New Books

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 »

The bubonic plague’s origins were in the Tien Shan mountains in modern Kyrgyzstan. It spread not via rats and ships, but with gerbils... more »

Cynicism and despair make one seem sophisticated. David Graeber taught intellectuals a riskier commitment: hope... more »

The Grimm brothers, living under French occupation, despised the Gallic plagues of industry, development, and general effeteness... more »

The political theorist Richard Tuck tells progressives: Instead of condemning opponents, resolve to live with them more humbly... more »

Oxford at war. The town’s inhabitants, “dim and wildly eccentric and totally out of touch with all reality,” were essential to victory in World War II... more »

“Why can’t you be funny again?” Dorothy Parker chafed at her reputation as a reliable wit... more »

Life in a rock band. “Today I feel like a tired old whore. Some days I feel like a god. Most of the time I feel like an ambitious T-shirt salesman”... more »

Need a jolt? Read the songs of Hadewijch of Antwerp, a 13th-century mystic who wrote rapturous, erotic descriptions of receiving the Eucharist... more »

Babitz and Didion. Making sense of the contentious bond between "fastidious, frigorific, bony Joan" and "heedless, hot, voluptuous Eve"... more »

Henri Bergson's present-day obscurity is inversely proportional to his contemporaneous fame. He transformed not just philosophy but also literature and art... more »

“Brevity has never been a quality of mine,” wrote Oliver Sacks. Indeed, excess was a hallmark of his life and his literary style... more »

What has 1,192 pages, weighs four pounds, and endorses the singular “they”? The latest version of The Chicago Manual of Style... more »

“If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing?”... more »

“If the stomach was long considered ‘the most enigmatic of organs’ by doctors, it was always acutely palpable to nonprofessionals”... more »

Where the monsters come from. As a genre, horror emanates from the conflicting perils of community and solitude... more »

Two critics spar over a foundational question: Does the study of culture have a special role to play in public life? ... more »

Richard Dawkins’s less-than-inspiring exhortation: “You are the incarnation of a great, seething, scrambling, time-traveling cooperative of viruses”... more »

In the scramble to figure out how a bookstore can survive, we’ve lost sight of a different question: How should a bookstore be?... more »

Ta-Nehisi Coates has always insisted that he is an artist, not an activist. But now he's adopted a new role: political pamphleteer... more »

For Musa al-Gharbi, “woke” reforms in tech, journalism, and academia create only a hollow veneer of virtuousness... more »

Evolution can be whimsical and capricious, meaning that bad design can get awkwardly cemented. Consider the retina... more »

Writing that extracts universal laws from arresting anecdotes is good for business. But bad for writing. Ask Malcolm Gladwell... more »

James Salter wrote sumptuous descriptions of meals, houses, and ejaculations. But his greatest subject was failure... more »

To Ayn Rand, her own ideas were infallible, and ambiguity was evidence of moral treason. Is it any surprise she appeals to teenage boys?... more »

What makes looking at a great painting so magical? Not the historical intricacies or any controversies over the work. Just being there is the thing... more »

America is awash in myths: the Myth of the Founding, the Myth of the Civil War, etc. Is abandoning such folklore possible?... more »

The 17th-century Duke of Buckingham pursued a reckless and incompetent foreign policy, at the cost of human lives and national humiliation... more »

Ideology has been likened to halitosis. It’s “what the other person has.” Fun line, but does it explain ideology?... more »

The problem with the internet is not that it augments reality, but that it so often denies us the lush joys of physicality... more »

The Village Voice – utopian in origin, dysfunctional in execution – left a remarkable imprint on American culture... more »

A New Yorker staff writer takes a hard look at New York’s rave scene, and develops a cynicism — not of the scene — but of our literary culture... more »

Could it be that the story of money is the story of humanity itself, from 18,000 BC to the present? Not exactly... more »

One hermeneutic to rule them all. With sparring medievalists, Marxists, and right-leaning fans, Tolkienists are a fractious bunch... more »

In the university, philosophy is narrow and familiar. Becca Rothfeld shows that it can be extravagant, imaginative, and ambitious... more »

Culture in the sense we have understood it is eroding. Time to mourn – and to celebrate... more »

Essays & Opinions

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 »

Dickinson and Kafka could hardly seem more dissimilar. But the biographical overlaps are too numerous to dismiss... more »

Zero has been called the “eccentric uncle in the family of numbers.” It's also one of mankind's greatest achievements... more »

In 2017, 14 letters written by Sylvia Plath resurfaced. They claim abuse by Ted Hughes. What do they tell us about Plath?... more »

To write an essay is to erect an architecture of thinking, to build the place where a certain thought is possible... more »

Who was Evelyn Waugh? A clever sophist, a racist, a snob — yes, at times — but also a remorseful Catholic... more »

MAD magazine’s golden era. From the 1950s to ’80s, its goofball nonsense and cackling satire skewered cows both sacred and profane... more »

Out with cosmology and in with astrobiology and “complexity science,” which holds that life is based on physics, but beyond physics... more »

A paradox at the heart of education: Independence of mind can be achieved only by submission to authority. Matthew Crawford explains ... more »

Epigraphs have inspired many metaphors – “apéritifs,” “a spritz of fragrance in a large room” – but there's little consensus on their value... more »

Academic quit-lit is the bemoaning of a rarified class of students at elite colleges. In the hinterlands, grad school is a different proposition... more »

The blockbusterization of literature: At any given time, there is just one major book. Today, it’s Han Kang’s... more »

Wuthering Heights is an anti-romance shot through with sadomasochism. If it depicts love, there’s nothing pleasant about it... more »

“Nothing in excess,” “know thyself” — why do pithy philosophical sayings feel so antiquated and pat?... more »

What constitutes a writer’s space? A desk or office or cafe, sure, but also an inner region of the mind — a sacred aura... more »

The vexing Saad Eddin Ibrahim. The Egyptian sociologist spent his life advocating for democratization, but became an apologist for authoritarianism... more »

Is intellectual humility a virtue? Yes, but only when married to intellectual courage... more »

“Theory was among other things the brief afterlife of a failed insurrection.” It was also, Terry Eagleton writes, “exhilarating”... more »

"If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning"... more »

Weird nonfiction has roots in the work of Welles and Borges. But its natural home is the internet, amid disinformation and pissant humor... more »

Bits, cheeky, clever, gutted: Ben Yagoda explains the British invasion of American English... more »

Why does Marilynne Robinson, master of nuanced, humane fiction, clang out vast, hostile, and unprovable assertions in her nonfiction?... more »

Marx made little of it, and Rousseau spoke about it incessantly. Where did the idea of equality come from?... more »

For Eric Hobsbawm, the 19th century saw material, intellectual and moral progress — and the 20th century saw it regress... more »

There’s a deep truth in Thomas Mann’s line: “To be reminded that one is not alone in the world — always unpleasant”... more »

Two decades of n+1. The “dishwater leftism and barbershop snark” of the early years gave way to something else. But is it better?... more »

You know Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Do you know its bizarre backstory?... more »

On knowing and not knowing. Benign self-ignorance and willful self-delusion. Mark Lilla on self-evasion and self-confrontation ... more »

Technicians of trivia. Historians cannot merely compile sterile facts — they must develop theoretical frameworks... more »

Ideas and definitions that Judith Butler resisted as a young scholar have caught up with the author – and us... more »

The collapse of epistemic authority, the rise of “highly incitable” people, and a propensity for online ranting shape our combustible reality... more »

Studying philosophy has been flattened into a single option: academic. What's left if that goes away?... more »

“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Ray Kurzweil, the most prominent spokesman for AI messianism... more »

Every era recreates Mozart in its own image. In our time, he's a scatological imp who loves four-letter words... more »

Blasphemy seems like an anachronistic offense. But Salman Rushdie’s case is thoroughly modern... more »

Disappointments of literary Brooklyn. For one would-be writer, little magazine subculture was alienating and disgusting... more »