Articles of Note
The overworked phrase “rewiring your brain” suggests mechanical precision. The process is slow, messy, and incomplete... more »
New Books
Peter Matthiessen went to Paris to spy and write the Great American Novel. But he was, in his words, “always in the club drinking martinis”... more »
Essays & Opinions
In publications like the New Masses and The Anvil, the proletarian literary movement had a message for Ezra Pound: “See you in hell”... more »
Articles of Note
George Scialabba is no fan of political theory: “Imagination, sympathy, solidarity — by whatever name: this is the true engine of political progress”... more »
New Books
Walking “a fine line between principled opposition and crankdom,” the film critic A.S. Hamrah rails against Rotten Tomatoes, texting at the movies, and digital projection... more »
Essays & Opinions
It should be as good to remember a past joy as to anticipate a future one, reasoned Derek Parfit. Nonsense, argues Samuel Scheffler... more »
Articles of Note
Typists, editors, arbiters of art. Literary amanuenses like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot shaped modern literature... more »
New Books
How did Western psychiatric taxonomieshandle such non-Western disorders as “pibloktoq” (a wintertime psychosis) and “kufungisisa” (thinking too much)?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and John Ruskin were exemplars of socialist aesthetics, advancing the view that more leisure would result in better art... more »
Articles of Note
Somnambulism, hypnagogia, reverie — the borderlands of sleep are patrolled by poets, novelists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts... more »
New Books
Larry Levis died in 1996, at the age of 49. His posthumously published poetry forms a towering body of work... more »
Essays & Opinions
How did a stereopticon lecturer and his white-supremacist son end up in novels by Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald?... more »
Articles of Note
Before 1970, humans were rational. After 1970, irrational. What changed? The nature of psychology experiments... more »
New Books
When Michelangelo met Titian. The evidence of how they influenced each other is scant, and we so enter the realm of the educated guess... more »
Essays & Opinions
“If you were to construct a baseball lineup of the western world’s foundational thinkers, Plato would almost certainly bat cleanup”... more »
Articles of Note
Lionel Shriver in exile. The novelist has managed to alienate the literati. She's fine with that... more »
New Books
Malcolm Cowley’s Stalinism reveals him to have been a fool and a knave. What does it say about his literary acumen? ... more »
Essays & Opinions
Great Books programs have an unsavory reputation on the political left. That’s a mistake... more »
Articles of Note
The vapid radicalism of American studies. Scholars are quick to denote “racist, patriarchal, imperial” forces, but where does that take the field?... more »
New Books
The novelist George Sand dressed like a man, took a male name, and went through lovers like a rake. The life and the work cannot be disentangled... more »
Essays & Opinions
That books are disappearing, along with our capacity for complex and rational thought, has become a ubiquitous belief. Doesn't mean it's true... more »
Articles of Note
“LLMs are cliché machines, trained on a resilient human weakness for generating maximum content with minimum effort”... more »
New Books
With its mania for taxonomy and penchant for tidy solutions, psychiatry is ripe for reinvention. A new book takes a swing — and misses... more »
Essays & Opinions
"You don’t need a penis to read Infinite Jest, but you might need a dictionary." David Foster Wallace's divisive novel turns 30... more »
Articles of Note
How the New Yorker story — short, plainly written, plotless, with slightly enigmatic endings — became a genre... more »
New Books
Why do so many authors and critics remain attached to “literary fiction” in our commercialized landscape of books?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Raritan was a small magazine full of muscular writing. Why did it fail to cultivate a younger audience?... more »
Articles of Note
David Rieff, Doritos, and the intellectual deformations of social media. “I don’t exactly think better of myself for all the time I spend on Twitter”... more »
New Books
Leonardo Sciascia, Sicilian public intellectual, never got over seeing a mafioso tell an indebted shopkeeper that his daughter “seems almost alive”... more »
Essays & Opinions
Is there a way to engage in biographical criticism without becoming a moralizing bore? Consider the case of Philip Roth... more »
Articles of Note
The perilous allure of machine-generated writinghas a surprisingly long history... more »
New Books
Championing “Attensity!”, the attention liberation movement is here promoting a digital detox. Does it offer anything new?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Children’s literature, full of animal protagonists, is not about how animals act or think. It is about people dressed up as animals... more »
Articles of Note
Not too long ago, boredom was an understudied phenomenon. What's been learned? It doesn't foster creativity... more »
New Books
Margaret Atwood on Margaret Atwood. "This is a very long book that is very ample on seemingly insignificant matters and oddly reticent on a few big ones"... more »
Essays & Opinions
Harold Bloom, James Wood, Jack Edwards. At just 27, Edwards, a YouTube and TikTok star, has become the most important literary critic in the world... more »
Articles of Note
How to write a novel for the age of the algorithm? Look to the literature of the past. Look to Thomas Bernhard... more »
New Books
Russia’s forests "have been an obstacle and a sanctuary. They have also been both an object of reverence and fodder for exploitation"... more »
Essays & Opinions
The unheralded Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent a letter to Einstein in 1924. It would alter the direction of quantum mechanics... more »
Articles of Note
AI-produced books have begun to flood Amazon, whether coloring books or derivative novels. What they’re missing, of course, is an artistic ego... more »
New Books
Margaret C. Anderson, editor of The Little Review, was forced to choose between her magazine and her house. She moved into a tent... more »
Essays & Opinions
The war between writers and editors can be long, brutish, and nasty. "Every semicolon was a matter of life or death”... more »
Articles of Note
Punctuation and its discontents. "To monitor one’s tone is human, but why are we this scared of sounding brusque in routine emails?"... more »
New Books
The epistolary Updike was open, amiable, self-assured, wonderfully lucid, and brilliantly organized. He was also emotionally impenetrable... more »
Essays & Opinions
With subfields dominated by lefty-activists and new centers for conservatives, what is the state of academic viewpoint diversity?... more »
Articles of Note
The University of Austin is a sincere effort to rescue higher education from its illiberalism. Or is it a right-wing project?... more »
New Books
Sleep is subjective and lonely. What if it turns out we’re not alone in the bad dreams that plague us?... more »
Essays & Opinions
What was the first type of knowledge to exist on planet Earth? Colin McGinn on pain as a way of knowing... more »
Articles of Note
George Saunders was living a “nicely out-of-control life” when he had a dream about a zero-gravity theme park, and his writing career took off... more »
New Books
"Some gentlemen are dandies, but most dandies are not gentlemen." What unites the superior air, exaggerated sense of style, and sartorial splendor?... more »
Essays & Opinions
We generally visualize time as a line stretching into the future. That’s a surprisingly modern notion... more »
Articles of Note
Adam Tooze is a renowned economic historian. But is he really “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual?”... more »
New Books
How Bennett Cerf — "part Gatsby, part glad-handing salesman and part starstruck fanboy" — built a publishing powerhouse, then sold it away... more »
Essays & Opinions
Writers and their day jobs: William S. Burroughs was an exterminator, Joseph Heller a blacksmith. James Joyce worked in a movie theater... more »
Articles of Note
Sigmund Freud’s plants. He gave Virginia Woolf a narcissus and brought a zimmerlinde on his escape from Vienna. Why?... more »
New Books
Picasso’s women. "Two wives, four cohabitations: What of it? Genius has license to trample"... more »
Essays & Opinions
John — sparsely toothed with mismatched old clothes — could most often be found at UCLA, burnishing his reputation as the last intellectual... more »
Articles of Note
One night in 1973, three Jackson Pollock paintings were stolen. The case continues to reverberate in surprising ways... more »
New Books
The idea of revolution has transformed political thought across two millennia. Can we even agree on what it means?... more »
Essays & Opinions
Famous for telling writers to embrace their “shitty first drafts,” Bird by Bird is one of the most popular writing guides of all time. Is it any good?... more »
Articles of Note
Representing the “Freak Power” party, Hunter S. Thompson ran for sheriff promising to rip up streets and put any dishonest drug dealers in the stocks... more »
New Books
Freud died almost 90 years ago. His reputation has gone up and down. Is the jury really still out as to whether psychoanalysis works?... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society”... more »
