Contemporary society
- ‘Why You Hate Your Job: A Theory on the Function of Bullshit Jobs’
- University of Chicago principles of freedom of expression
- ‘Jenseits der Disziplin’ (interview with Sigrid Weigel)
- ‘Political Thought in an Age of Conformity’
- ‘Humboldt-Uni ist Namen nicht wert‘
- ‘Iconoclasm of the Vanities: Why We Are Destroying Statues’
- ‘The Most Pressing Issue Diversity Issue in Publishing?’
- ‘The End of Progressive Intellectual Life’
- ‘How American culture ate the world’
- ‘An elaborate new decorum has crept in’
- ‘Bad Economics: How microeconomic reasoning took over the very institutions of American governance’
- ‘Der Populismus der liberalen Eliten: warum das progressives Schwarz-Weiss-Denken in die Irre führt’
- ‘Burdened by Books’
- ‘Treason of the Intellectuals’
- Why culture wars are an élite device’
- ‘Speaking Power to Truth’
- ‘The Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harrass their citizens’
- ‘Making sense of conspiracy theorists as the world gets more bizarre’
- ‘Beware of Books’
- ‘A Tyranny without Tyrants?’ (review of Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit)
- ‘It’s All just Beginning’
- ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’
Intellectual history
- ‘The Cult of Carl Schmitt’
- ‘Philosopher of the Apocalypse’ (on Günther Anders)
- ‘Das Ich, das viel besagt’ (review of philosopher Dieter Henrich’s autobiography)
- ‘The Symbolic Animal’ (on Ernst Cassirer)
- ‘A Happy Contrarian’ (on René Girard)
- ‘Mary, Quite Contrary’ (review of Sylvana Tomaselli’s new study of Mary Wollstonecraft)
Obituaries of scholars and artists I admire
- Hans Belting (art historian, January 2023)
- Dieter Henrich (philosopher, December 2022)
- Jean-Luc Godard (film director, September 2022)
- Javier Marías (novelist, September 2022)
- Jean-Jacques Sempé (artist, August 2022)
- James Lovelock (scientist and writer, July 2022)
- Letizia Battaglia (photographer, April 2022)
- Frederick Burwick (scholar, March 2022)
- Harald Weinrich (scholar, February 2022)
- Jean-Paul Belmondo (actor, September 2021)
- Roberto Calasso (writer and publisher, July 2021)
- William St Clair (scholar and publisher, June 2021)
- Christa Ludwig (mezzo-soprano, April 2021)
- Vartan Gregorian (scholar and former president of the New York Public Library, April 2021)
- Marc Fumaroli (scholar, June 2020)
- Mirella Freni (soprano, February 2020)
- Jessye Norman (soprano, October 2019)
Nicholas Halmi 