New Books

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 »

When should novelists hang it up? Consider the increasingly wobbly, bloated work of Salman Rushdie, a writer in free fall... more »

"When a book sits next to the internet, its authority as the final word on anything is automatically undermined." But you can't pop a cyst with a phone... more »

Has Anthony Kronman written the most undiplomatic attack on diversity in the academy ever produced by a senior university official?... more »

Anarchism has been among the most daring, imaginative political currents of the modern age. Terry Eagleton explains... more »

In investigating its subject, a book invokes Freud, Heidegger, geography, and the nature of home. The matter at hand? Pigeons ... more »

In America, science was shaped by the CIA, the State Department, and the Cold War. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily without intellectual integrity... more »

To understand Whitman’s impact on present-day writing, look no further than a poetic project on delight — delight in cardinals, in log piles, in nicknames... more »

Lincoln was out of his depth politically. Moral hazard in banking isn’t a serious threat. Walter Bagehot had a talent for epic miscalculation... more »

The intellectual coward. Victor Serge knew the type: playing word games, dabbling in fashionable politics, inciting “nothing but a revolt of literary cafes”... more »

The rise and fall of an imperial discipline. Economics once wielded vast political influence, but is the intellectual marketplace now moving on?... more »

Eric Hobsbawm's parents died within a span of two years, from heart attack and lung disease. The teenager found a new family in the Communist Party... more »

Were Beethoven’s works politically charged? The historical context encourages such a view, but the music itself suggests something murkier... more »

Iris Murdoch likened language to a net cast over the mind, constraining thoughts according to the landings of its knots and threads... more »

Let us praise the semicolon, the punctuation that helps us pause and think as it pushes us forward to what's next... more »

Sexism and anthropology. Margaret Mead was fearless in her investigations of culture. But later, who could protect her academic reputation from vicious attacks?... more »

Film’s forgotten man Robert G. Haines appeared, as an extra, in many of the greatest movies ever made. What does his omnipresence mean?... more »

The way we think about derivative translations and pure originals is all wrong. It rests on clichés and lazy approaches... more »

A poetic friendship is born: Wordsworth had just abandoned his daughter; Coleridge then abandoned his own family to spend more time with Wordsworth... more »

The challenge facing any biographer of Frederick Douglass: Work your way behind the self-made public hero of the autobiographies and find the private man... more »

Simone Weil was devoted to alleviating the suffering of others. André Weil, her brother, was devoted to numbers. He became a great mathematician; she became unhinged... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

When Umberto Eco died, obituarists struggled to explain his project. It was to explode the line dividing high and popular culture... more »

Democracy is in crisis! Or so warns a gaggle of alarmist books — all of which seem to poorly grasp how democracy actually works... more »

Efficiency for what? We talk of “optimizing” our diets, exercise, and appearance, but rarely of optimizing child care or political representation... more »

Being David Foster Wallace’s pen pal meant, at least for Susan Barnett, quips, dog discussions, and tolerating endless come-ons... more »

For Claude Lévi-Strauss, studying man is like studying a mollusk: One must find the geometric beauty of the task... more »

Despite a plethora of aesthetic points of view, there is still a line between respecting bad taste and being complicit in it... more »

"I write this because I’m dying as a poet," says Bob Hicok. "I’m a straight white guy, and the face of poetry is finally changing"... more »

H. G. Wells, diviner of the future. The art of prediction is difficult, he determined, and thus warrants an academic solution: “Professors of Foresight”... more »

John Ruskin’s literary reputation is in tatters, but he offered some wisdom. For example: “The most beautiful things in the world are the most useless”... more »

“We are sick of you and your weird diseases, go home!” A tour of the red-light district of Amsterdam with Oliver Sacks... more »

“You sit in a plaza and it occurs to you that other people have been in your situation, whatever it is, and this knowledge is at the heart of civility”... more »

Science has a data problem — its reliance on “statistical significance” has thrown it into disarray. An alternative standard beckons... more »

To celebrate a work, Jackson Pollock got drunk, arrived naked at a party, and urinated in the fireplace. Or so said Peggy Guggenheim... more »

How to rebuild Notre-Dame? Make it modern, some say, with a spire of glass or even crystal. Witold Rybczynski dissents... more »

A cache of Saul Bellow letters is discovered in the attic of a private residence — more evidence that the man was incapable of writing a boring sentence... more »

Nineteenth-century Paris was not a good place for female artists, as Berthe Morisot and her sister discovered. As Manet put it, “It’s annoying they’re not men”... more »

Against mindfulness. Sold as a remedy for all occasions, it oversimplifies the difficult business of understanding oneself... more »

When Max Weber began his talk "Politics as a Vocation," he did so with ambivalence. "This lecture," he said, "will necessarily disappoint you"... more »

There are many casualties in trying to quantify student learning. Is the link between metaphor and imagination one of them?... more »

What does it cost to be a citizen of the literary world? Time, for one thing. But the demands we make of women writers are outsize ... more »