New Books

Students trained to speak in a rarefied lexicon, vying for professors’ approval, competing for a few, unstable jobs: "The M.F.A. is graduate school in a funhouse mirror"... more »

Philip Larkin wrote 4,000 letters home, some masterpieces of curmudgeonly comedy. But over time, his ample gift hardened from playfulness into habit... more »

Writing weakens the intellect, or so claimed Socrates. Despite this, two new books set out to rehabilitate classical philosophy... more »

Philip Johnson wasn't a casual Nazi. He was very Nazi — the sort who insisted on reading Mein Kampf in the original German... more »

“Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow inquired on his deathbed. The answer was both... more »

Lord Byron was “dangerous to know” and “irritable to the point of mental disease.” The women in his life responded accordingly.... more »

To understand the semiotics of sleep, consider its opposite. Insomnia feels like collage, like looking at the world atilt... more »

"The internet hasn’t so much changed people’s relationship to news," says James Meek, "as altered their self-awareness in the act of reading it"... more »

Toward the end of his life, René Girard’s views darkened. “More than ever, I am convinced that history has meaning,” he wrote. “Its meaning is terrifying”... more »

The African Middle Ages were fascinating, but the era’s structures have largely disappeared — a consequence of mosques built of coral; palaces made from grass; whole towns built of salt... more »

Read Lucia Berlin and you’ll think: “Here is a woman who really knows what it’s like to vomit.” Patricia Lockwood explains... more »

“What’s a hundred years?” asks John McPhee. “Nothing. And everything.” His quiet, meticulous writing style was built to last... more »

The modern world teems with beliefs in astrology, paranormality, and demonic possession. But that isn't evidence we've left the Enlightenment’s legacy unfulfilled... more »

Edward Gorey created his modern Gothic aesthetic with one self-described aim: "make everybody as uneasy as possible." He was uniquely successful... more »

The hawking of Stephen Hawking has not ceased with his death. "The final book" would have benefited from a little more editing and a little less marketing... more »

Atheism needs theistic ideas to give it life. “Some of the most radical forms of atheism,” says John Gray, are indistinguishable from “some mystical varieties of religion”... more »

Claude Debussy's seeming aimlessness kept him in financial peril. It also afforded him the time to write La Mer, Pelléas et Mélisande, and exquisite chamber music... more »

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that technology would give rise to a 15-hour workweek. Instead it gave rise to pointless work... more »

Taciturn, discreet, undemonstrative, Fryderyk Chopin, that frail, tubercular Pole, was comfortable only at the piano... more »

“In a few years I can be top-flight painter if I want.” So said Jack Kerouac in 1956. Was his work really that good?... more »

About 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was born. Not long after, life emerged. Was it an inevitability of the laws of nature?... more »

Remembered for serene portraits, Félix Nadar lived a frenetic life. He was first to photograph underground and from the air, and was possibly the inventor of airmail... more »

The bedroom, a place of love and of death, seduces us. Unfortunately, a new "intimate history" does not... more »

What caused Nietzsche’s insanity? The usual theories — syphilis, seeing a horse being whipped — don’t hold up... more »

Automata of antiquity. Mythic Crete was the Silicon Valley of the ancient world, home of the cryptic maze, manned flight, self-guided arrows... more »

Tragedy and religion. Disease killed her son; her husband fell off a mountain. "No one escapes terrible loss," says Elaine Pagels... more »

Hermann Hesse was intent on alienating his parents. He smoked, read Turgenev with a revolver, and wrote bad poetry... more »

The Enlightenment definitively and rigidly shapes modern society. But the idea of all-encompassing rationality is a mirage... more »

The unlikely odyssey of Sergei Shchukin: How a Russian textile magnate became one of the most important patrons of the Parisian avant-garde... more »

The two Sylvia Plaths. How to reconcile her cheery letters — cooking, acquiring a hunky husband — with a disenchanting domestic life?... more »

The Beast of Beverly Hills. Architectural Digest made a fortune by placing a good bet: Americans would drool over celebrity, money, and power... more »

Life on the lecture circuit. Frederick Douglass’s moral crusade entailed exhausting rail journeys, hostile mobs, and time away from his dysfunctional family... more »

The many Karl Marxes: He is relentlessly reinterpreted, analyzed, medicalized, flattered, and diminished. Why can't we stop talking about him?... more »

Saul Bellow's youthful Trotskyism had, by the mid-‘60s, given way to liberalism. Then he wrote the first neoconservative novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet... more »

The cloaked fiend. Vampires, seen philosophically, represent “black illumination” and “blasphemous life.” They are a dark, epistemic riddle... more »

The appeal of Stoic philosophy to both ancient Romans and today’s therapy-chasing Americans is unsurprising. But darkness is at the heart of Stoicism... more »

"By one estimate," says Carl Zimmer, "genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the internet. It is outranked only by porn"... more »

A character study of God. Literary criticism is a valuable way to understand religious texts. But do the same methods work for the Bible and Quran?... more »

For Jill Lepore, history is about how we know what we know (or think we do), and what to make of the gap between evidence and truth... more »

Essays & Opinions

Ponderous, posturing, even silly, Hemingway’s fiction becomes more out of fashion every year. So why do we still read it?... more »

Pleasure and expertise. Those who play tennis well or cook well experience a kind of pleasure unavailable to others. Is the same true for those who read well?... more »

“We’re in hot water”; “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”; “a leopard cannot change its spots”: What exactly makes a cliché a cliché?... more »

The story of how a cripplingly shy, often sickly boy became Andy Warhol is also the story of our own antihumanist swerve... more »

“What a complex foamy mixture a couple is,” wrote Elena Ferrante. In our eagerness to uncover her identity, have we erred in assuming she is one person?... more »

Art is a way of contending with life, even in its shadiest corners. But does that cover artists like Egon Schiele, who displayed interest in prepubescent girls?... more »

Should studying literature be fun? Not if you want to be a serious scholar. Thus aesthetic appreciation became the province of nonacademic critics... more »

How did an uncharismatic Oxford medievalist create the most popular adventure story of the 20th century? Tolkien's stories had ideas, not ideology... more »

Want to be an artist? Jerry Saltz has some advice: Know what you hate, scavenge, be delusional, and, of course, accept that you will probably be poor... more »

Besides book blurbs, there are “pre-blurbs” and even “pre-pre-blurbs.” The blurbing industrial complex is out of control and must be destroyed... more »

Selfies, with machinelike monotony, reduce us to predictable characters. Can they become artistic statements, like self-portraits once were?... more »

We build the boxes we live in, write on square pieces of paper, and invented the four-cornered frame. This frame is what separates us from nature itself... more »

In the works of Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer is an argument for how to liberate the left from itself. Their ideas can look feeble or sentimental or unsophisticated. They are, in fact, necessary... more »

Saint Oscar, Wilde the Irishman, Wilde the wit, classicist, socialist, martyr for gay rights: The Oscar Wilde industry gives us the Wilde we need — or at least the Wilde that sells... more »

William H. Gass compiled a final collection near the end of his life, resigned to the fact that his real legacy would be buried by the fickle winds of literary opinion... more »

What's the burden of the black public intellectual? She defends and explains black culture, and argues for black people’s humanity, but does so for a white audience... more »

The greatest book ever written about the theater? The Season by William Goldman, who died recently. What makes it great? Its bluntness... more »

An idiom is like a musical phrase; a cliché is like an earworm. "If idioms help us think outside the box, clichés box us in"... more »

What do we mean when we talk about “quality of life”? Aging is not a problem to be solved. It is a meaning to be lived out... more »

The pun, long considered the lowest form of wit, is widely — and unfairly! — reviled. Puns are at once pedestrian and profound... more »

What is "cultural Marxism"? An old slander posing as a new insight. The myth led to grievous harm in the last century. How about ours?... more »

What makes bullshit bullshit? The answer is psychological and sociological, as well as linguistic and philosophical... more »

How did Sartre come to embrace Marxism? The tale involves his friendship with Camus, and his work at a clandestine newspaper... more »

"It remains startling to me how little many men have to do to earn intellectual authority," says Jill Lepore, "and how much more women have to do"... more »

The American Memoir tells a recurring story of personal responsibility and freedom from history. As Christopher J. Lebron explains, it is a lie... more »

Difficult books are difficult in different ways. Some are just plain bad. But readability is not always good. The case for difficult books... more »

Calling bullshit has a venerable intellectual pedigree. And why not? Bullshitters get the kudos without the work... more »

Wars of conquest have declined sharply over the past seven decades. Could a treaty signed in 1928 be the cause?... more »

Art, before the age of mechanical reproduction. The four extant original manuscripts of Old English poetry are a reminder of the yawning void of history... more »

When Donald Hall turned 80, he’d stopped writing poetry. He'd lost 60 pounds. He was ill and depressed. Then he rediscovered prose... more »

A golden age of English literature began under a draconian monarchy. For Thomas Wyatt, this meant collaborating with — and falling victim to — tyrants... more »

The whitewashing of antiquity. Fascists have long looked to the ancient world as a source of ideology and pride. They are abetted by a generation of scholars... more »

Francis Perey’s eureka moment had come. Unfortunately, the physicist’s landmark paper was “maddeningly repetitious philosophical froth”... more »

Who would have thought that n+1, largely founded by men, would in time become the world’s least boring journal of feminist theory?... more »

The art world is a place of cravenness and tropospheric wealth, beset by toxic rot and junkie-like behavior. Yet it can still produce good work... more »

Beyond dark and stormy nights. Gothic literature is more than candles and curses. Its chief concerns are terror, the sublime, and the uncanny... more »

True artistic freedom comes from not caring about quality, métier, or meaning. Magritte found it when he set those all aside to make a joke... more »

Claude Debussy, a "very, very strange man," was an acutely literary composer. His music, heavily influenced by poetry, is easy to love but hard to explain... more »

The Swedish Academy’s decision to take a year off from awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature brings to a close more than a century of foolishness... more »

The workings of the multimillion-dollar machine that publishes academic journals are complex. They're also implausible and outrageous... more »

The opponents of political correctness are not a pitiable collection of angry old white men. They are people of all ages and all colors protective of their liberties... more »

“He was a boy raised on a river.” Is there anything new to say about Mark Twain? In a slew of new books, scholars try and fail... more »

An orthodoxy has taken hold of intellectual, cultural, and academic life. Its hallmarks: moral preening, lazy attitudinizing, and grim-faced virtue-signaling. The remedy: Marxists against wokeness... more »

"The university has nurtured many partisan causes to which its members can devote themselves, but there seem to be few partisans of the university itself left"... more »

What happens when our writers and thinkers express themselves through Facebook instead of on the page? Imagine Herzog in the era of the status update... more »

Precision "pervades our lives entirely, comprehensively, wholly," says Simon Winchester. But does the abstract concept have a precise history? Yes. It begins in 1776... more »

The pernicious social dynamics of the internet. We overshare about our personal lives and fail to understand those of others. Narcissism spreads; empathy vanishes... more »

What is the point of a bookish life? It's not to become knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. It is to become wiser... more »

When his aged father and newborn son died within a few years of each other, William James took an interest in "ghosts and clairvoyances and raps and messages from spirits"... more »

Women do the lion’s share of the book reading, editing, agenting, and buying. Still, we live in a literary culture that ignores women... more »