Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Priyamvada Natarajan

All Things Great and Small

The origins and fates of atoms and galaxies are closely intertwined.

July 1, 2021 issue

Corey Robin

Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence

Despite very different lives, the two writers not only knew and liked each other, but also found common cause in the great concerns that animated their work.

May 12, 2021

Cass R. Sunstein

What Price Is Right?

Both government regulators and private companies regularly assign a monetary value to human lives. A new book argues that the price is too low, and can entrench inequalities.

June 10, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

June 10, 2021 issue

Ariel Dorfman

A Taxonomy of Tyrants

Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen delineates what the last century’s macho dictators have had in common.

May 27, 2021 issue

Anna Della Subin

The Rules of the Confidence Game

The Book of Charlatans provides an unusual glimpse into the street life of medieval Islamic societies rarely captured in more elevated Arabic literary sources.

May 27, 2021 issue

Tim Flannery

Why Did They Vanish?

Recent advancements in archaeology and genetics have granted us previously unimaginable insights into Neanderthal life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Adam Kirsch

The Symbolic Animal

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.

April 8, 2021 issue

The Latest

David A. Bell

A Haunted Patrimony

Through their art collecting wealthy Jews staked a claim to being French, but the nation they loved savagely betrayed them.

July 1, 2021 issue

Robert Macfarlane

The Landscapes Inside Us

Our navigational ability as a species is closely connected to our ability to tell stories about ourselves that unfold both backward and forward in time.

July 1, 2021 issue

Ian Johnson

A Most Adaptable Party

The belief that history brought it to power is one of the few ideological constants in the Chinese Communist Party’s hundred-year saga.

July 1, 2021 issue

Sean Wilentz

Forging an Early Black Politics

The pre-Civil War North was a landscape not of unremitting white supremacy but of persistent struggles over racial justice by both Blacks and whites.

July 1, 2021 issue

Caitlin Zaloom

The Broken Promise of Retirement

If the US does nothing to fix its retirement system, 2.6 million formerly middle-class workers will be plunged into poverty by 2022.

July 1, 2021 issue

Christopher R. Browning

Blue Bloods and Brownshirts

The relationship between German nobles and the Nazis was a misalliance in which attraction prevailed over repulsion.

July 1, 2021 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Imperial Delusions

From the late eighteenth century onward, the British justified their empire with a continually updated ideology of moral purpose and historical necessity.

July 1, 2021 issue

Helen Epstein and Claude Gatebuke

The Roots of Rwanda’s Genocide

Why have so many Western historians, journalists, and human rights investigators failed to grasp why Hutu Rwandans suddenly started killing their Tutsi neighbors in April 1994?

June 10, 2021 issue