New Books

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 »

Michael Sandel’s critique of meritocracy misses something obvious: Merit and credentials are not synonymous  ... more »

It was a neoclassical homage, “empire style,” “gauzy nudity.” In the late 18th century, a clinging white bedgown was the height of fashion ... more »

Like a nightmarish accordion, Kafka’s “lost” writings expand, trapping readers in their complexities. They make no easy task for the critic... more »

Thorstein Veblen seemed intent on torching every school of thought. Does the academy still produce such thinkers?  ... more »

The Ferrante Letters, a supposedly experimental critical project, ventures little beyond textual analysis. Quelle horreur!... more »

“Fail fast,” “fail better” — we celebrate failure as something inevitable on the path to success. That’s nonsense   ... more »

Down with occurrences! Our politics, wars, triumphs, and failures are mere “surface disturbances” and “crests of foam” on the great sea of history  ... more »

The question of how to live has long flummoxed great minds. But not cats: They have nothing to learn from philosophy... more »

The clock, the astrolabe, the university — the so-called “Dark Ages” produced some of our most important tools and concepts. It’s time to revisit the period... more »

The Didion gaze. What makes her work fascinating is also what makes it rare: a woman looking at men and not looking away  ... more »

Why did the West rise? Meritocracy, democracy, trust, innovation, and restraint, argues a new book. But was it really so simple?... more »

From the “morally hideous” to the terroristically violent, Kate Manne offers a clear taxonomy of misogyny. And yet no vision for the future emerges   ... more »

What constituted identity in the Renaissance? According to two new books, it was a slippery concept, bounded by neither mind nor body... more »

Selecting Adrienne Rich for a poetry prize, Auden praised her “neatly and modestly” finished work. So began her desire to be “messily passionate and grand”   ... more »

Even when the history of philosophy doesn't make sense philosophically, it does makes sense as a story   ... more »

War has advanced in lockstep with civilization, argues Margaret MacMillan. It is "the most organized of all human activities” ... more »

A rage to possess: Degas could not say no to calico headdresses, Normandy handkerchiefs, Gavarni prints, and Oriental carpets   ... more »

What's the best book of 2020? The New Statesman rounds up picks from Hilary Mantel, Steven Pinker, Pankaj Mishra, and other readers ... more »

In a new book of essays, Zadie Smith offers advice for getting through the pandemic: “Think, reflexively, of whoever suffers”  ... more »

“This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved. We persist.”  ... more »

When Michael Dirda first heard Wagner, he understood why Victorian mothers shielded their daughters from it. "This wasn’t just a 40-minute duet, it was aural sex"  ... more »

It's been said that "humans’ greatest invention was the invention of invention itself." What are the origins of our ingenuity?  ... more »

Sybille Bedford ran in elite literary circles with Peggy Guggenheim and Cyril Connolly. She kept her friends close — and exploited them mercilessly   ... more »

It’s easy to hate Ezra Pound for his racism and fascism. But consider his painful postwar years and another emotion may emerge: pity   ... more »

The growth of specialization is by no means regrettable. Pathological pedantry is a prerequisite for producing knowledge  ... more »

Historians have lost influence to economists and political scientists. Is that because the latter are more willing to court the powerful?  ... more »

Was Ted Hughes a wife-beater? That may depend on your interpretation of Sylvia Plath’s tale of a glass thrown across a dark room  ... more »

Gogol was strange, but consider his parents: His father was a sort of court jester; his mother thought her son invented the steamboat and the railroad... more »

Delve into Nabokov’s letters and lectures, and a familiar, impertinent question will occur: Was he a pervert? ... more »

Across five volumes totaling 2,500 pages, Joseph Frank did more than any other critic to illuminate the mind of Dostoevsky... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

Feynman, Hawking, and Herschel all insist that empirical evidence is the sole truth of science. Do they protest too much?   ... more »

America’s battle is not between a “liberal” left and a “fascist” right, but rather between the people and a grandiose system of political management   ... more »

Literature defines itself against the pedantry of popular advice. Self-help promotes itself as an antidote to intellectual bombast. Are the genres antithetical?   ... more »

“The world is a wild and unlikely place: the giraffe, stranger than the griffin, taller than a tall house, does us the incomparable gift of being proof of it”   ... more »

A profusion of new voices, all clamoring for readership, most unable to pay the bills: the 18th-century writing life... more »

Though his ideas have faded, the charismatic philosopher Franz Brentano achieved immortality by other means — his students   ... more »

Before there was cancel culture, Wagner was canceled. He hated Jews and was embraced by the Nazis. Yet his work has persisted  ... more »

A new translation casts Beowulf as a modern bro, making a point about toxic masculinity and leaving a trail of clichés ... more »

Self-awareness as a literary tic doesn’t arise out of thin air. So why have writers become so annoyingly self-conscious?  ... more »

In praise of minor aesthetics. The beautiful and sublime are rare; the cute, zany, interesting, and gimmicky are ubiquitous  ... more »

The election is over, but anti-intellectual resentment remains strong. What does that mean for the academy?  ... more »

Ours is an intellectually enfeebled milieu in which the self-interest of privileged white men is passed off as “global thinking”... more »

Don DeLillo and Martin Amis ruled the literary ’80s. Now they poke along, referencing their former genius  ... more »

The “first-person industrial complex.” Confessional writing — from Augustine to Jia Tolentino — turns desire into discourse. But why is it so dominant now?... more »

What happens when we pray? An anthropologist embeds with an evangelical church to distinguish the metaphorical from the miraculous ... more »

In praise of politics. It’s messy, unpredictable, and often disappointing. It’s also the starting point for meaningful societal change  ... more »

The “full-naming” crusade — against referring to some composers only by last name (Beethoven) but to others by full name — is just silly ... more »

Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, McEwan — the British baby boomers sink toward senescence with a wave of nostalgic, self-indulgent prose... more »

The Theory Wars of the '90s never ended; they just migrated from Diacritics to Twitter. There’s no end in sight  ... more »

Being an editor requires two qualities that rarely coexist in the same person, says Norman Podhoretz: arrogance and selflessness   ... more »

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 »