Articles of Note

Nietzsche completed his first memoir at 13, and wrote another five over the next decade. He wrote to see who he was. What he was was a mama's boy... more »

On April 6, 1922, Albert Einstein met Henri Bergson at Société française de philosophie. The encounter marks the beginning of philosophy's eclipse by science... more »

Pumpkin, Basil, Citrus, Red Pepper, Artichoke, Cherry, Buttercup. What's with the oddly horticultural lingo of Israeli soldiers?... more »

A mad old man who imagines himself a knight rides forth on his frail horse, Rocinante. The modern era - and with it the novel - is born... more »

Lord Acton had a library of 67,000 volumes, scrupulously cross-referenced. His miscellanea fill some 50,000 pages. But he never published a book... more »

Jenny Diski - virtuoso novelist, memoirist, essayist, pessimist, misanthrope; - is dead. She was 68... more... more... more... more »

For Walt Whitman, the body was the basis of democracy. So he was a health nut, a fount of advice on sex, bathing, exercise, footwear... more »

The history of war is typically written by winners. But not the Spanish Civil War. Our version has been Orwell's version. And it's time for a change... more »

When Romanticism meets romance. From Flaubert onward, it’s clear that literature gives us the wrong idea about love... more »

Camille Paglia and a life of observation. She doesn't sit in a university. She doesn't go to conferences. She listens to conversations at the mall... more »

Poetry and money. Eileen Myles sent poems to The New Yorker for 30 years. Finally, one was accepted. Payment: $600 and two nights at a motel... more »

Here's what we know: Shakespeare was buried on April 25, 1616. How did he die? Many theories - alcoholism, typhus - but little evidence... more »

Physics is not a discipline or a set of procedures. It's a way of thinking about the world: a scheme that organizes cause and effect... more »

The signature literary genre of the Stalinist era was the production novel: Outsider at factory solves problem. Bohumil Hrabal was a master of the form... more »

If Cervantes is the Spanish Shakespeare, why isn’t his hometown the Spanish Stratford-upon-Avon? Because Spain is inept at acknowledging its own culture... more »

The Coetzee archives. “All writing is autobiography,” he likes to say. But how much could he bear to reveal in his own papers?... more »

The cult of science. As it gains more and more prestige, it attracts opportunists and charlatans spewing an ocean of nonsense... more »

“The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper,” declared Mao, who liked his meals spicy. Turns out, he may have been on to something... more »

Inspired by Nietzsche, the architect Philip Johnson went to Berlin to understand both art and power. There he marveled at blond boys in black leather paying homage to Hitler... more »

Edward Copleston was a shrewd observer of the literary scene. His essay "Advice to a Young Reviewer" was published in 1807. It holds up disturbingly well... more »

How societies make progress. It can't be engineered or managed, as technocrats and many academics think. Rather, social institutions evolve... more »

Nabokov made hundreds of magnified drawings of butterfly genitalia. What can his lepidoptery tell us about his literary output?... more »

Is academic prose really an unintelligible stew of bloviating inanities and polysyllabic gibberish? Sure looks that way... more »

Meet Irv Teibel, the man who took his recording equipment to the seashore and came back New York's least likely media mogul... more »

Violette Leduc - thief, smuggler, writer, lesbian - articulated a feminism of lived experience. Not like her mentor, Simone de Beauvoir... more »

Cervantes and Shakespeare. One was a man of action, a warrior, and, for a time, a slave. The other preferred writing tales of men at war... more »

Praise pretension! It’s a noble cultural yearning, an assertion of intellectual ambition, a refusal to be defined by a reductive understanding of oneself... more »

Eugenics is now seen as harmful folly. But once it was beloved of progressives, reformers, and intellectual elites. And nowhere was it more central than at Harvard... more »

Adrienne Rich’s feminism changed her life and her poetry. It also placed her at odds with Susan Sontag, who regarded such moralizing as powerful but limiting... more »

Paranoia, brutality, longevity: Stalin's three decades in power have the ingredients of a great novel. So why the dearth of Stalinist fiction?... more »

New Books

"Deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop.” That was Time in 1966 on gays in the arts. What was the Homintern?... more »

How Patti Smith spends her days: On a bizarre, bohemian death cruise, taking blurry Polaroids of writers’ graves and meditating on pebbles... more »

What word processing wrought. Easily, endlessly editable text lets you go on revising forever. It’s a blessing. And a curse... more »

If secularism is a powerful force, why is it so often on the losing side of history? Because religion is no atavistic holdover; it's here to stay... more »

The cult of the unfinished. Incomplete paintings, sculptures, novels, and musical compositions are undeniably seductive - too seductive... more »

Frank Gehry, known for egomaniacal arrogance and an inability to stick to a budget, made his name by turning a shack into a shrine... more »

Stalin's henchmen. Vile murderers and treacherous cowards, they were also a musical bunch. They could have made a competent chamber ensemble... more »

It’s all well and good, intellectually, to praise forgetting. But collective amnesia is something else entirely. Where to draw the line?... more »

The history of virility - Henry VIII’s codpiece, Louis XIV's dancing - was a lively topic. Then a team of French academics went to work... more »

Sexism across the centuries. In classical music, the torch of white, male genius is passed from generation to generation. Time to reconsider female composers... more »

The Aeneid plays an outsize role in the cultural literacy of the West. A reminder of the confusing and disturbing pleasures of epic narrative... more »

Blanche and Alfred Knopf had a simple plan: “We would get married and make books and publish them.” Reality was more complicated - and interesting... more »

How did a Velázquez painting from 1623 emerge in the back of an English bookshop two centuries later? That question drove one man to ruin... more »

A metaphor creates a "little event in the mind of the reader." It can make the familiar strange and the strange familiar... more »

The beauty of Brutalism. Those bold and passionate concrete monstrosities mark a high point of architectural creativity and ingenuity... more »

What's it like to be a bat? A bonobo? A lot of ingenuity has gone into answering that question. Conclusion: Don't underestimate nonhuman minds... more »

Authenticity is overrated. It's pretense and flagrant artifice that create culture. We'd have no art without it... more »

Growing up Mann. Thomas was distant and severe to his six children, who lacked his talent. In Klaus, this produced a fascinating and tragic restlessness ... more »

What word-processing wrought. The shift from typewriter to computer changed the way artists and intellectuals wrote. Derrida, for one, saw that his paragraphs were too long... more »

A puzzle of the French Revolution: Paris was alive with scientific progress, yet many scientists were imprisoned or murdered... more »

If Christopher Hitchens was so good — clever, fearless, well read — why so bad? If he was so right, why so wrong?... more »

What makes a dog a dog? Forty-two teeth, advanced auditory and olfactory senses, tight-knit social structure. But really it's all about food... more »

Aged, skeletal, pancaked in makeup, Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo’s major-domo, was the philosopher-queen of "the will to please"... more »

Twain's autobiography - uncut, unexpurgated, unchronological - clocks in at half a million words. An uproarious and unmitigated delight, right? Well... more »

Often dandyish on the page, Wallace Stevens could be vicious in person. He traded punches with Hemingway. He lost... more »

Hobsbawm, Foucault, Dworkin, Lacan — how far to the left were the thinkers of the New Left? Roger Scruton’s answer may surprise you... more »

Pornography and its discontents. Consider life in a sexual utopia, a “pornutopia” in which anyone is up for anything. Result: Boredom... more »

Charlotte Brontë’s awkwardness. The unrequited love, the early-morning wedding, the incident with the hairpiece -- her social life was in her writing... more »

The “taint” of commerce. When art becomes a stand-in for wealth and political influence, where does that leave those who collect for sake of collecting?... more »

Essays & Opinions

Philosophers once needed books, writing tools, and perhaps a glass of sherry. Now they think with the Internet. Cognition itself is connected to the web... more »

Yes, fitness clubs can be dehumanizing orgies of exhibitionism and self-regard. But intellectual scorn for exercise misunderstands why we work out... more »

Sincerity and irony in art. What can beatniks, punks, and hipsters teach us about commitment, both aesthetic and political?... more »

The value of simplicity and complexity in art is a matter of taste. In science, the search for simple theories is a requirement. But is simpler better?... more »

When black intellectuals interpret black life for white audiences, the question of racial authenticity arises. What is authentic black knowledge?... more »

Nationalism is back, along with a politics of grievance, belligerence, and isolation. It's a moment for Benedict Anderson, who diagnosed nationalism’s insurgent appeal... more »

Chernobyl, the novel. How an airborne toxic event came to represent postmodernism. A story of alienation and technological hubris... more »

Why is a 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish philosopher, a writer of dense and opaque prose, so popular? Spinoza is a heretic for our times... more »

Contemporary poets speak only for themselves, while the poets of yore spoke for everyone. So goes one eternal critique of poetry − wrong, of course... more »

Alec Ross went to Washington and became an important man thinking important thoughts. Adviser to the president, influencer, visionary, example of futurism at its laziest... more »

Time eludes our understanding, defeating both philosophers and physicists in their attempts to pin it down. Does time even exist?... more »

Why do some writers abandon their native language and adopt another? Politics, idealism, and internationalism all play a part. Opportunism, too... more »

Essays convey observations and emotions, experiences unique to the writer. So what is the essayist’s obligation to fact?... more »

Philosophy has been overrun by Kant and by moralistic rules. We need a version that appeals to people — we need a return to Hume... more »

“A thing” has become a thing, as in “Is that actually a thing?” Sure, it's an irksome linguistic trend. But it fills a real need... more »

The critic in the mood to confess. Here a personal anecdote, there a self-deprecating aside, a pose of endearing amateurism. Enough!... more »

"I wonder why Arab prisons are not full of writers," says the poet Adonis. "I wonder why, because it means that Arab writers are not doing their jobs"... more »

Everybody loves diversity. Nobody opposes it, especially on college campuses. But the link between demographic and intellectual diversity is, at best, tenuous... more »

Tennis, the most isolating of games, draws the obsessive and brooding, those in search of agony and transcendence. Literary types, in other words... more »

The tragedy of Dorothy Parker. Intelligent and clever, she won fame early in life. Death and suicide, however, were never far from her thoughts... more »

Oppressively earnest, quick to take offense, an aggressive drunk — Grace Hartigan didn’t make things easy for her friends, who included Frankenthaler, O’Hara, and Ashbery... more »

Baffled by the rise of ISIS? Spasms of barbarism are the norm when modernization outpaces civilization. John Gray explains... more »

What's the Homintern? The vast network of gay creative types who have for the past century been the foremost arbiters of the arts... more »

James Baldwin's first novel was set in Harlem. His second had all white characters. His publishers were having none of it. You're a "Negro writer," they reminded him... more »

Marianne Moore’s poetry of the small produces “the feeling that life is softly exploding around us,” as John Ashbery put it. Is she our greatest modern poet?... more »