Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Why Biology Is Not Destiny

In The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Harden disguises her radically subjective view of biological essentialism as an objective fact.

April 21, 2022 issue

David Cole

When Rights Went Right

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?

April 21, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.

April 21, 2022 issue

Jackson Lears

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.

April 21, 2022 issue

Odd Arne Westad

The Long Shadow of Nuclear War

Putin has issued a stark reminder that the architecture of the atomic arms race was never dismantled. But his cold-war superpower gambit won’t win the war in Ukraine.

March 18, 2022

Ariel Dorfman

The Futility of Censorship

Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas focuses on heroes and heroines who refused to allow their freedom of expression to be extinguished.

April 7, 2022 issue

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

Nick Laird, interviewed by Matt Seaton

The Hidden Crime

“When murderers are rehabilitated without admissions of guilt, and history’s rewritten, a new and awful reality occurs.”

March 19, 2022

Among the Animals

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

Elizabeth Kolbert

He Tried to Be a Badger

The more that’s learned about cognition in other species, the tougher it is to make the case that our intelligence is anything special.

June 23, 2016 issue

Liuty, a male tiger whose name, according to John Vaillant in The Tiger, is ‘an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-blooded, and bold,’ at a Siberian wildlife rehabilitation center run by the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov

Tim Flannery

Tigers, Humans, and Snails

Whether birdsong at dawn or just a weed in a sidewalk, nature is all around us. Yet all too frequently we only appreciate it when it’s out of reach.

February 10, 2011 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

Do jellyfish have minds?

April 24, 2014 issue

The Latest

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

Yuri Slezkine

‘He Loved Handing Out Decorations’

The admiring biographer of Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union’s most memorably inconspicuous leader, finds him an affable heartthrob who longed for peace “with every fibre of his body.”

June 9, 2022 issue

Ginia Bellafante

Mothers Under Pressure

The culture of contemporary child-rearing brings anxiety and guilt without relief. Does Emily Oster’s call for more relaxed parenting offer the solution?

June 9, 2022 issue

Magda Teter

Rehearsal for Genocide

Three recent books conclude that the anti-Jewish pogroms following World War I help to explain what would take place a generation later.

June 9, 2022 issue

Michelle Nijhuis

Must We Grow?

New books argue that life in a slower economy isn’t necessarily painful, and is likely to be healthier and more secure in many ways.

June 9, 2022 issue

Ethan Zuckerman

Could Internet Culture Be Different?

Kevin Driscoll’s study of early Internet communities contains a vision for a less hostile and homogenous future of social networking.

June 9, 2022 issue

David Cole

A Heedless Majority

In voting to overturn Roe, the Trump-appointed justices on the Supreme Court have proven themselves to be truly radical.

May 7, 2022

Ruth Franklin

Beyond the Betrayal

Why are we so eager to assign a single person blame for revealing the hiding place of Anne Frank and her family?

May 26, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

A Fable of Agency

Kristen Green’s The Devil’s Half Acre recounts the story of a fugitive slave jail, and the enslaved woman, Mary Lumpkin, who came to own it.

May 26, 2022 issue

E. Tammy Kim

A Permanent Battle

A new history draws on recently declassified archives to illustrate how the Korean War was an intimate civil conflict, not just a proxy battle between superpowers.

May 26, 2022 issue