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The Market For Non-Fiction Reporting In Books Is Contracting
Articles of Note
The book review flourished in tandem with the Enlightenment. Both are in decline, leaving a great deal at stake. David Bell explains... more »
New Books
Gin and secrets: We know the Cambridge Five betrayed Britain, but the damage they caused runs deeper than we previously knew... more »
Essays & Opinions
“People in government today obviously don’t care about literature, so the effort to ridicule them in literature can seem pointless or (worse) harmless”... more »
Articles of Note
Robert Musil offers a salve for Western egocentrism: The self is not a single, enduring substance but a collection of sensations... more »
New Books
AI’s grandiose paradoxes. It will bring us heaven on earth or kill us all, we’re told; it is the most important invention in history or a scam... more »
Essays & Opinions
When contrarianism becomes its own orthodoxy: The heterodox movement is replicating the groupthink it set out to cure... more »
Articles of Note
Uncanny and vaguely malevolent, the institutional Gothic style replaces bloodthirsty lords with soulless corporations... more »
New Books
Great diarists open up the entire folio of their lives. Samuel Pepys was a great diarist. He was also a wretched human being... more »
Essays & Opinions
“The humanities are not a system for the production of positive ‘research results.’ They are a practice of self-cultivation, or they are nothing”... more »
Articles of Note
In the 16th century, with telescopes and microscopes emerging, a curious malady emerged: Men believing they were made of glass... more »
New Books
“Hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon.” Marx on a work-free future. His son-in-law had a stranger cause: the right to be lazy... more »
Essays & Opinions
“At its most idyllic, siblinghood can be a fragile utopia, a protomarriage of equals, a playroom, a shelter from the parents or the world”... more »
Articles of Note
The "literacy crisis" is older than the iPhone and AI. Dante faced it, so did Wordsworth. Crisis is writing's natural condition... more »
New Books
Willa Cather’s will prohibited the direct quotation of her letters. The result was a bizarre, confused scholarly morass... more »
Essays & Opinions
By the mid-1930s Frank Lloyd Wright was seen as a relic of a previous era. Then he created a new kind of American sublime... more »
Articles of Note
Jürgen Habermas, “a rationalist when it was unfashionable to be one,” died last month. He was 96... Foreign Policy... Jan-Werner Müller... Matt McManus... Cass Sunstein... Nancy Fraser... Alexander C. Karp...... more »
New Books
Jan Morris correctly predicted that whatever her merits as writer, her obituary would inevitably read "Sex Change Author Dies"... more »
Essays & Opinions
Nobody understands Gertrude Stein. With her, incomprehension was always, at least partly, the point... more »
Articles of Note
Danielle Allen is a rare liberal academic who takes conservatism seriously. But she is far more interesting than the label “moderate” might suggest ... more »
New Books
Just 25 literary agents collectively represent half of all authors short-listed for major American literary prizes this century... more »
Essays & Opinions
Drug addict, confidence man, adulterer: The attacks on Freud’s reputation may matter in an academic context, but not in a literary one... more »
Articles of Note
In a nightmare year for nonfiction, sales dropped by more than 8 percent and only one of the 10 best sellers was a new book. Any hope in sight?... more »
New Books
Pedants are irritating. They're also essential. The know-it-all is civilization's last line of defense... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Always read the magazine you’re submitting to.” “Don’t resubmit the same day.” And other advice from literary magazine editors... more »
Articles of Note
Updike and the Jews: the men grotesque, hairy, hunched; the women dumpy and frizzy... more »
New Books
How to define a color. A seemingly simple task came to require scientific and industrial — as well as aesthetic — expertise... more »
Essays & Opinions
The philosopher and the tsar. Leibniz courted Peter the Great for decades, seeking influence and ducats. The effort resulted in frustration... more »
Articles of Note
Oliver Sacks and the art of annotation. His marginalia spanned 10,000 books, the chronicle of a life well read... more »
New Books
Robert Macfarlane is one of the great nature writers of his generation, making him an unusual critic of the genre... more »
Essays & Opinions
An idolatrous, consumerist faith in AI has distorted our thinking about human life and human meaning... more »
Articles of Note
Robert Trivers reveled in explaining the contradictions of the human condition, and he himself was a mess of them. Steven Pinker explains... more »
New Books
In the ’60s, Richard Hofstadter identified a “paranoid style.” Today’s version of that impulse, a “woke style,” is similarly inescapable — even on the Right... more »
Essays & Opinions
As Francis Bacon put it in 1597: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested”... more »
Articles of Note
Long fact, literary nonfiction, narrative nonfiction: The genre is hard to define, essential, and imperiled. Paul Elie explains... more »
New Books
Constantine Cavafy preferred mystery, candlelight, and shadow. His biographers are still squinting... more »
Essays & Opinions
In response to AI, artists and critics are increasingly retreating to a Romantic conception of art, but there are problems with that defense... more »
Articles of Note
Marc Andreessen says introspection is a Viennese import from the 1920s. Montaigne, Bacon, and Descartes beg to differ ... more »
New Books
T.S. Eliot on the pressure to be an intelligent correspondent: “If I ever had any small gift for letter writing, it has been ruined years ago”... more »
Essays & Opinions
“Thomas De Quincey was famous first for his opium eating, second for his prose style, and in both he pressed to the extremes”... more »
Articles of Note
Those books lying all over your house unfinished? They’re not signs not of readerly fickleness, but of a robust indifference to societal norms... more »
New Books
How the guy who got evolution wrong, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, managed to be right about so much else... more »
Essays & Opinions
The em dash—sleek, suave, far superior to the measly comma—must not be ceded to the large-language models... more »
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