New Books

The extinction obsession. We’ve always indulged fantasies about the end of the world. What’s changed is the mechanism of our destruction... more »

What’s the point of psychoanalysis? According to Freud, it's to turn “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness”... more »

“Alongside the rococo fizz of their wedding playlist hits, Abba were masters of kitchen-sink realism”... more »

How was early Christianity unified? As Augustine put it, “Better a few Donatists burn in their own flames … than their vast majority perish in the flames of hell”... more »

Many scholars write histories of the working class without grasping the actual experience of work. David Montgomery was an exception... more »

A new account of the Vietnam War gets it all wrong: “In this search-for-villains approach to history, it is always the Americans who matter most”... more »

How Tariq Ali, a street-fighting, mustachioed Marxist, became a Trotskyist Zelig, never indulging a second thought... more »

For Thomas Hardy, the death of his first wife prompted him to reclaim in poetry the love he neglected in life... more »

Millennials' divorce books are less concerned with social tragedy or triumph. Tthe possibilities they explore instead are thrilling... more »

By the time Handel presented Messiah, he was being ridiculed as a fat, stale has-been. Only one of those things was true... more »

Saints for supper. In the Middle Ages, consuming holy icons was thought to cure a range of intestinal ailments... more »

"Every era reinvents the biography form to suit its purposes," writes Laura Kipnis. "Call it the post-truth biography"... more »

“Sound directs our passage through time. It shapes our orientation to the future moment and also to the moment when the future stops.”... more »

Piet Mondrian failed as a prophet. Today he's regarded as something more significant: an influencer... more »

Dicey, piece of cake, scrounge, and bonkers are all NOOB's — "not one-off Britishisms." Why have such words conquered America?... more »

The novels of the 20th century achieved exquisite style and form, but did they constitute a collective cultural experience?... more »

Close reading isn’t the only method of literary interpretation. But it’s the most fashionable, and most contested... more »

In all, the Nazis stole artworks that filled 26,984 freight cars from Paris. Rose Valland heroically tracked them all... more »

“The story of the 20th-century novel is also the story of an art form brilliantly innovating toward its own marginalization”... more »

Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind, her least read book, is a feat not of knowledge, accuracy, or even clarity, but one of meaning... more »

“A good cook is half a physician.” In the 16th century, medicine began in the kitchen — an ethos that is still with us... more »

Rules to avoid a box-office flop: Pick your title carefully, never give a director free rein, avoid water and cats... more »

What makes a successful pop-science book? A simple story offering a quasi-theological insight that purports to explain everything... more »

Jackson Lears is among the most original historians of our time. He chronicles cranks and conjurers... more »

Perry Anderson, pillar of Britain's Marxist left, tackles a thorny question: What really caused World War I?... more »

Many atrocities have been committed in the name of communism. But communism is not an atrocity. It is a tragedy... more »

Nostalgia, greed, and streaming have taken hold of the music industry. Do we even want new music anymore?... more »

The power of ignorance. “How is it that we are creatures who want to know and not to know?” Mark Lilla explains... more »

Walter Benjamin in Capri. An extended holiday helped shape one of the most influential diagnoses of modernity... more »

Nostalgia began not as an emotion but as a disease. Now it afflicts us all, with great political consequence... more »

Richard Dawkins has long been the doyen of grandiloquent science writing. His new book feels like the end of an era... more »

America’s “Bone Wars”: The first triceratops fossil on record was discovered by a cowboy when he lassoed it by the horns... more »

In the absurd guise of Dr. Pangloss, Voltaire took devastating aim at his real foil: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz... more »

Milton, dismembered. In 1790 his coffin was pillaged. Several thousand people bought what they believed to be one of his teeth... more »

The love affairs of Thomas Hardy followed a pattern: He would give his beloved a ring and then break off the engagement when he met someone else... more »

No matter how brilliant or original their work, environmental historians face a challenge: Are they just doomsayers?... more »

“Gluttony is the forechamber of lust.” In premodern Europe, how to eat was a way to answer questions about how to be... more »

“Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Joan Didion infuriated Eve Babitz... more »

Plunder and provenance. The origins of many museum collections are scandalous, criminal, and impossible to reduce to any one story... more »

Essays & Opinions

The poetry of stones. In times of stress, Oliver Sacks turned to the physical world, “where there is no life, but also no death”... more »

The preposterous productivity of Barry Malzberg. Could you write a publishable 60,000 word novel in 27 hours?... more »

Are operas more relatable if we regard them not primarily as works of art but as work by artists?... more »

Daniel Defoe’s travelogue on Britain is unsurpassed, despite its fabrications, carelessness, and overuse of superlatives... more »

God doesn’t like Marxists — or so concludes Jordan Peterson in a 500-page book ostensibly about the Old Testament... more »

“The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty”... more »

“I used to think of the swelling piles of books in every room as literary stalagmites, but now that they’ve merged, they’re more like a great coral reef of literature”... more »

Does real moral progress begin when we give up on moralism? We’re just not built that way... more »

The case for Trollope. He should be read because he is not of our time. His charitable attitude is anachronistic – and necessary... more »

DH Lawrence vs. Orwell. “Dreaming up laws of the cosmos from under your scrotum is one thing; cheating on your wife is another”... more »

When a letter is not just a letter. It’s a confession, a moral credo, a play, a plot, an existential quarrel. Cynthia Ozick explains... more »

For Fredric Jameson, theory, in its turning away from common sense, offered a trip through the looking glass... more »

In 1919, Charles Hoy Fort, the “enfant terrible of science,” wrote Book of the Damned: “For every five people who read this book four will go insane”... more »

A weekend at the ventriloquist convention holds flirtation, aggression, corny jokes, and above all, faith in the art form... more »

Literary criticism has become almost entirely cultural criticism. Was this shift an inevitable product of the academy?... more »

“Authors are not authorities, especially about themselves, and we do a certain violence to both the author and their work when we ask them to pretend to be so”... more »

Where did Annie Ernaux first confront the themes central to her writing — class conflict, shame, ambition, imagination, the politics of knowledge? At the library... more »

The death of Peter Schjeldahl was the end not just of a person but of a whole approach to writing about art... more »

We know about Big Data, but it’s weather forecasts, shipping confirmations, and phone notifications — Little Data — that are killing us... more »

Dante’s revenge. His Hell, in The Divine Comedy, is populated almost exclusively with 13-century Florentines... more »

When progress was glamorous. In the early 20th century, imagining a marvelous future was a cultural norm... more »

AI and democracy. Had early technologists paid attention to John Dewey, we’d be in a much better place. Evgeny Morozov explains... more »

Literature professors gave up too easily on the language of the true, the beautiful, and the good, ceding it to traditionalists and provocateurs... more »

“In search of solid ground, any number of artists have opted to return to first principles: technique, color, and, above all else, visual pleasure”... more »

Thirty years ago, Sven Birkerts derided digital reading. He was dismissed as a curmudgeonly Luddite, but he was right... more »

An array of contradictory modern movements claims the mantle of decolonization, seeking moral authority from the now-distant 20th century ... more »

“Appreciationgiving” doesn’t have the same ring to it but might be a more philosophically accurate approach to the holiday... more »

Whether cancel culture is a moral panic or a genuine scourge, are the words and deeds of American colleges students really so consequential?... more »

In place of the the monastic cell of the Middle Ages, Renaissance-era scholars had the studiolo — a place to converse with the dead... more »

The Duolingo delusion: It’s fun — but absurd — to think that five minutes of language-learning a day will make us fluent... more »

Barre, Pilates, the Alexander technique: Is our quest for straighter spines a moral panic or a legitimate concern over back pain?... more »

The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas, yes, but also a fairy-tale of illness and health, waking life and dream, love and pedagogy... more »

Art is about selection and omission. Melville goes on and on about whales; another writer would sum it up with “etcetera”... more »

“When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized?”... more »

Democracy dies in darkness? Journalists’ aspiration to save democracy is counterproductive, argues Yascha Mounk... more »

Modern museums are designed to focus attention. But now our attention is fractured, and our art is changing... more »

The hard problem of dark comedy. “When I laugh with Céline, is my open mouth a gate to the Holocaust?” Michael Clune explains... more »

We live in the age of the internet novel, with its dispassionate, deadening style and lack of formal innovation... more »

To calm the identity wars, don’t underestimate the power of thinking in the third person. Kwame Anthony Appiah explains... more »

Margaret Fuller had “a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory”... more »

At the age of 10, Henri Bergson was left alone in Paris — amid violence, destruction, and the fall of the Second French Empire... more »

A family of fascists. The Mitfords were downwardly mobile aristocrats living in great ignorance and fear... more »

How did the world’s most famous swear word earn its status? Early evidence points to the role of a man named Roger Fuckebythenavele... more »

The Emily Oster riddle: Would you rather take pregnancy advice from a pediatric epidemiologist or an economist?... more »

In 1939, W.H. Auden left England. He rarely returned, but his self-conception as a poet remained bound up in his Englishness... more »

The real fertility question: Why has the ratio of childlessness to childfulness changed so little?... more »

Unlike data sets, the human mind isn’t trained. It experiences and learns and invents and thinks. No computer can do that... more »

In early modern England, numbers were tactile: Three barleycorns made an inch; four saltfish made a warp; tallies were made on wood... more »

“What afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity”... more »

Charles Taylor synthesizes moral reflection and intellectual history. His writing is difficult to follow, but worth trying... more »