Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

John Gray

The Mind’s Body Problem

The belief that we’re different from other organisms may be an incurable human illusion.

December 2, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

A Garden City in Queens

After nearly a century Sunnyside Gardens remains a model of how to create and sustain affordable urban housing.

November 18, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

November 4, 2021 issue

Christopher Benfey

Exile on Main Street

A new book argues that Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology helped overturn old notions of the virtuous New England village as the prototype of American life.

December 2, 2021 issue

Sue Halpern

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

Annette Gordon-Reed

The Color Line

W.E.B. Du Bois’s exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition offered him a chance to present a “graphical narrative” of the dramatic gains made by Black Americans since the end of slavery.

August 19, 2021 issue

Anne Enright

The Burden of ‘Yes’

Katherine Angel is part of a new generation of female writers who are revisiting ideas of female submission.

August 19, 2021 issue

Edward Chancellor

Waiting to Deflate

Two recent books try to explain the seemingly irrational behavior behind speculative bubbles, from the tulip craze of the 1600s to Bitcoin today.

August 19, 2021 issue

The Latest

Tim Flannery

Flies Like Us

Jonathan Balcombe’s Super Fly explores the immense world of flies.

December 16, 2021 issue

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Inventing the Science of Race

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified chattel slavery.

December 16, 2021 issue

David S. Reynolds

He Was No Moses

While he opposed slavery and southern secession early in his career, as president Andrew Johnson turned out to be an unsightly bigot.

December 16, 2021 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Digging for Utopia

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

December 16, 2021 issue

Willa Glickman

Fruits of Empire

The plant explorers of the USDA succeeded in bringing the world’s fruits to American supermarkets. But at what human, ecological, and gustatory cost?

November 12, 2021

J.H. Elliott

Mastering the Glyphs

New histories of the conquest of Mexico look to Nahuatl-language sources for a fresh perspective on Aztec society.

December 2, 2021 issue

Sarah A. Seo

Reimagining the Public Defender

For the poor, who are disproportionately people of color, the criminal justice system in the United States is essentially a plea-and-probation system.

December 2, 2021 issue

David Motadel

Nazis on the Run

Many perpetrators of the Holocaust escaped justice. Should Germany prosecute as accessories to murder the elderly few who remain alive?

December 2, 2021 issue

Neal Ascherson

Grand Illusion

Armed with only a Ouija board, two British officers attempted an eccentric and devious escape from a Turkish prisoner of war camp.

December 2, 2021 issue

Leah Aronowsky

The Limits of Climate Change Litigation

For two decades, climate scientists have been developing tools to pin the blame for hurricanes, floods, and heatwaves on fossil fuel companies. But judges say climate change is too big for court.

November 3, 2021