... more »

Synthesis, sweep, and all-encompassing theorizing are out of fashion in the academy today. Was René Girard the last of the hedgehogs?   ... more »

A columnist's lament: His feuilletons on artists and academics go unappreciated by algorithms. Are readers still interested?  ... more »

Nepotism is an ugly word, and few issues provoke as much anger and frustration, especially in the literary world. But how bothered should we really be?   ... more »

Is smoking an issue of individual liberty? Or is it something much more: "a signifier for what we have accomplished in agriculture, economics, thought, and expression" ... more »

Whatever dark future social media is speeding us toward, we are co-pilots. We want to waste our time. We find satisfaction in endless, circular argument... more »

Pankaj Mishra’s writing emphasizes the weight of history, but not its excitement and contingency. A bleak, fatalistic image is the result   ... more »

Modern pessimism was born on November 1, 1755, when an earthquake leveled Lisbon. A golden period of Enlightenment came crashing down with it   ... more »

Punctuation and revolution. In 1905, the "Comma Strike" among Moscow's printers led to political reform. Punctuation can still make us angry ... more »

Tocqueville on wheels. Desert car races, like democracy, are about more than ambition counteracting ambition. Both racing and democracy require self-restraint and virtue  ... more »

We've built a politics around the idea that a college degree is a prerequisite for social esteem, says Michael Sandel. That's been corrosive to democratic life... more »

In 1878, Mark Twain nearly outed himself as a believer in the paranormal. He thought no one would take him seriously. But was he serious?  ... more »

What Joseph Brodsky was able to set in motion: "Not the limits of a meager idea, but the activity of thought itself."  ... more »

Books are more permanent than magazine articles. So why are only the latter subjected to fact checking?  ... more »