New Books

Dwight Garner on Joseph Epstein: “His sentences read as if they were written by a sentient tasseled loafer and edited by a sentient bow tie”... more »

A tidy lawn, a model home, good local schools — suburbia lured Americans by the millions. But it was a trap... more »

“Nostalgia” was coined in 1688 to denote a painful, even deadly form of homesickness. It still has a bad reputation... more »

A provocation: What if our world is not enlightened at all, but a product of the Enlightenment’s failure?... more »

For the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, relentless posting and liking on social media are evidence of the vacuity of modern life... more »

Hypochondria is a learning disease. The more we understand about the ways our bodies can fail, the more we have to fear... more »

AI robots can help us explore Mars, perform surgeries, and deliver aid to disaster zones. So is our robot-assisted future bright?... more »

Between the emergence of humans and the invention of writing is blank space. To fill it, we have a half-cocked concept: prehistory... more »

A decade before the Sokal hoax, critical theory was lampooned in a German essay: “Lacancan und Derridada”... more »

Norman Podhoretz's masculinity problem — and ours. Why were the New York Intellectuals so preoccupied with manliness? ... more »

“[Lauren] Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things ... but she lacks the curiosity that would permit her to do so”... more »

Exhortations to “sit up straight!” ring from Goop to TikTok to hatha yoga to the far reaches of YouTube. Why so much posture panic?... more »

Sheila Heti has been editing and reworking her 500,000 word diary for a decade. The result is a kind of Symbolist poetry... more »

Imagine that social critics were to excise cynicism from their social criticism. Peter Gordon makes the case... more »

Stories about the end of the world are as old as stories themselves. We are obsessed with our own demise... more »

The contradictions of Ian Fleming: loving yet cruel, arrogant yet insecure, spiteful yet generous... more »

Crossword puzzles work because words are drenched in meanings, shapes, and sounds. Becca Rothfeld explains... more »

Classics in crisis. What the field needs is a sweeping history of Roman emperors and their influence beyond Europe... more »

Contemporary Stoicism is all aphorism and motivational cliche. It is toothless — practically to the point of meaninglessness... more »

By the 19th century, educated elites had little time for ghosts, demons, and other apparitions. The Society for Psychical Research, on the other hand... more »

For women among the New York Intellectuals, men wanted to sleep with you or write like you. Or both... more »

“Can God create a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it?” Paradoxes sound absurd, but they can be logically sustained... more »

Jesus, and other magi. Early variants of Christianity championed Pontius Pilate, Apollonius, and a holy snake... more »

Cities have become frictionless, optimized sites of consumerism and productivity. In other words, they have lost their humanity... more »

In 1959, Sonny Rollins vanished. No performing and no recording for two years. Turns out he kept a diary... more »

Shakespeare’s “sisters.” Women writers in the Renaissance were constrained by disinheritance, marital disputes, legal trou­bles, and humiliation... more »

Lauren Oyler’s essays “contain not arguments or judgments so much as advertisements for a conspicuously edgy personality”... more »

The feminist history of the crossword puzzle. Some of the form’s early champions were women working for little to no pay... more »

Bernard Malamud sounded nothing like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. His stories are no less essential... more »

Medieval England had amulets for everything: to preserve health, to protect grain from vermin, to help children understand crows... more »

If Keith Haring’s most enduring legacy is the blurring of lines between art and commerce, does that make him a sellout?... more »

“It’s not that one poet is more ‘political’ than another,” said Seamus Heaney. “It’s that some make the … artistic mistake of espousing ‘politics’ in the verse”... more »

“There exist few more sober, reliable, or serious guides to thinking about the virtues and vices of liberalism than Raymond Aron”... more »

Late capitalism and its discontents. Why do lit scholars have an undying attachment to an epoch that ended decades ago?... more »

Who’s afraid of gender? asks Judith Butler, in a book oddly focused on Ukraine, police violence, neoliberalism, and every other leftist concern... more »

Should literature “rescue” the law with novelty, interpretive flexibility, and an appreciation for paradox? No... more »

Canadians often contrast their secularism with the religiosity of Americans. A century ago, the roles were reversed... more »

Paul Gauguin was narcissistic and crass. But he was more than a “sexual predator gorging himself in paradise”... more »

Ralph Waldo Emerson lived in an age of reform. But he was wary of the crackpot ideas that swirled around him... more »

Essays & Opinions

In 1953, Margaret Macdonald advanced a bold theory: “Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations”... more »

Animals mock efforts to classify and master them. Our formidable opponents include coral, rattlesnakes, stingrays, and raccoons... more »

Descartes’s stove. Comfort is key to thought, and so the maxim “I think, therefore I am,” may be rewritten: “I think in a stove-heated room, therefore I am”... more »

“I was born for opposition.” Lord Byron’s scandalous affairs and flouting of convention led to his becoming a social outcast... more »

“Culture is no longer a way of transcending the political but the language in which certain key political demands are framed and fought out”... more »

How do artists begin? By making sketches and lines in notebooks, by waiting, by gathering fragments, and by finding hope... more »

In praise of walking. “At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. … There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity”... more »

“There’s an invigorating novelty in seeing a master try something new without immediately becoming virtuosic”... more »

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, a compelling account of nationalism’s origins, speaks little to its contemporary re-emergence... more »

Most newspaper columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery. Others have a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad... more »

The new academic politics are not a recipe for disciplinary longevity, let alone for saving the planet... more »

What was the intellectual dark web? A worthy project gone bad or a fraud based on spurious grievances?... more »

Beethoven’s secret code. Do handwritten scribbles in his manuscripts reveal elaborate musical directions lost for centuries?... more »

Second chances teach us that repetition is not mechanistic or meaningless — and that we can be the authors, not merely the victims, of our lives... more »

What is space for? Yes, adventure, exploration, exploitation. But maybe space is really just for space... more »

We think of Robert Frost as the good, gray poet of the New England woods. His work was darker — and more demonic — than that... more »

“I am after small truths, not after truth with a capital T.” Daniel Kahneman in perhaps his final interview ... more »

"No matter how many books, articles, Tweets, and TikToks I’d gobbled up, it had apparently eluded me that no one was ever going to say I’d produced enough"... more »

Radicalism is a complex and sometimes paradoxical posture, one that Raymond Williams wrestled with his entire life... more »

As an editor, Toni Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters – long, generous, critical, and freshly unearthed from the archive... more »

Gender’s enemies. Judith Butler targets conservative Christians, white supremacists, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists... more »

Reading Shakespeare in its original English can be hard going at first. But his example will always show us what is possible... more »

“We live in an unheroic and disillusioned moment, and—as to sales—a moment when ambitious novels have become a niche taste”... more »

The Monster of Ravenna, the Monk Calf, and, of course, the Pope Ass. Why were 16th-century luminaries printing pamphlets on monsters?... more »

“Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”... more »

Ishiguro drafted The Remains of the Day in four weeks. It took Min Jin Lee 28 years to write Pachinko. But slow writing has its virtues... more »

"The university campus is rapidly becoming a locus of infantilizing social control that any independent-minded student should seek to escape" ... more »

Dante was shaped by two deep longings – for Beatrice and for the city of Florence – that together fueled his poetry... more »

Economics is in disarray, says Angus Deaton. Part of the problem is an overenthusiastic belief in the efficacy of markets... more »

The reputation of the historical novel is ascendant but perplexing. Is the appeal primarily pedagogical, moral, or escapist?... more »

“Make love not babies.” Once a fringe philosophy, antinatalism can now be found on highway billboards... more »

Journalists were once skeptical of big words and complex theories. They were anti-intellectual. Now they are something worse: pseudo-intellectual... more »

Personality testing will soon be a $6.5-billion industry. How did we come to submit to this belief in self-typologies?... more »

We think of intellectual communities as broad-minded. They are in fact narrow and insular. Larry Summers explains... more »

Marshall Sahlins insisted that gods, spirits, and demons are worthy of scientific study. What would such a science teach us?... more »

Quantum physics and gravity don’t fit together, a problem that has plagued physics for 50 years. A novel theory offers a reconciliation... more »

Edwin Frank: “Books are now deemed to be important the same way it is important to find the best lightbulb”... more »

Academic philosophy rewards specialized, jargon-laden individual genius. A better system of social thinking exists: folklore... more »

The best of W.H. Auden’s late work was animated by the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical... more »

Overlooked amid the swagger of the New York Jewish intellectuals, Pearl Kazin led a remarkable life of freedom and frustration... more »

“The people and groups and agendas grouped together as the left contain not just contradictions but sworn enemies”... more »

What if writing history were less about archives and ideas and more about forensics and genomes?... more »

Do our lives consist of the stories we tell about our ourselves? Galen Strawson on a view that’s ascendant and plainly wrong... more »

The editor and memoirist Diana Athill’s philosophy was that fidelity is a faulty mechanism on which to base a relationship... more »

“The measure of a society’s stage of moral sophistication is how infrequently it requires us to trade gratuities like love and poetry for food”... more »

Self-help is often glib, politically obtuse, and intellectually dishonest. Why, then, are philosophers writing it?... more »

The psychic entanglement of the generations, the tumult between old and the young: What we need Mary Gaitskill for... more »

After the suicide of his wife, Blake Butler wrote a book detailing her secret life. Was it art — or literary revenge porn?... more »

Maverick, crank, wisecracking economic pundit? Milton Friedman was thought too radical, then later — when his ideas won the day — too obvious... more »

Garrison Keillor, Leon Wieseltier, Otto Penzler: Is there still a role for grumpy old men in arts and letters?... more »