Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

The Bull’s-Eye on Your Thoughts

Today digital privacy exists only at the discretion of the companies that mediate our online engagement. But what happens when those companies, an employer, school administrators, or the government have access to our neural data?

November 2, 2023 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

Where the Orcas Swim

The death that humans inflict on whales today has little to do with demand for meat or blubber. We may think of whaling as a bygone practice, but it is ongoing, pervasive, and implicates us all.

November 2, 2023 issue

Susan Faludi

‘Hag of Misery’

The midwife and abortionist Madame Restell is central to the story of how American women’s reproductive freedom was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century.

November 2, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

‘Such Womanly Touches’

Is there such a thing as a female style?

November 2, 2023 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Defying Tribalism

In her new polemic, the philosopher Susan Neiman charges her fellow leftists with intellectual betrayal and calls for a return to universal ideals of justice and humanity.

November 2, 2023 issue

Kaya Genç

Ruffians, Gamblers, Thieves, Outcasts

Over more than two decades, the amateur historian Reşad Ekrem Koçu led an ever-expanding project to document Istanbul’s vanishing past.

October 4, 2023

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

September 29, 2023

Tim Judah

Black Swan Times

Three months into Ukraine’s counteroffensive, even the best predictions about the war’s outcome could still be thrown off course.

September 13, 2023

Law & Justice

David Cole

Surprising Consensus at the Supreme Court

With narrow rulings in many of its most controversial cases, the Court defied predictions of a sharp turn to the right.

August 19, 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

Ankush Khardori

Merrick Garland’s Moderation to Excess

As attorney general, he is the United States’ top law enforcement officer. But is he enforcing enough?

July 15, 2021

Jed S. Rakoff

Sentenced by Algorithm

Computer programs used to predict recidivism and determine prison terms have a high error rate, a secret design, and a demonstrable racial bias.

June 10, 2021 issue

Conservation and Extinction

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

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

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

Elaine Blair

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

December 21, 2023 issue

Linda Greenhouse

An Unhealthy Definition of Rights

For the new majority on the Supreme Court, religious liberty takes precedence over the government’s power to protect public health.

December 21, 2023 issue

Neal Ascherson

Becoming European

Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands traces the development of his passionate identification with Europe and the continent’s unsteady experiments with unity

December 21, 2023 issue

Rebecca Giggs

The Lost World

Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.

December 21, 2023 issue

Robert Darnton

The Dream of a Universal Library

Digitization promised to democratize learning, and despite countervailing forces the trend is toward more open access. But is an ‘Alexandria in the cloud’ really an open sesame?

December 21, 2023 issue

John Banville

Back to the State of Nature

John Gray argues in The New Leviathans that only Thomas Hobbes can explain how a liberal civilization based on tolerance came to an end, and what we have lost in abandoning it.

December 21, 2023 issue

Nitin K. Ahuja

Gut Instincts

Recent books about the importance of the microbiome have driven many patients to fixate on the idea of “gut health.” Are they right to do so?

December 7, 2023 issue

Adam Hochschild

Mildred Rutherford’s War

The “historian general” of the United Daughters of the Confederacy began the battle over the depiction of the Old South and slavery in US history textbooks that continues today.

December 7, 2023 issue

Magda Teter

Found in Translation

A painstaking work of linguistic and textual archaeology unravels a forgotten story of pre-Ashkenazi Jews’ presence in medieval eastern Europe and their intellectual contributions.

December 7, 2023 issue