New Books

John Richardson once cracked: “Pampered lunatics often reach a great age.” And so it was with Lucian Freud... more »

Dostoevsky in love. What's romance to a man who believed that suffering gave value to existence?   ... more »

Stop reading like a critic. It’s time we treat Beckett and de Beauvoir the same way we do Beyoncé and the Boss — with devotion  ... more »

More than the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of two flesh-and-blood daughters  ... more »

For George Saunders, fiction is fundamentally moral. Despite all that it can teach us, however, it is not our salvation ... more »

Anne Applebaum is deft at critiquing anyone to her left or right. She is far less willing to interrogate her own assumptions  ... more »

“All things are made of elementary particles," says Frank Wilczek. Understanding them is a triumph of modern physics  ... more »

When did "fitness" become not just a physical but a moral good, the obligatory aim of every citizen? ... more »

The age of wood. Lewis Mumford called it “the most various, the most shapeable, the most serviceable” of materials. It's also the most underappreciated ... more »

Amid these apocalyptic-seeming times, one philosopher’s vision stands out. This is a moment for Machiavelli... more »

Leïla Slimani wins literary accolades for busting taboos around sex and violence. But does her work actually reinforce those conventions?... more »

Harry Houdini could escape from seemingly impossible situations. But he couldn't escape his roots   ... more »

Cary Grant's greatest role was Cary Grant, a persona of elegance, charisma, and charm  ... more »

Was Louis Kahn a true sage, or just a bushwa artist talented at conning the eggheads at Yale and Penn?  ... more »

The creative class flourished for decades in the middle of the 20th century, then was crushed. Can it be rebuilt?... more »

Knausgaard returns, with a collection of earnest, tedious, minor essays. Is excessive literary production a social offense?   ... more »

Molded in the mythos of meritocracy, millennials have now become the burnout generation... more »

"I am a Christian," insisted Thomas Jefferson. But he had no patience for metaphysical claims. So he went about reinventing Jesus... more »

The survival of a moderate conservatism may have become inextricable from the survival of liberal democracy itself  ... more »

"Demons are more than crazed hypotheses or ungrounded thought experiments; they are quietly central to our very understanding of the world"   ... more »

A.J. Ayer quipped that the problem with logical positivism was that “nearly all of it was false.” But it was "true in spirit" ... more »

Harold Bloom viewed literature as a contest, measuring writers against a yardstick of purportedly timeless values  ... more »

Merpeople: For Linnaeus, they were next to seals and manatees, for Darwin, they explained a missing link. Now they’re being connected to queer identity  ... more »

Fredrik deBoer and Michael Sandel say meritocracy is a bad idea, but really their beef is with the imperfect implementation of the system... more »

Heinrich Heine was an idealistic devotee of German culture. That didn't blind him to what made it so dangerous  ... more »

The best of 20th-century philosophy urges us to be fearless, critical, and creative, and to avoid orthodoxies, ideologies, and obscurantist nonsense... more »

Isabel Wilkerson’s study of caste illuminates much about India. But in an American context, it merely obfuscates ... more »

Of the many misrepresentations about Adorno, the most persistent is that he had little aptitude for practical politics. Nonsense ... more »

For Twain and Woolf, little was as tedious as discussing the weather. And yet such conversation continues — implacably, abysmally... more »

A spate of books peddles philosophers, from Socrates to William James, as gurus of the good life. Try Spinoza... more »

Is strongman a useful category for political analysis? A new book stretches the definition beyond its limits... more »

Philip Roth, Jewish patron saint of rage and writing, never forgave ex-wives, nosy neighbors, or scathing critics. His thin skin grew thinner over the years... more »

When people struggle to read a classic like the Iliad, it’s not because of a moral aversion. It’s because they’re bored and confused ... more »

What’s behind the highbrow hostility to works of self-help? It’s the status anxiety of professional critics, argues a new book... more »

Beneath Thorstein Veblen’s austere exterior and grim scowl lurked a dimly perceptible reservoir of hope  ... more »

Michel Gallimard and Albert Camus were killed in a car crash in 1960. Gallimard was driving fast, but was foul play the true cause?   ... more »

Graham Greene's restlessness — a new country, a new woman — shaped his work and wrecked his life  ... more »

What's right about rights and wrong with virtues? Rights don't depend on those who suppose themselves to be virtuous ... more »

Kate Manne’s consideration of misogyny is full of mockery, condemnation, and fatalism. We deserve better from our public intellectuals ... more »

Essays & Opinions

There’s an app for that! The notion that technology offers the best solution to any problem is appealing. It's also dangerous   ... more »

How should we read? For Will Self, “we would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text” ... more »

The paradox of political science: Only by remaining aloof from the messiness of politics can it achieve the scientific authority it craves  ... more »

“I have never written a plot-driven novel,” held Ursula Le Guin. “I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t”  ... more »

The isolation artist. Edward Hopper's paintings make an emotional resurgence amid our sustained solitude  ... more »

When Catherine Camus was informed of the death of her son Albert, all she could say was, “Too young”  ... more »

Americans say they want 2.5 children, but they're having only 1.7, on average. Why? Ross Douthat's case for larger families... more »

Ferociously dull and laden with puffery, the academic book review is a tedious genre that's outlived its purpose ... more »

The genius of Schubert’s syphilitic years was to draw the listener into his melancholy world, all the while pointing to an unattainable beauty ... more »

René Girard was not a particularly great theorist. It's easy to spot his weaknesses and lacunae. But he is the theorist our era deserves... more »

The goal of all art is inexhaustible precision — something simple, like Melville’s whale, that gains endlessly in complexity... more »

Henri Breuil, “the Pope of Prehistory,” did more than anyone else to prove that our early ancestors were capable of symbolic thought... more »

"To find humor in death isn’t to degrade or deny the sanctity of human life, but rather to grapple with its finite nature"  ... more »

"If one were interested in the sexual life of the professoriate at the turn of the last century, it would be strange to omit Veblen" ... more »

The artist who most acutely registers the deranged quality of contemporary American public life? Peter Saul... more »

Over the past 70 years, popular culture has gone from realism to fantasy and science fiction. Blame, in part, Ray Bradbury... more »

"Historians will record that in the early decades of the 21st century we became an unforgiving society, a society of furies, a society in search of guilt and shame"... more »

More than a few writers have been drunks. Is their drinking part of a negotiation with their own impossibly high standards? ... more »

Graham Greene, steeped as he was in bleak moral choices, was delighted that French attempts to pronounce his name sounded like “Grim Grin” ... more »

Every year, David Brooks compiles a list of the best long-form essays of the year. Here are his 2020 Sidney Awards... more »

What was so different about Beethoven? The novelty of his rhythms, which turned into plot, into argument, into speech ... more »

America, writes David Blight, is polarized in a cold civil war. The core questions of the original Civil War and Reconstruction era remain unanswered ... more »

“Rather than shoving all our debates into a single, hellish town square, let each town have its own” ... more »

A failed philosophical mission: Plato urged Dionysius I to abandon wine and orgies. In response, the tyrant sold Plato into slavery... more »

Scientists' mistakes are regrettable but usually not sinister. Science remains the gold standard of truth. And it needs defending ... more »

E.P. Thompson’s rise was a paradoxical intellectual event: “history from below” promised social uplift, yet ignored colonial realities... more »

The banality of empathy. Empathizing with fictional characters is too often seen as an ethical good. It’s not   ... more »

Why have restaurant reviews become smackdowns? Our appetite for blood sport distorts how critics write and think about food ... more »

William Gaddis was cynical about America, wishing it were more like Costa Rica. But he never lost hope entirely... more »

Eating with Italian futurists: oranges should be balanced on one’s head, meat eating should be synchronized with trumpet blasts, pasta should be avoided ... more »

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sought to transform the world by reintroducing old stories. Nearly a century later, they’ve been remarkably successful ... more »

Before the Gilded Age, classical music was on par with juggling acts and vaudeville tunes. Beer — not wine — flowed. What changed?... more »

Consider pinnacles of literary culture: Elizabethan England, 19th-century Russia, Flaubert’s France. America, in 2020, is at the other end of that spectrum ... more »

For the academic left, science is a hegemonic force with sweeping authority over the modern world. But that misunderstands science   ... more »

Now bludgeoned by liberals, the idea of American exceptionalism was itself a creation of the left  ... more »

What does the pandemic portend for the arts in America? We can’t even agree that culture matters, much less how to protect it ... more »

People who grouse about cultural appropriation aren't just puritanical; they don't respect the anarchic energies of art... more »

Modern poetry is intimidating. But you don’t need expertise in ekphrasis to appreciate Ross Gay, Frank Bidart, and Ada Limón ... more »

Era of cant. Wherever people are punished for expressing an unorthodox opinion, humbug is bound to flourish  ... more »

The art of artificial intelligence. Are we at the dawn of a new medium? If so, it would portend a doleful future  ... more »

Gone are the days of voracious nerding out in the academy. Such work must now demonstrate a new moral piety  ... more »

“The difficulty of making out the plain sense of poetry.” Literary studies faces a foundational problem: Making distinctions comes with diminishing returns... more »

Montaigne studied classical philosophy but claimed to learn nothing from it — the only moral authority he recognized was his own  ... more »

America is a government of words, our language shaping our politics. Which is why we need critics like David Bromwich  ... more »

"The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important,” said William Faulkner, as if he knew his personal failings would diminish his professional reputation   ... more »

Genius is, among other things, a personality-laundering scheme. Boorish behavior is reclassified as charming idiosyncrasy. Agnes Callard explains ... more »

Henry Adams, American aristocrat. His friends adored him, but his “distilled and vitriolic mockery” was an acquired taste  ... more »

The right-wing Medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz once killed Communists. Later, at Berkeley, he refused to sign a Cold War loyalty oath. Why?... more »

Freud’s philosophy of grief. How the loss of a daughter shaped a father’s understanding of death ... more »

Harold Bloom’s last book is lazy, solipsistic, vague, and plain wrong. It suggests that he may have misunderstood literature all along... more »