Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Despair, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Jerome Groopman

Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It

Advances in our knowledge of the causes of diabetes, and in our ability to treat the disease, have long been hampered by racial prejudice and exorbitant drug prices.

October 6, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

October 6, 2022 issue

Linda Greenhouse

A Powerful, Forgotten Dissent

Stephen Breyer’s dissent in the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved case has proved prophetic about the decision’s consequences for racial integration in public schools.

October 6, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

Nawal Arjini

Democracy in Concrete

An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress.

June 26, 2022

Liza Batkin

Ruling by Fear

The Supreme Court’s conservative justices paint a dark portrait of society, danger lurking in every shadow, to justify overturning a New York gun control law.

June 25, 2022

Paisley Currah

What Sex Does

For transgender people in the United States, the sheer number of institutions with discrete authority to define sex ensnares us in Kafkaesque contradictions.

May 27, 2022

Essays by Tony Judt

Tony Judt

Captive Minds

Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History.

September 30, 2010 issue

Arnold Nursing Home, 7 Mile Road; photograph by Andrew Moore from Detroit Disassembled, just published by Damiani and the Akron Art Museum. For a slide show of Moore’s photographs, see the NYR blog, blogs.nybooks.com.

Tony Judt

Ill Fares the Land

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

April 29, 2010 issue

Tony Judt

The New Old Nationalism

Everywhere there has been a growing absorption in what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” None of this began recently, born again as it were in 1989. Nationalism, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, is not “resurgent”—it never died.

May 26, 1994 issue

More by Tony Judt

The Latest

Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

Tim Flannery

It’s Not Easy Being Green

George Monbiot argues that none of the most rapidly spreading alternative farming methods can help save our food system from impending crisis.

September 22, 2022 issue

Elaine Blair

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

September 22, 2022 issue

Eric Foner

The Complicity of the Textbooks

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

September 22, 2022 issue

Anthony Grafton

How to Cast a Metal Lizard

The knowledge that underpins our world of things has been discovered over centuries, produced as the result of collaboration and generally unrecorded. How does a historian overcome these obstacles?

September 22, 2022 issue

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

‘Hell, Yes, We Are Subversive’

For all her influence as an activist, intellectual, and writer, Angela Davis has not always been taken as seriously as her peers. Why not?

September 22, 2022 issue

David Motadel

My Husband the War Criminal

Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife portrays Reinhard Heydrich as a cold, apolitical technocrat while downplaying his ideological commitment to Nazism.

September 22, 2022 issue

Christine Henneberg

The Good Mother

Jazmina Barrera and Angela Garbes consider the emotional and political fallout of pregnancy and motherhood.

August 18, 2022 issue

Vivian Gornick

‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’

Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

August 18, 2022 issue