New Books

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 »

The invention of alphabetical order signaled a shift from a world with intrinsic order to one we must organize   ... more »

A new biography of Lucian Freud withholds gossip into “private affairs.” That’s a shame — Freud’s private affairs propelled his art   ... more »

Intellectual detours are key to learning, and the ability to take them is a skill to nurture  ... more »

Jew, poet, homosexual, painter, punster, novelist, critic, palm-reader, ether-addict, Kabbalist, Catholic: Who was Max Jacob?  ... more »

“Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics,” John Carey wrote. But not necessarily wiser... more »

The maddening Martin Amis. He denounces authors’ asides into dreams, sex, and religion… and then commits those very novelistic sins  ... more »

The voice of The Atlantic is authoritative, high-minded, empirical — and, once you’ve heard it enough, utterly tedious ... more »

The history of knowledge and its enemies was best summed up by Heinrich Heine: “Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings” ... more »

Alexis de Tocqueville mastered many styles. He could be romantic, clever, or ruthlessly withering... more »

His legacy may be oppressive factory work, but in 1914 Henry Ford also gave America the $5 work day: “Social justice begins at home,” the company said  ... more »

“Some, though not much, poetic force.” “Great imitative power.” “Not quite a Tintoretto of verse.” Longfellow’s contemporaries were unimpressed  ... more »

The decade between World War I and the Great Depression featured intense intellectual creativity. Was this German philosophy's last great moment? ... more »

It's always been hard to make a living as an artist. But has the aspiration essentially become obsolete?  ... more »

The 2020 intellectual situation: The politics of consumerism, and of grievance, have overwhelmed the politics of unity and responsibility  ... more »

"If you are reading this, you are very probably WEIRD," says Daniel Dennett. “But we are outliers on many psychological measures"  ... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

James Wood has a suggestion: "Every professor of literature should stand in a classroom and announce (in effect): 'My god, this is beautiful.' And yes, do it every year, anew" ... more »

The meaning of a mustache. For Wesley Morris, it’s a way to connect to Blackness, and to a legacy of improving America ... more »

A bookstore is a place of reverie, digression, discovery. As efficiency-accustomed customers have discovered, it is not Amazon Prime... more »

Some poets harvest a narrow field. Robert Conquest had an appetite — and a satirical bite — for the world and all it contains ... more »

Stanley Kubrick demonstrated a contradiction: He was a rebel who succeeded, yet his films are about rebels who fail  ... more »

For seven weeks in 1726, it was believed that a woman, Mary Toft, could give birth to rabbits. It was a gift to satirists, but torment for Toft... more »

Many of us still believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch. Why? An improvisational millenarianism has taken root ... more »

Liberalism’s discontents. Does it, as Catholic intellectuals contend, offer “thin gruel” in lieu of deeper moral commitments?... more »

In a 50-year run at The New Yorker, Whitney Balliett produced more than 500 essays on jazz. They amount to a blueprint for arts criticism... more »

In America, self-storage is a national psychopathology. Behind it lurks the dream of infinite space... more »

Luc Sante on reality TV: “It’s like the stuff I’m interested in, but with all the poetry taken out and all the money put in”  ... more »

To understand seduction, we must consider both Pamela and the modern pickup artist. So claims a new book, dubiously  ... more »

As Homer shows, truth can be revealed in concentric circles radiating out from the plot. As Sebald shows, such narrative rings can also bamboozle   ... more »

Universities have long played host to eccentric ideas. But a tolerance for debate has survived. Is that now in doubt?   ... more »

Surrounded by revolutionary fervor in China, Eileen Chang chronicled smaller revolutions, in romance and lust. She would have been 100 today ... more »