New Books

When improv comedy is done poorly, which is often, it's excruciating. But even at its best, improv is almost always inferior to prepared material... more »

How did Germans see Nazism? Not as we see it. Habituation, confusion, distraction, self-interest, fear, rationalization, and a sense of personal powerlessness made terrible things possible... more »

Inspired by Pride and Prejudice, Annabella Milbanke decided to fix Lord Byron’s flaws. The two were wed, but he was no Darcy, and she no Elizabeth Bennet... more »

Lorrie Moore has thought a lot about what it takes to become a writer. “Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands”... more »

Pick your literary role models carefully, lest you end up chasing down disappointing lovers, or chanting The Waste Land in the desert heat... more »

Politics may be a necessary evil — but viewing everything solely through a political lens is an evil that we’re choosing. We should stop... more »

When Saul Bellow was bad. His nonfiction reads like a hodgepodge of facts combined with ideas dreamed up simply to have something to say... more »

If there’s one thing science-fiction authors love more than cosmic terror, it’s arguing about what constitutes “real” science fiction. That's a fight with high stakes... more »

In the West, the filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi is seen as an earnestly didactic opponent of authoritarianism. It’s time to move beyond such reductive political readings... more »

Did you know that Aristotle spoke with a lisp? That Socrates enjoyed dancing? The third-century gossip of Diogenes Laërtius is fascinating, if not always factual... more »

Picture Mary Shelley summoning Percy to a tryst; imagine her pregnant and seasick, eloping across the English Channel. Do these scenes reveal or obscure her personality?... more »

How not to write a biography: Choose a figure about whom we known almost nothing, make liberal use of the word “presumably,” invent a timeline where none is justified... more »

Benedict Arnold's treason seems not to matter much anymore. But it's fascinating: Spies and counterspies, suspense and close calls, a beautiful woman, Alexander Hamilton... more »

Social scientists study beauty as physical appearance. The natural sciences study it as pattern and structure, fractals and spheres. But a messier form of beauty is coming into view... more »

A rose is red because we experience it as red. But our experience is itself mysterious. Daniel Dennett ponders the manifest and the scientific image of the world... more »

We're hooked on mirages: meaningless stimuli from an algorithm. Jaron Lanier offers 10 arguments for quitting social media right now... more »

Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Mark Antony: Shakespeare's tyrants can tell us much about the puzzling psychology and spectacle of villainy... more »

The dominant image of Samuel Beckett is that of a man not merely apolitical but antipolitical, a disengaged pessimist offering disempowering despair. Don't believe it... more »

We live in an age that prizes efficiency. So how to explain the proliferation of pointless jobs? They make little economic sense. Their function must be political... more »

Barbara Ehrenreich doesn’t meditate. She doesn’t believe in self-care, wellness, or mindfulness. They are coercive, exploitative, and futile. We are not in charge of ourselves... more »

A memorable dinner at the White House. William Styron and James Baldwin attended. J.D. Salinger, a budding recluse, declined. Mary Hemingway bored JFK immensely... more »

Deontologists, consequentialists, virtue ethicists. Philosophers are hopelessly divided on how to reach the truth about morality ... more »

The private writing of Roland Barthes reveals his crushes, his musical and literary preferences, and his desired thesis adviser — Claude Lévi-Strauss, who turned him down... more »

Bleakness was his birthright. Despite the ministrations of academics, Joseph Conrad endures as a modern master of a tragic sense of life... more »

For decades Thomas Kuhn struggled to square the thought of an independent reality with the thesis of a changing world. He died feeling like a failure... more »

Do the sex lives of Surrealists tell us anything about their paintings? Not much. But it does make for wonderfully bizarre — if somewhat frivolous — reading... more »

Espionage has inspired literature since Stendhal. The CIA even produces a partly classified journal devoted to the spy novel: Studies in Intelligence... more »

Life is a cacophony — cellphones, TVs, traffic. But there is probably no more noise than there used to be. What's changed is the amount of distraction... more »

Lucian Freud ignored the rise of abstraction; David Hockney unfashionably persisted in depicting love and happiness. Britain’s postwar painters had a talent for taboo-breaking... more »

An aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes Scholar, advanced cultural pluralism even as the odds were against him... more »

Three ways in which democracies die: Coups, catastrophes, and technological takeovers. None of those are inevitable, but none have solutions.... more »

Aristotle in America. His understanding of the middle class was a truth upon which the country's founders depended when legislating their own republic... more »

Quantum theory is real and successful. It's also weird. Even those who understand it best, like Richard Feynman, aren't sure they understand what it means... more »

The gags of a “gonzo” journalist. Hunter S. Thompson lit dynamite under beer kegs, sprayed unsuspecting people with Mace, blasted his assistant with a shotgun... more »

While the quality of French intellectual life has plummeted, its reputation remains. What makes Left Bank scribblers so compelling?... more »

Hans Asperger did pioneering work on the syndrome that now bears his name. He was also, it turns out, complicit in the Nazi killing machine... more »

What gave rise to the selfie? Don't blame Steve Jobs. Blame basic human jealousy. “Beggar is jealous of beggar and poet of poet,” wrote Hesiod... more »

Consciousness is an instinct, says Michael Gazzaniga. But this is less a solution to the “hard problem” than a window through which to see it... more »

At the Solovetsky Special Prison Camp — the “mother of the gulag,” per Solzhenitsyn — an intellectual and literary culture blossomed... more »

Essays & Opinions

Being Leonard Bernstein’s daughter. Hearing of her dad’s sexual exploits was one thing; his showing up at Harvard to party was something else entirely... more »

Attempts to justify the humanities are, too often, self-congratulatory fantasy: I read better books, so I’m a better person. Stanley Fish has read the best books. He's not a better person... more »

The gazillion books and articles, the conferences, symposia, and reading groups — all a waste of time? A scholar breaks up with James Joyce ... more »

Anthony Domestico had been a book critic for seven years when he realized that no editor had ever asked him to review a female author. He thinks of two possible explanations... more »

With Couples, John Updike brought “down-and-dirty sex" into the literary mainstream. Fifty years later, the novel seems less about sex than about loneliness... more »

The metaphysics of water. Lakes, river, the ocean — they spur us to reckon with the immense and the unknown, to confront life’s fluidity.... more »

Paul Gauguin abandoned Paris and his wife and children to paint in Tahiti. Does his artistic brilliance justify the moral cost?... more »

Maybe we really have lost the vocabulary for talking about death, depending instead on euphemism, lies, and ambiguity. But there was never a time when we did death well... more »

“There are no easy solutions. And yet a principled compromise is possible.” Yascha Mounk wants to save liberal democracy — but is mature reasonableness the path forward?... more »

Robert Penn Warren and William Faulkner promoted a distinct ideology of the South. For black Southern intellectuals, things weren’t so straightforward... more »

"Every truth becomes false when you take it to its extreme," says David Brooks. Affluence, for example: "People take money and translate it into loneliness"... more »

Modern life has deprived us of mystical rites, epiphanies, and inward reflection. Could the key to regaining such missing illumination be psychedelics?... more »

Gullibility is alive and well among us. Consider the intellectual rot at the foundations of physics. Or the persistent popularity of anti-rationalism... more »

Cumberland Clark was a Shakespeare scholar, a serious writer and critic, and no fool. Yet he's also the author of reams of ludicrous doggerel. Is he the second-worst poet in English?... more »

Goldman Sachs has been depicted as the central villain of the Great Recession. Yet little has been said about its most egregious sin: the lobby art... more »

Jordan Peterson is many things, most notably an archetypal victim and beneficiary of our polarized times. One thing he is not: a dangerous far-right radical... more »

Cheating and drinking and child-raising and defying the prevailing fantasies of a woman’s place: Country music is the soundtrack of American domesticity... more »

“Past results are no guarantee of future performance, yet in book publishing they are pretty damn reliable.” Is a minor writer destined to a career of mediocrity?... more »

As a teenager, Reynaldo Hahn composed hymns to love and sang in Parisian salons. An affair with Proust, who called him “Mon petit Reynaldo,” followed... more »

Jordan Peterson has much to say about masculine despair. But he offers no antidote, instead trying to make men feel better while failing to address the problems: misogyny and racism... more »

Heinrich Heine was neither deep nor strikingly original, and he did little to advance the intellectual debates of his time. What made him a major figure was his indomitable spirit... more »

A work of art can be incisive, beautiful, discomfiting, or representative, but not necessary. So why do critics keep using that word?... more »

Leonardo and the riddle of authentication. His works have resurfaced with surprising frequency. Can an expert eye really detect when it's the real thing?... more »

“Performance art” once involved raucous Dadaists; now it’s a Lady Gaga performance or Kanye West tweet. Why have pop stars started dealing in high-concept abstractions?... more »

In higher education, the ubiquity of innovation-speak masks a dearth of actual innovation. The latest fad: design thinking. It's a boondoggle... more »

When erotic misadventures and poetry became tiresome for Byron, he turned to military command, with 600 Greek troops and an audacious plan. Fiasco followed... more »

The Enlightenment started with philosophical insights spread by a new technology. We face a dominant technology — artificial intelligence — in search of a philosophy... more »

Dickens heard his characters speak. Woolf heard birds singing in Greek. The treatment for hearing voices has long been: ignore them. What if we listened instead?... more »

Is an intellectual’s responsibility to think, or to enact a political argument? The question once distinguished little magazines from think tanks, but that has changed... more »

Travel writing is a genre prone to indulgence but also capable of carrying considerable weight. Patrick Leigh Fermor was a master at managing that tension... more »

Think of genius not as an isolated individual, but as the spirit of circumstance. Genius is contingent — precarious, rare, magical... more »

How Victorian essayists used tact to come up with a creative rather than controlling, playful rather than violent way of handling not only other people but also the world and its objects... more »

“The evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza.” At the age of 23, the future philosopher was expelled from his Jewish community. What had he done?... more »

Chekhov, Beckett, Woolf, Poe — all childless. Thomas Mann had kids but locked himself in his room and forbade them to disturb him. Are kids kryptonite to writers?... more »

Dostoevsky, broke. He ducked landlords, always lost at roulette, and pawned his wife’s dowry and their clothing. One project dominated his thinking: The Idiot... more »

Derided by Dadaists and Surrealists and hijacked by contemporary narcissism, beauty is an idea that's been up and down. What does it mean today?... more »

Timothy Snyder is one of our foremost historians of evil. He also personifies a certain paranoid style that has taken hold of liberals... more »

Much of the work we do has no social value, and we hate doing it. Then there’s higher education, where the problem is acute. David Graeber on the bullshitization of academic life... more »

The Nobel Prize for Literature is beset by scandal. But this has nothing to do with sex. The scandal is that the prize ever had any credibility at all... more »

Who doesn't love to beat up on literary theory? It's justified, but it's not the reason undergraduates aren't getting the education they deserve... more »

The Kuhn cult. Admiration for the philosopher is misplaced, says Errol Morris. Kuhn's thinking is unoriginal. Worse, it's an assault on truth... more »

Poems that hide in plain sight. Famous works, anthologized, widely read, become so encrusted with criticism it’s hard to see them anew... more »

Pity the poor pun. Reviled for its smirking stupidity, its ubiquity in advertising and talk-show banter, the wordplay deserves better... more »

Wallace Thurman: editor, novelist, playwright. “A strangely brilliant Black boy who had read everything," said Langston Hughes, "and whose critical mind could find something wrong with everything he read”... more »

What Frida Kahlo is to Mexico, Julia de Burgos is to Puerto Rico. Except that de Burgos isn't well known to the rest of the world. Why not?... more »

How blank are our slates? Hobbes and Rousseau believed in the existence of human nature, but today’s philosophers are skeptical. Biology suggests an answer... more »

Before the sum total of human knowledge exploded, it was possible to know everything. The last man to do so was Sabine Baring-Gould... more »

At 30, Elizabeth Jennings was a celebrated poet. At 40, she lived in poverty, a shabby eccentric haunting Oxford cafes. What went wrong?... more »

Eros in the academy. Intellectual magnetism often shades into erotic attraction. That's always been true of students and professors... more »

Death and the meaning of life. Have you thought about being composted or cremated? Perhaps donating your body to science? Why we distract ourselves from the fact that we are physical beings... more »