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Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, 1560s

Anthony Grafton

Pico della Mirandola’s Mystical Thinking

A new book cuts through generations of misguided commentary on the most famous speech of the Renaissance.

November 5, 2020 issue

Hari Kunzru

The Wages of Whiteness

Whiteness is a concept that can be made to serve many interests and positions, not all of them compatible.

September 24, 2020 issue

Jessica Riskin

Just Use Your Thinking Pump!

What is the scientific method, and when, where, and how did it become, as the kids say, a thing?

July 2, 2020 issue

Marilynne Robinson

What Kind of Country Do We Want?

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America?

June 11, 2020 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Defender of Differences

On Franz Boas and his critics

May 28, 2020 issue

David Quammen

The Brilliant Plodder

We can’t stop reading and talking about Charles Darwin, 138 years after his death.

April 23, 2020 issue

Great Synagogue of Bolechów, Bolekhiv, in present day Ukraine, 2001

Daniel Mendelsohn

Finding a Path Through the Odyssey

I was suffering from what the Greeks called aporia: a helpless, immobilized confusion, a lack of resources to find one’s way out of a problem.

September 7, 2020

Michelle Nijhuis

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Humans have spent decades trying to teach other animals our languages, but we’ve made little effort to learn theirs.

August 20, 2020 issue

The Latest

Tom Scocca

How the Awful Stuff Won

Andrew Marantz’s and Megan Phelps-Roper’s books explore the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

November 5, 2020 issue

An edition of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death bound in human skin, 1898

Mike Jay

The Hide That Binds

A medical librarian’s history of books covered in human skin.

November 5, 2020 issue

Ruth Ben-Ghiat

The Right’s War on Universities

Authoritarians from Mussolini onward have seen colleges as holdouts of liberal democracy—and attacked them relentlessly.

October 15, 2020

The stones of Callanish, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, 2010

Hugh Raffles

The Stones of Lewis

A line of monoliths once stretched from this “Stonehenge of the North” to the large outcrop of Lewisian gneiss that I used to climb from my sister Franki’s house.

October 9, 2020

The writer Marie de France, who lived in England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, pictured in a collection of poems in old French, from an illuminated manuscript copied in Paris circa 1285–1292

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Gulag historian Yuri Dmitriev following his first trial, in which charges of child pornography were dismissed, Petrozavodsk, Russia, April 5, 2018

Olivier Rolin

Dmitriev: Historian of Stalin’s Gulag

Yuri found his vocation as a researcher—in archives, but also on the ground, in the NKVD killing fields of Karelia. “I wanted to find out about the fate of those people,” Dmitriev told me.

October 7, 2020

A house damaged by Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans, 2005

Eric Klinenberg

A Disaster 100 Years in the Making

Disasters have the power to reveal who we are, what we value, what we’re willing—and unwilling—to protect.

October 22, 2020 issue

Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court shortly after being sworn in, Washington, D.C., August 1993

Pamela Karlan

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933–2020

The late justice not only wrote about the connection between sex equality and liberty; she lived it.

October 22, 2020 issue

Annette Gordon-Reed

Rebellious History

How should historians construct a more complete and truthful version of the past?

October 22, 2020 issue

Roger Stone celebrating outside his Florida home after President Trump commuted the sentence of his ally, Fort Lauderdale, July 12, 2020

Ankush Khardori

Rule by Law

The threat that faces the country is of an increasingly dominant rule by law that could include a more comprehensive deployment of the criminal justice system against perceived opponents of the administration.

September 25, 2020