New Books

Einstein during World War I. Cut off from scientists abroad, he tried to extend his untested ideas about relativity into a more powerful theory... more »

Thirty years since Cass Sunstein's first steps as a public intellectual, the world has changed. But not his ideas, or his dreary prose... more »

Sherlock Holmes and his world are an inexhaustible source of spinoffs, parodies, and adaptations. Michael Dirda has the latest... more »

"If what makes humans unique is the power of seeing what is not there, what makes them so destructive is that they believe what they have seen to be real"... more »

A psychologist studying empathy is like a climatologist studying polar ice: "We discover how valuable it is just as it recedes all around us”... more »

When people write about Vasily Grossman, they often start by complaining that he is insufficiently appreciated — which is hardly true... more »

Before its “golden age,” TV was thought to be formulaic, fluffy trash. The change in regard is in no small part the work of Emily Nussbaum... more »

Pundit on a pilgrimage. For David Brooks, a midlife awakening yielded a most unexpected insight into himself: “I realized I was a religious person”... more »

Graham Greene in Havana. What better destination for a novelist who delighted in exposing conflicting loyalties and shifting political allegiances?... more »

Robert Caro is a scholar of power — how it's obtained, how it's used. So it's odd that he seems so oblivious to his own... more »

“London’s only Lady detective.” Maud West had a talent for disguise, infiltration, and self-promotion. Her career is a snapshot of social change... more »

Nothing to lose but our iPhones. Cal Newport’s "digital minimalism" might restore solitude, conversation, and leisure to overcrowded lives... more »

The lost art of reading holy texts. We too often seek only superficial confirmation of our interpretive biases. A more deliberate approach is needed... more »

Why we obsess over what we wear: New clothes appear to bestow a charm and intellect we otherwise can’t quite muster... more »

The most enterprising Marxist. Bhaskar Sunkara, founder of Jacobin, offers a manifesto for socialism that is thrillingly non-utopian... more »

The Naomi Wolf formula: convert dissatisfaction into epiphany, ignore facts and laws of nature, make blanket recommendations for all women... more »

How best to tell the story of philosophy? Instead of moving from one peak to another, wander the fertile valleys in between... more »

Time to read and think and, for Wordsworth, ply his skills with the spade. Why were the Quantock Hills so inspiring to Romantic poets?... more »

The rise of Pushkinography. Academics have flocked to the author, at the rate of three books published per day. Is there anything new to say?... more »

The first appearance of the word Orwellian? Mary McCarthy used it to describe the fashion magazine Flair... more »

The Regency years in Britain — 1811-1820 — involved more than spotlessly dressed dandies, lascivious rakes, and Elizabeth Bennet look-alikes... more »

E.P. Thompson suffered an endless series of heroic defeats but refused grubby compromises and went down guns blazing... more »

John Williams put a lot of himself into his most famous protagonist, William Stoner, a lackluster professor and difficult man... more »

Peacock tongue and fried dormice, brain-stuffed sausages, caviar-stuffed crayfish, liters of wine poured by naked waiters: The Romans took gluttony seriously... more »

Art criticism is art. It makes meaning out of the seemingly indecipherable, elucidating existential stakes. No one does this better than Peter Schjeldahl... more »

Step aside, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill. Meet the oddballs, underdogs, and outcasts of British philosophy... more »

The dissents of Wendell Berry. His dislikes include weather forecasts, unsmelly bathrooms, ballroom dancing, and the moon landing... more »

In the Western tradition, what’s the most powerful and persuasive construct of the human imagination? It’s the idea of hell... more »

The history of psychiatry is the history of our beliefs about our own minds. Breakthrough and disappointment, dogmas and counter-dogmas... more »

It cannot be the fate of the book to become tweetlike. The book must stand above. A case study in what happens when it doesn't... more »

How Islam shaped Western thought. The relationship led to a flowering of political philosophy, thought experiment, and polemic... more »

As Oliver Sacks wrote, between mania and depression lies “a narrow ridge of normality.” Despite his best efforts, he sometimes slipped off that ridge... more »

In the last decades of the 19th century, séances abounded, and austere sects speculated about geology. Darwin’s world was awash with spiritualized science... more »

“Tonight I have achieved a fresh perspective on myself. I now understand my sexuality." Foucault on LSD... more »

The problem with eternity: it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. Can this realization be liberating?... more »

Being Einstein meant people asking your opinion even about stupid things. "Why is it that no one understands me and everyone likes me?"... more »

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote Allen Ginsberg. "When do I get the manuscript?" Thus began the effort to publish Howl, a landmark case of attempted censorship... more »

When political failure leads to intellectual success. “Losers,” said Eric Hobsbawm, “make the best historians.” He was an embodiment of that principle... more »

Reading Catcher in the Rye in Moscow. For Soviet audiences, imbibing Western culture — and misinterpreting it — was an expression of a freedom... more »

Essays & Opinions

"Summer reading is always a balancing act between the books I have loved, the books I feel I oughta love, and the books I sense I will love"... more »

Is discussion overrated? Is it not as likely to generate bitterness, and division as it is to enlighten or foster consensus?... more »

If the Apollo missions brought us the age of consumer technology, Jill Lepore isn't impressed: "My country went to the moon and all I got was this lousy surveillance state"... more »

The buzzword of this decade is authenticity, which is a shame because it impedes progress and aspiration... more »

Svetlana Alexievich is on a mission to collect memories before they disappear, to correct for the rewriting of history by propaganda... more »

“We live today in a laboratory of human suffering as vast and terrible as that in which Dickens and Dostoyevsky wrote.” The America of Nelson Algren’s imagination... more »

Lacan, the terrible. He was avaricious, classist, and an awful father. Tasked with treating his suffering daughter, he headed to the brothel instead... more »

The origins of beach reading. A 19th-century invention, it was for “airy, buoyant, salty, sunny, breezy” books. Or, it was the consumption of “pestiferous trash”... more »

What is liberalism? A politics? A temperament? A credo? Maybe it's like a rhinoceros: A once-successful animal that now stands on the edge of extinction... more »

The debate over political correctness has devolved into camps hardened by moralism and hypocrisy. Another path is possible... more »

Jared Diamond once at least went through the motions of adding statistical and scholarly evidence to his books. No longer... more »

Intellectuals easily uncover Orwellian traits in American politics. They have a harder time, writes George Packer, acknowledging the Thought Police closer to home... more »

Andrea Dworkin was prescient; she lived a version of Me Too long before Me Too. Yet her analysis of pornography has little traction. Why?... more »

Sylvia Plath at Smith College. She read Chaucer and Dante, and she broke off relationships. “I want a man who isn’t jealous of my creativity in other fields than children”... more »

This year the Modern Language Association’s annual conference took as its principal subject the death of its own significance... more »

The ever-expanding subtitle. Publishers pile up keywords in a mad attempt to boost SEO. Time for readers to revolt?... more »

Against knowledge. It’s a crude, archaic concept, a relic of a bygone age, and it harms our real ways of thinking... more »

It’s like Waze, but for social theory. Cass Sunstein wants government to help citizens navigate their lives. What if they don’t know where to go?... more »

For Adrienne Rich, the great philosopher of secrets, the wish to keep and share them goes to the heart of intimacy, and why we value art... more »

The click-swipe-and-rate economy has devastated journalism, art, literature, and entertainment. Now it's coming for the academy... more »

When are writers polymaths, and when are they merely trespassing superficially into areas of knowledge they haven’t mastered? The lesson of Naomi Wolf... more »

Art in an age of self-exposure. Gone is the withholding of secrets — novelists now put self-consciousness front and center... more »

The idea that thinkers should distinguish private from public views is associated with Leo Strauss and the right. Now it's ascendant on the left... more »

Should writers still make things up? With more fact-based fiction, purely fictional fiction faces a new reality... more »

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him," said Arthur Miller, who understood shame... more »

She had Sartre for conversation; he, only drunks and gamblers. Inside the short-lived long-distance relationship of Nelson Algren and Simone de Beauvoir... more »

Leslie Epstein has spent 40 years in the same wooden chair in the same lopsided room teaching fiction. The job is changing... more »

Slaughterhouse Five at 50. Despite Vonnegut’s conviction that the book was a failure, it has endured surprisingly well... more »

"How much you can learn from someone by looking very carefully at them without judgement.” Lucian Freud’s brute nudity... more »

The web is awash in tips from successful women writers — here’s what they’re reading, their Sunday routine. Does it help us understand them?... more »

“A monster of arrogance and inconsideration.” Susan Sontag cut through received wisdom — an approach sorely missing today... more »

New books reinterpret Homeric poems toward feminist ends. But in advancing a 21st-century politics, do they rob readers of ethical ambiguities?... more »

One notable thing about Stefan Zweig’s writing is how varied the reactions to it have been — in his own time and our own... more »

Make philosophy great again. The field has been reduced to bland Continental and analytic variants — a trend that must be reversed... more »

Humor is often lost in translation, especially if it's being translated from German. Yes, the jokes are ponderous. But they're funny, too... more »

The myth of advice. Successful people want to be helpful. But their advice sounds empty and canned — because it is... more »

Today’s intellectual mode: “Learn an attitude and inquire no further.” Marilynne Robinson on why certain ideas, like economic “associationism,” have vanished... more »

The cultural contradictions of Daniel Bell. He never could quite reconcile the Jewish conservative and the Yiddish radical within him... more »

E.H. Carr and the fate of facts. “By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation”... more »

Wit, mockery, joking, buffoonery: The oldest monastic rule we know of forbade joking. Laughter has long had a dangerously democratic quality... more »

Adam Gopnik and the limits of liberalism. Is a defense of moderation and incrementalism really evidence of a refusal to look at reality?... more »

Podcasts are the internet for our ears; they allow us to drift into a soothing, saturated state, distracting us from loneliness. Maybe loneliness is better... more »

More than 7,000 pages of his letters, 8,000 pages of prose, 12,000 pages of Criterion, the magazine he edited. How much T.S. Eliot is too much T.S. Eliot?... more »

Making ends meet as a book reviewer: $250 here and there, $1,000 from The New Republic. Jacob Silverman on the “foolish pursuit of an intellectually engaged life”... more »

The history of cheerfulness. It evolved from a Greek virtue aligned with patience and justice into a self-helpy brand of American nonsense that borders on psychosis... more »

The rise of the literary critic as pre-eminent cultural arbiter was a fluky aberration of the 20th century. The role was always going to be temporary... more »

When ancient battles seem modern. The Epicureans were outraged when their school was bought as a retirement home for an amateur pornographer... more »

John Berger occasionally went awry in evaluating individual artists (like Picasso), but his bullshit detection and skepticism of fashionable ideologies were nonpareil... more »

"The habit of seeing universities as the main or even sole custodians of humanistic culture isn’t just inaccurate; it is bad for universities themselves"... more »

From Gordon Lish’s severity to Michael Pietsch’s maximalism, editors invisibly shape literary trends. That bodes ill as we enter publishing’s Conglomerate Era... more »