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Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Thomas Powers

Getting Sacagawea Right

New evidence suggests that Sacagawea had a longer life than most historians have believed—fifty-seven years longer.

June 8, 2023 issue

David W. Blight

The Two Constitutions

James Oakes’s deeply researched book argues that two very different readings of the 1787 charter put the United States on a course of all but inevitable conflict.

June 8, 2023 issue

Laura Kolbe

‘Autopsies of Many Kinds’

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s beautifully written book about cell biology grows hazy when it comes to who or what ought to set the priorities of biomedical research.

June 8, 2023 issue

Howard W. French

The Creation of Nigeria

Britain’s consolidation of Nigeria as a single colony has been the source of most of the major political conflicts that have roiled the country since independence.

June 8, 2023 issue

Erin Maglaque

Unwanted Thoughts

Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory.

June 8, 2023 issue

Trevor Jackson

The Price of Crypto

Despite its boosters’ frequent references to democracy and freedom, cryptocurrency reflects a radical marketization of politics in which major players can rewrite the rules as needed.

June 8, 2023 issue

David Quammen

What Is Wildness?

Wildness, a name we give to living nature, is intangible, maybe even ineffable, but it’s not imaginary—it’s biological.

May 16, 2023

Nicholas Guyatt

Blues, Grays & Greenbacks

Two new books argue that the innovations the Lincoln administration used to finance the Civil War transformed the nation from a modest and decentralized economy into the global juggernaut of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

May 25, 2023 issue

University Business

Hannah Appel

Tenant, Debtor, Worker, Student

In their historic strike, academic workers at the University of California took on one of the biggest employers, landlords, and financial actors in the state.

February 8, 2023

Charles Petersen

Serfs of Academe

Pursuing a life in academia has become more like trying to become a professional athlete or a star musician than a doctor, a lawyer, or even a typical service sector worker.

March 12, 2020 issue

Striking graduate students marching in Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Mass., December 3, 2019

Walter Johnson

How Harvard Aims to Muzzle Unions

The procedure by which an employer—in this case, Harvard—predicates employment on a worker’s non-participation in union membership or strike action has a long history. It is called a “yellow dog contract,” because only a scared worker will sign one.

January 27, 2020

"Halting at Noon," a wood engraving showing a slave drive through Virginia in the early nineteenth century, 1864

Alex Carp

Slavery & Universities

From their very beginnings, the American university and American slavery have been intertwined, but only recently are we beginning to understand how deeply.

February 7, 2018

Rana Foroohar

The Dangerous Financing of Colleges

When the financial industry gets too involved in any activity of the economy or society, it’s time to worry.

October 13, 2016 issue

Jacques Barzun

The Wasteland of American Education

The focus at colleges and universities on expansion brought on a state of mind unsuited to teaching and learning. The bustle became a processing and a being processed.

November 5, 1981 issue

The Latest

Jerome Groopman

Saving Lives and Making a Killing

A new book reveals the split personality of the biotech industry: an altruistic enterprise that creates breakthrough treatments for patients in need, and a bare-knuckle business that seeks to generate astronomic profits and stop competitors from developing better treatments.

May 25, 2023 issue

Jed S. Rakoff

The Frontier Justice

William O. Douglas was a strong advocate of conservation and environmentalism, but as a Supreme Court justice his involvement in such issues was often ethically questionable.

May 25, 2023 issue

Jenny Uglow

Shifting Sands

Who was responsible for the wrecking of the Royal Navy warship Gloucester in 1682, and why did it provoke so much political controversy?

May 25, 2023 issue

Adam Hochschild

History Bright and Dark

Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum and the documentary series based on the 1619 Project reflect deep divisions in how we recount our nation’s past.

May 25, 2023 issue

Marina Warner

Temporale

During the pandemic I picked up the Catholic missal of my childhood, and it made me think again about its function: marking the passage of time.

April 14, 2023

Garry Wills

The Court Kills

Why do we slaughter our own children? Because the Supreme Court condones it.

April 4, 2023

Sarah Blackwood

Letter from an English Department on the Brink

At the English department I chair, our major has grown by more than 40 percent in the last two years. We are being driven to the edge of extinction anyway.

April 2, 2023

Michelle Nijhuis

Refill the Swamp!

Two recent books show that the concept of ecological restoration is a fuzzy one: even practitioners rarely agree on what is being restored, or to what end.

April 20, 2023 issue

Robert Kuttner

300 Years of ‘Too Big to Jail’

In Impunity and Capitalism, Trevor Jackson shows how, between about 1690 and 1830, financial crises stopped being crimes and were treated as everyone’s fault and no one’s.

April 20, 2023 issue

E. Tammy Kim

The Safe Harbor

The longshoreman labor leader Harry Bridges may no longer be widely known, but his philosophy of inclusive, democratic unionism imbues much of today’s most ambitious organizing campaigns.

April 20, 2023 issue