New Books

“I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child,” wrote Nabokov. So are his interviews at all worthwhile?... more »

When Wittgenstein went to war, the gossip machine quickly determined that he was a burnt-out wreck and a disgrace to the field... more »

Is most modern liberalism just the Christian heresy of Pelagianism by another name? A revisionist critique of John Rawls says yes... more »

Elizabeth Bishop’s dogged pertinacity: She would spend years, even decades, on a poem. Every word, every nuance, had to be perfect... more »

The National Review, American Greatness, and The Claremont Review of Books share a vision of American nationalism. That vision is a lie... more »

Lucian Freud thought Celia Paul was just another pretty muse. But she was a painter herself. Zadie Smith unpacks “museography”... more »

Science is trustworthy because it works, right? Well, most scientific theories throughout history have turned out to be false. Is our time different?... more »

Rivalries, alleged plagiarism, rapturous fandom — the giants of Russia’s golden age of literature had complicated relationships with one another... more »

Lydia Davis is a modern Vermeer, patiently observing everyday life, but from odd and askew angles... more »

In terms of its influence, The Economist has long been a publication like no other. It can plausibly be said to have made the modern world... more »

For García Márquez, the relationship between journalism and fiction was symbiotic: Journalism was an apprenticeship for fiction... more »

Jefferson's lofty vision for the University of Virginia was not shared by its early students. Riots in 1825 brought him to tears... more »

In John Hersey's day, all news was slow news. Hiroshima appeared more than a year after the bombing. The delay contributed to its style, substance, and accuracy... more »

By the end of his life, John Rawls had a stature so great that he shaped the very idea of what philosophy is. Has this become a problem?... more »

Jill Lepore's problem. She is among the most eloquent preachers of the liberal gospel. Yet she's preaching in increasingly radical times... more »

Is the modern world receptive to ancient ideas? A new series of compact and handsome pocket-sized translations seeks to find out... more »

On a February night in 1965, William F. Buckley squared off against James Baldwin. For Buckley, it was his most satisfying debate. For Baldwin, not so much... more »

Howard Zinn told America's story as a simplistic melodrama. But the latest attempt to create an appealing alternative is no less flawed... more »

Wokeness and its discontents. Has social-justice activism devolved into narcissistic sloganeering? Maybe. But the left doesn't have a monopoly on navel-gazing... more »

Auden described poetry as "a way of happening." Poetry matters because it represents the possibilities to which intelligent and humane social life should point... more »

Identity politics was the one form of politics Susan Sontag didn’t want to play. She didn't want to be a Jewish critic, a feminist author, or a lesbian writer... more »

Condé Nast’s formula: “appeal to a moneyed, aspirational readership.” As glossy magazines decline, is anything lost along with the elite tastemaker-editor?... more »

Daniel Mendelsohn's critical art. His commitment to nuance and his synoptic view of a subject, whether ancient or contemporary, make him essential... more »

Germaine Greer's On Rape has been widely lambasted as "deeply ill-informed." That's unfair, says Mary Beard. But that doesn't mean it's a good book... more »

A subversive history of music. New sounds come from the margins — slaves, outlaws, criminals, poor country folk, foreign emigrants, and inner-city kids... more »

How should we think about what it is to read, what forms that reading takes, and why we turn to books in the first place? Leah Price has answers... more »

Are innovators creative geniuses or mere tinkerers? Edison was unequivocal: “I’ve got no imagination. ... My so-called inventions already existed”... more »

The story of how Silicon Valley reached the center of the American dream is about how tech's shortcomings became those of the nation... more »

"The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is not always worth reading." Thus a new memoir from Thomas Chatterton Williams ... more »

Auberon Waugh and the art of writing about wine. Tasting notes include stale cardboard, French train stations, old penknives, and a dead chrysanthemum... more »

The anthropologists who coined “cultural relativism” discovered that, in fact, not all cultures were equal. American culture, they felt, was inadequate... more »

“All they do is show you’ve been to college,” wrote Vonnegut about semicolons. Why does punctuation inspire such strong feelings?... more »

“Philosophy progresses, not by producing better theories, but by the elimination of confusion through the clarification of what, in some sense, we knew all along.”... more »

In Greece, Byron’s doctor diagnosed epilepsy and siphoned off half the blood in his body. But perhaps it was the poet’s diet that did him in... more »

Seamus Heaney is famous for poems of bogs, ditches, and sectarian violence. But he became a poet of happiness... more »

Nicholas Coleridge has heard it all. Young people with sex tips; Prince Andrew on building a golf course; Margaret Thatcher ranting about the lottery... more »

The spectacle of celebrity entertainment coming home to rot was Norman Mailer’s foremost topic. No doubt he would have written a Trump novel... more »

Despite their love, Beauvoir found Sartre rather pathetic. His skirt-chasing didn’t help — nor did his performance in bed... more »

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, warned E.B. and Katharine S. White —nobody cares, and the frog dies in the process. Still academics persist... more »

Essays & Opinions

Unable to predict a crash or facilitate prosperity, economics is now a field of dubious value. And yet it retains an unearned intellectual authority... more »

Ibsen was reviled by some as immoral, hailed by others as prophetic. James Joyce thought him the most influential intellect of his time. Ibsen retains his potency today... more »

Which words should be banished? “Adorkable,” “YOLO,” and “influencer” are popular suggestions. But policing language is a fraught exercise... more »

The origin stories of big ideas highlight the eureka moments. But it's the mundane work that is key. Inspiration favors the prepared mind... more »

"Liberalism" is a slippery word for Americans, who have no experience of anything else. Now critics are falling over themselves... more »

When the Aztecs met Cortés, they did not think he was a deity. Rather, they scouted his forces and set up a war room. So why does another tale persist?... more »

The sad-lady literary sirens are legion: Plath, Woolf, Jean Rhys. What would it mean, wonders Leslie Jamison, to move beyond them?... more »

“Where man strives for knowledge, the Devil will never be far away.” Knausgaard contemplates the power and temptations of literature... more »

Cave art has been found on nearly every continent. What does it mean? That our Paleolithic ancestors knew something we still strain to imagine... more »

Google has a “chief happiness officer,” a “treat yourself” ethic reigns, and happiness bloggers score viral hits. Yet peak happiness is a noxious goal... more »

Reading Kierkegaard can be dispiriting. He seems so dour, so tortured by inner turmoil. But he was, in some odd way, a happy writer... more »

Education of an architect. Aspiring to greatness is now conflated with aspiring to novelty, bolstering the field's affinity for what’s ugly... more »

Young Lucian Freud delighted in shocking visitors. He maintained a grisly cast of mounted animals in his home, and stored two dead monkeys in his kitchen oven... more »

To accommodate drinking, the Literary Review established the Academy Club. Poets were banned for never paying their tabs and for bad conversation... more »

Lusty retirees and power-lifting septuagenarians churn out books chronicling the joys of aging. It’s all quite misleading, of course... more »

"One doesn’t want to share in that old-man vibe and die of a heart attack after a student protester shows us her breasts." Justin E.H. Smith on avoiding Adorno's fate... more »

John Ashbery was famous for his impenetrability. "My poetry is disjunct," he said, "but then so is life." Fair enough. But is it fair to the reader?... more »

Why are some intellectuals pardoned for past sins, but others condemned? Case study: the reaction to a new collection by the “fascist icon” Charles Maurras... more »

Bartleby, autistic? Melville, on the spectrum? Literary critics used to make such armchair diagnoses, but now they’ve gotten more sophisticated... more »

Peter Handke has been widely denounced for his politics, but what of his prose? Turns out it’s associative, digressive, oneiric, and, above all, idiosyncratic... more »

J.S. Bach, bad boy. We remember him as a saint, but he downed beer by the gallon, got mixed up in knife fights, and consorted with women in the organ loft... more »

Parents whitewash parenting. For the truth, turn to Knausgaard: The car seat will humiliate you; you will panic in silence... more »

Everyone, academics included, hates academic writing. But maybe the disgust is misplaced. Could it be that most academic writing is actually pretty good?... more »

Reading is not a team sport. Thus, when we talk of the historical or cultural power of the novel, we may miss its real strength: establishing intimacy... more »

Since Shakespeare's day, theaters have been uniquely flammable. Thus early Broadway theaters’ obsession with fire escapes. Forty wasn’t too many... more »

Memoirs From Beyond the Grave. Chateaubriand wanted his 2,000-page book published only after his death. Then financial hardship struck... more »

Wittgenstein's house on a lake was built as a retreat from the world. But it turns out he was an oddly ostentatious recluse... more »

Lenin invented totalitarianism and the ideas of a one-party state and a terrorist state. He also invented a style of thinking that endures... more »

Minae Mizumura, both imaginatively cosmopolitan and linguistically rooted, exemplifies the change in what it means to be an immigrant writer... more »

The competing visions for modernism included “Make it new,” of course, but also: “Art is dead,” “Realism = Abstraction,” and “victory over the sun”... more »

“There is a cure for everything. Except longing.” The imprisoned Turkish writer Ahmet Altan on the role of the imagination in prison... more »

What does sober creativity look like? To find out, Leslie Jamison went to the archives. Early results weren’t promising... more »

How Saul Bellow thought about America. The novelist began his career as a critic. He ended it as an eloquent guardian of the nation's soul... more »

Nietzsche’s lonely, desperate intellectual heroism: “Wherever you travel, in sunny climates or in the shadowlands, Nietzsche has gone before you”... more »

Against street art. "Kitsch, contrived and uninspiring," it is "the act of an entitled, middle-class narcissist"... more »

What's the secret to good science writing? Cormac McCarthy has some thoughts. Among them: ease up on the adjectives... more »

“If they’re killing people for poetry, that means they honor and esteem it, they fear it, that means poetry is power”... more »

"You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling"... more »

Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for its containment? Zadie Smith weighs the evidence... more »

“The art of rest,” “how to do nothing,” “digital minimalism” — new self-help books abandon productivity tips for a celebration of solitude... more »

Your taste in literature, music, and painting used to say something about you and your values. Now we have something worse: a collective taste truce... more »

An inestimably vast grid of rooms linked by an endless spiral staircase. Borges’s “Library of Babel” is a terrifying glance at the horrors of infinitude... more »

Behold the prose poem, "a mode of writing that allows the stylist plenty of slack” — to be ponderous, vague, clichéd, and repetitious... more »

All Ayn Randers aboard! Set sail on the anti-Paul Krugman cruise, where every Pictionary guess is “Ron Paul!”... more »

Widely dismissed, William Blake managed to capture the heart of one wealthy, credulous benefactor. It helped that they shared a passion for séances... more »

In “a marketplace of ideas,” accurate information and incisive arguments win out. Too bad no such place exists in real life... more »

Are millennials hesitant to have children because childlessness is a moral response to climate change? Or are they merely selfish?... more »

Every second of every day, someone is complaining about bias, pointing to evidence that justifies outrage. This arms race in cultural analysis is unwinnable... more »

The road to dictatorship is depressingly predictable. But there is one quality that distinguishes modern tyranny: the cult of personality... more »

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 »