New Books

Is there life after death? The psychiatrist Ian Stevenson spent his life collecting evidence. What he found was suggestive — but unprovable... more »

Kinkajous commute. Dusky farmerfish grow crops. Octopuses build cities. Cathedral termites build taller, relatively, than any human skyscraper... more »

Swift, Pope, and Gay gathered at Twickenham in 1726. They shared a villa, and a witty contempt for their age... more »

Dwight Macdonald opposed U.S. entry into World War II, denounced the atom bomb, and never found an ideological home. Was he right?... more »

The Renaissance was a golden age invented by people who believed they were living through a dark one... more »

When Duchamp took New York: Europe spurned him, so he decamped to America, where he was met with exaltation and outrage... more »

Being Auden's typist. The experience left James Schuyler feeling awed, fascinated, and discouraged... more »

Are we really in “the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press”?... more »

A mediocre student, a crushing bore, a compulsive seducer. How an improbable group of spies helped Stalin build an empire... more »

There are plenty of reasonable grounds on which to criticize the Frankfurt School. Why resort to delusional fantasies? ... more »

What makes Great Books great? Their honesty, rigor, seriousness, and sensitivity — all qualities they can lend to their readers... more »

“To see like a dog in a work of art is to have moral perceptions about human beings”... more »

Psilocybin is doing what decades of philosophy couldn't: turning committed materialists into reluctant mystics... more »

To anyone in love with the precious, fleeting things of this world, resistance to disappearance seems only natural and proper. And yet... more »

The dons of Oxbridge have traded the BBC for podcasts. Is this decline or progress?... more »

Harold Bloom read everything, praised lavishly, and struggled mightily with self-doubt ... more »

Sensitivity readers promise authenticity but deliver essentialism. Who really benefits when identity polices the imagination?... more »

Trivial pursuits. How do you know if a game — whether elegant, complex, or embarrassingly simple — truly matters?... more »

He appeared to be a pauper, but John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, was quite successful, owning 1,200 acres across three states... more »

Leslie Fiedler, the wild man of American letters, argued that our literature was less realism than repression... more »

Gramsci, Marcuse, Adorno: How recondite mid-century thinkers became villains in America's culture wars... more »

"Show don't tell." "Kill your darlings." Writers love rules, even when rules can't solve their problems... more »

At Stanford, undergraduates faking perfection are thrown ungodly sums of money. But what’s it all for?... more »

The canine gaze. Dogs in Western art are surrogate viewers and compositional anchors... more »

Translating Kafka. Borges found freedom in his labyrinths. For Primo Levi, it was like recovering from an illness... more »

T.M. Scanlon’s 1982 essay “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” heralded the emergence of a new ethical theory... more »

Living in Berlin during World War II was like dancing on a volcano — full of raucous parties between the bombing raids... more »

It’s been over a decade, and scholars of the new history of capitalism have no more sense of a system now than when they began. What went wrong?... more »

"Cultural Marxism" means whatever you need it to mean. Which is why it never goes away. ... more »

Zoom out and it becomes clear that the defenders of humanistic liberalism have been decisively losing the battle over ideals... more »

James Schuyler, the most neglected poet of the New York school, may now be its most necessary... more »

Ibram X. Kendi’s “Great Replacement” theory encompasses so many disparate examples that it loses its explanatory power... more »

Dissidence is not a political stance, career, or personality type. It occurs when the distance between beliefs and actions becomes intolerable... more »

Kimberlé Crenshaw, coiner of “intersectionality” and “critical race theory,” is genuinely puzzled by the controversy her ideas have aroused... more »

You've seen crows picking at roadkill. Disgusting? Those birds are doing us a favor... more »

Wittgenstein finished the Tractatus certain all philosophical problems were solved. Then spent his life disagreeing.... more »

The music critic Michael Steinberg, finding his profession “an irritant and a depressant,” went to work for orchestras... more »

Your sous vide wand. Your car. Your search results. All enshittified, all on purpose, all at once. Cory Doctorow explains... more »

Seamus Heaney took Dante, not Yeats, as his model — and transformed Northern Ireland's Troubles into purgatory... more »

Essays & Opinions

When the blogosphere gave way to Substack, writers gained audiences but lost one another. Noah Smith explains... more »

England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante. Who is the great poet of America?... more »

What killed the masquerade ball: the rise of evangelical moral values or an increasing affordability, which rendered it less appealing to the aristocracy?... more »

Debate over whether David Foster Wallace was a virtuosic bully or a genius with a heart of gold has eclipsed consideration of his work... more »

Toni Morrison believed that racial blackness and whiteness and redness — potent though they may be — are just that: stories ... more »

Children’s literature used to get reviewed in serious outlets. That’s stopped — and has that turned the genre to “crud”?... more »

The great AI divide. All writing — novels, poems, screenplays, even love letters — will be judged according to which side it falls on... more »

Peter Hujar and Paul Thek shaped Manhattan's art scene. They died before anyone fully understood what they'd made... more »

Daniel Greco is a professor of philosophy at Yale. Why is he training an AI to replace him?... more »

Obstinate pedantry and an endless focus on commercialism — in the world of the film critic A.S. Hamrah, one misrepresentation leads to another... more »

In a classic case of therapeutic culture run amok, professors are refusing to punish their students for cheating with AI... more »

"AIs like talking about sweetness, loudness, quiet, age and beauty. There is a lot of insisting," says Malin Hay, "as well as a lot of promising"... more »

Harold Bloom, flatterer. John Ashbery was “THE POET ABSOLUTE,” yet A.R. Ammons’s work was “larger and better” — and then there was Henri Cole... more »

Imagine a metastasizing heap of incalculable, forgotten junk. That’s what we’re all storing away in “The Cloud”... more »

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. Now there’s data to back it up... more »

The grand tour’s most enduring truth: Even the most miraculous work of art is born not just into history, but also out of it... more »

You’ve heard of effective altruism, but what about “effective accelerationism”? Adherents believe that the solution to our cultural ills lies in technology... more »

"Information commons" sounds democratic. But it suggests that knowledge is something you retrieve, not carry... more »

For Sergiu Klainerman, mathematics and physics aren't neighboring disciplines. They're two fields destined to converge... more »

On BookTok, the reader’s response to a book isn’t evidence in service of a judgment; it is itself the judgment... more »

Em dashes, bad metaphors, and not-X-but-Y sentence constructions. Did a literary prize go to an entirely AI-written short story?... more »

The naturalist John Cade studied things like snakes’ tails and the kookaburra’s cry. Then he started giving lithium to manic-depressives... more »

A.S. Hamrah's film criticism elides the distinction between comic prose-poetry and reflexive contrarianism... more »

On Substack, young “writers” jockey for status, but virtually none are writing about anything other than the world of writers itself... more »

Universities preach AI literacy. On campus, the reality looks more like cognitive surrender... more »

Loud, naïve, ham fisted, needy. The American tourist used to be regarded as the most obnoxious creature in the world... more »

Liberal democracy and liberal education fell together. To save the first, we must resurrect the second... more »

The weirdness of quantum matter. A seemingly simple question — what is the world made of? — might have a surprising answer... more »

The problem with a literary culture of images is that images have an exceptionally short shelf life. People soon grow bored with them... more »

He warned against idleness, then stopped doing anything at all. The compelling contradictions of Samuel Johnson... more »

"In the current climate where poet is activist (or vice versa), the poems also start to look a lot like cant"... more »

Despite his reputation as a conservative ogre, Harvey Mansfield’s latest book is immensely clever, subtle, and thought-provoking... more »

“Of all the defects of American gerontocracy today, one of the worst is our failure to face mortality and embrace old age”... more »

To get through World War II, the novelist Wolfgang Koeppen faked his own death, hid out in a hotel, and accumulated experience... more »

AI anxiety predates AI. The fear that machine writing will replace human writing has a long history... more »

Will human-written fiction become artisanal cheese, a luxury for the wealthy few while others eat Velveeta?... more »

Kierkegaard vs. Copenhagen's tabloid press. "Twenty-five signatures make the most frightful stupidity into an opinion"... more »

Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the depth of our own... more »

A writing experiment reveals AI's likely future: Individual productivity rises; collective intelligence decays... more »

The New York art critic Jerry Saltz recently unearthed 40,000 slides: Here’s what the art world of the 1990s looked like... more »

“Slavery has been such a widespread practice throughout human history that it has rarely needed a particular racial ideology in order to take root”... more »

There is a cost to being unreachable. But the cost of being available is far higher. Jerusalem Demsas's experiment in disconnectedness... more »

What causes X? For lazy social scientists, everything can be attributed to “culture,” a point so vague that it effectively argues nothing at all... more »

Francis Bacon was as much a creature of his own era as he was a technocratic prophet of ours. The two designations are inseparable... more »

Elitist critics condemn literary “slop,” but in 50 years they may be writing redemptive theories of such slop and cutting the ribbon at the Slop Museum... more »

Why AI can’t smell. Current “e-nose” technology is the size of a fridge, costs a half-million dollars, and takes six hours to run a sample... more »

Helen DeWitt turned down a $175,000 prize because of the strings attached. Is she a principled actor or a spoiled, entitled nightmare?... more »

Nietzsche the mystic. There is something odd about a profoundly atheistic thinker holding quasi-religious convictions... more »

If you would save the planet, forget The Planet. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place... more »

Making it in a non-existent profession. The economics of the writing life are grim, mercurial, and infrequently discussed... more »