Those Who Live in the Dark

A recent production of The Threepenny Opera recovered the work’s emphasis on subversive anarchism and destructive sexuality. 

May 10, 2025

‘Legal Whack-A-Mole’

Since October 7, Israel’s oldest and most prominent human rights group has faced stiffer opposition than ever before. 

May 9, 2025

In Search of Almas Ali

My grandfather was an early activist in the struggle for a free Bangladesh. Why was he killed by the independence movement he helped found?

May 4, 2025

‘Illness and Its Very Concept’

Surveying a century of political struggles over medicine and psychiatry, a recent book foregrounds a West German collective that sought to create a radical, patient-led form of health care.

May 2, 2025

Saboteur in Chief

When you want to discredit government itself, obliviousness and ineptitude are their own rewards.

December 6, 2018 issue

The King and I

Trump cannot function as a dictator, but he thinks and behaves like one. And this contradiction of an authoritarian in a democratic system turns upside down one of the central qualities of dictatorship: the monopoly on predictability.

March 21, 2019 issue

The Second Coming

Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.

December 5, 2024 issue

Forced Amnesia

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

May 29, 2025 issue

Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire

“Virtually every twentieth-century book or sect that promotes healing through the power of mind is in some ways a repackaging of the work of one woman, Mary Baker Eddy, the self-proclaimed ‘Discoverer and Founder’ of Christian Science.”

July 11, 1996 issue

Pioneers of Paranoia

“When Republicans founded ‘Democratic Societies,’ to protect civil liberties, Federalists saw them as the work of Jacobins sent to bring the reign of terror to America. Indeed the whole world was to be brought to its knees by a secret society known as the Bavarian Illuminati, dedicated to atheism and anarchy, an organization that existed only in the minds of fanatical Federalists.”

October 6, 1994 issue

The Fear of the Occult

“There was always a strong undercurrent of fear in the occultists, fear of the forces they might be invoking, anxiety to keep on the safe side in dealing with them.”

November 22, 1979 issue

Greetings from Far Away

“In 1967, Spiritualism began a comeback. It was, of course, part of the big Occult Explosion, but the strongest shove came from three men: the late Bishop James Pike, the later Reverend Arthur Ford, and Allen Spraggett, a Canadian fundamentalist preacher turned occult journalist.”

May 3, 1973 issue

In Praise of Public Libraries

“A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. It is nonjudgmental. It stands in stark opposition to the materialism and individualism that otherwise define our culture. It is defiantly, proudly, communal.”

April 18, 2019 issue

How the FBI Turned Me On to Rare Books

The year was 1952. I had spent six months in France doing the first research for my PhD thesis. Not long after my return, two gentlemen from the US State Department arrived at our apartment to pick up my passport and that of my husband.

July 30, 2013

A Lost World

“The historian Vincent Harding raised an important question: ‘What is the role of the word—the spoken word, the preached word, the whispered-in-the-nighttime word, the written word, the published word—in the fight for black freedom?’”

July 3, 2003 issue

Mad About the Book

“I once owned twenty years’ worth of the bound newsletters of a Fort Worth asphalt company whose sideline was industrial grease; I was mentally preparing myself to own those newsletters forever when the writer Annie Proulx came streaking through Archer City, pausing in her dusty journeying just long enough to be swept up by the drama of asphalt.”

December 20, 2001 issue

The Deep Roots of Vaccine Hesitancy

Understanding the battle over immunization—from the pre-Victorian era onward—between public health and the people may help in treating anti-vax sentiment.

December 14, 2021

Resistance to Immunity

Opposition to vaccines has been around for as long as vaccines themselves. What can be done to convince the public that infectious disease is not a private concern?

May 23, 2019 issue

The Strange Politics of Saving the Children

A small number of simple medical supplies, including vaccines for measles, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio as well as oral rehydration solution could prevent about half of child deaths in the developing world, if only the international community would pay for them.

November 5, 2015 issue

Department of Defense

New ways of killing people have always been adopted with alacrity, but ways of preventing illness have sometimes taken centuries to be implemented.

October 8, 1987 issue

Sketching an Uncertain Future

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today.

November 2, 2019

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

Saul Steinberg’s Universe

Saul Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought.

May 26, 2017

Virtuoso of the Tiny

Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page.

November 17, 2016

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

September 21, 2023 issue

The Orphan Among Revolutions

Christopher Clark’s history of the 1848 revolutions highlights the destinies of individuals and the legacy of the tumults.

October 5, 2023 issue

History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

May 25, 2023 issue

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 2023 issue

The First and Last of Her Kind

The legal academy has tended to be dismissive of Sandra Day O’Connor, arguing that she had no overarching theory of constitutional interpretation. But the Supreme Court is not a law school faculty workshop. She saw herself as a problem-solver.

November 7, 2019 issue

Hail to the Chief

“John Marshall, while hugely instrumental in assuring for the federal judiciary its limited supervisory role over the legislative branch, exhibited a subservience to the executive branch that continues to haunt us.”

November 22, 2018 issue

Law Without History?

How Justice Scalia’s understanding of the Constitution is wrong

October 23, 2014 issue

Bad Man from Olympus

Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that law should be conceived as a means to the attainment of human ends, and that judges should admit that they decide debatable cases on the basis of policy, not of precedent or abstract principle.

July 13, 1995 issue

Translating from Troy to Ithaca

“The Odyssey is haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can.”

May 10, 2025

Happy Accidents

“My work is on a constant mission to capture the magic spark in mundane, everyday moments and objects.”

April 26, 2025

Myths That Matter

“One might invoke the situation in India—the widespread damage that the Modi government has done to religious coexistence and free speech—to underline the danger to these precious rights in our own land.”

April 19, 2025

Continental Drift

“Over the past decade, common understanding of the EU as a peace project has weakened, and its stated purpose—to allow the free movement of people and goods—is no longer the political consensus.”

April 5, 2025