Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

October 3, 2024 issue

Ian Johnson

China’s Iconoclast

Perry Link and Wu Dazhi’s biography of Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident, doubles as a history of Chinese political thought and activism over the past half-century.

October 3, 2024 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Are Sheriffs Above the Law?

County sheriffs are useful to the right. They appear regularly as talking heads on conservative media, especially on the subject of immigration. Many vignettes of sheriffs in action are dramatic and alarming. But how representative are they?

October 3, 2024 issue

Wallace Shawn

The End of a Village

Jonathan Schell’s account of the US military’s destruction of the village of Ben Suc in Vietnam laid bare the problem with many American interventions.

October 3, 2024 issue

Matthew Desmond

A Prophet for the Poor

In order to build a mass movement for economic justice, Reverend William Barber argues, we need to let go of the idea that poverty is an exclusively Black or urban issue.

October 3, 2024 issue

Kathryn Hughes

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

October 3, 2024 issue

Charlie Savage

A Terrible Mistake

Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap recounts the long history of confusions, misconceptions, and miscalculations in the relationship between the US and Iraq, from Saddam Hussein’s rise to power in 1979 to the the American invasion in 2003.

September 19, 2024 issue

Lynn Hunt

In Search of Steady Reform

Fareed Zakaria seeks lessons for the present in various European revolutions, but the “liberal” English and Dutch examples he singles out as exemplary barely qualify as revolutionary at all.

September 19, 2024 issue

Cave Paintings and Cosmic Eggs

William Dalrymple

Garum Masala

Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.

April 20, 2023 issue

William Dalrymple

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

William Dalrymple

Painting the Cosmic Ocean

“Mountain fortresses suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained in the now-defunct Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring one another in a manner comparable to the rival city-states of Renaissance Italy.”

June 6, 2019 issue

William Dalrymple

The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery

One of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta

October 23, 2014 issue

Animals in the Anthropocene

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

November 4, 2021 issue

Chukchi hunting a gray whale in the Bering Sea, Chukotka, Russia, June 2018

Sophie Pinkham

Blood on the Ice

“As humans hunted and mined at an ever-accelerating pace, they did so with little understanding of the cyclical and finite aspects of life on earth, or of the ways their actions would disrupt the larger ecosystem.”

November 7, 2019 issue

Leopard cubs at Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, India, 2014

David Quammen

The Concrete Jungle

Evolution is still happening, sometimes briskly, and in response to the single greatest agent of environmental change on the planet: us.

November 8, 2018 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

They Covered the Sky, and Then…

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t much matter whether overhunting was or was not the sole cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, though, it matters a good deal.

January 9, 2014 issue

The Latest

Verlyn Klinkenborg

What the Ocean Holds

Most of our planet’s biosphere exists in the dark of the deep ocean. Will we protect it? Or will we cash it in without concern for the harm we’re causing?

October 17, 2024 issue

Linda Colley

A Constitution Nowhere and Everywhere

Despite the absence of a single codified document, there is a long tradition of writing about the United Kingdom’s constitutional history.

October 17, 2024 issue

David S. Reynolds

Grant vs. the Klan

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

October 17, 2024 issue

Scott W. Stern

The Women She Left Behind

Eleanor Roosevelt’s tacit support for a program that jailed sex workers suggests the limits of the elite-led reform efforts she championed.

September 18, 2024

Ben Tarnoff

Venture-Backed Trumpism

Why have right-wing ideas found such an eager audience among tech elites during Biden’s presidency?

September 19, 2024 issue

Ian Frazier

Can We Talk!

Can Babel work? An exhilarating new book about preserving the languages of the most linguistically diverse city in history believes it can.

September 19, 2024 issue

Jed S. Rakoff

The Most Conservative Branch

In his new book, Reading the Constitution, Stephen Breyer criticizes recent Supreme Court decisions on issues such as abortion and gun rights as the product of rigid and imperfect reasoning rather than of ideology, and he argues for a more pragmatic jurisprudence.

September 19, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

Worms’ Work

For five thousand years there has been no shortage of uses for silk, from Genghis Khan’s undershirts to nerve repair.

September 19, 2024 issue

Ruth Franklin

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

September 19, 2024 issue