Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

A Theology of the Present Moment

Can bringing Scripture and science back into dialogue help answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing?

December 22, 2022 issue

Sean Wilentz

The Emancipators’ Vision

Was abolition intended as a perpetuation of slavery by other means?

December 22, 2022 issue

Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes

On Women: An Exchange

“That article of mine spoke of women in general, and said things we all know: that women are not much worse than men and can also accomplish something worthwhile if they try.”

December 22, 2022 issue

Christopher R. Browning

Adenauer’s Bargain

A new book argues that a delayed reckoning with the Holocaust was necessary for democratization in postwar West Germany.

December 22, 2022 issue

Corey Robin

Empathy & the Economy

The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began.

December 8, 2022 issue

Corey Robin

The Trouble with Money

John Maynard Keynes thought that in forgetting that money is a means and not an end, we abandon the reality of the present for the fiction of the future.

December 22, 2022 issue

Ben Tarnoff

In the Hothouse

If Elon Musk kills Twitter, what will he have killed?

November 11, 2022

Liza Batkin

Controversy

In a case litigating Andy Warhol’s use of a photograph of Prince, the Supreme Court wades into the uncomfortable territory where art criticism and copyright law collide.

October 25, 2022

The Legacy of Occupy Wall Street

An instructor demonstrating how to break free of plastic hand restraints at the Occupy Wall Street occupation of Zuccotti Park, New York, October 9, 2011

Jeff Madrick

A Zuccotti Park Education

The crisis Occupy Wall Street sees is not just economic. It is about fairness and democracy. How could one blame those in their twenties for frustration when they can’t get a job with youth unemployment rates so high while Wall Street doles out enormous bonuses?

October 11, 2011

Text and art by Molly Crabapple

Occupy Memory

A decade ago, a grassroots anticapitalist movement burst on the scene, galvanizing people with its slogan “We are the 99 percent.” It changed me, and many others, but how much did it change the world?

September 16, 2021

David Graeber

Against Economics

The discipline is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

December 5, 2019 issue

Robert Kuttner

The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay

The classical historian Moses Finley said that in the ancient world all revolutionary movements had a single program: “Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.”

May 9, 2013 issue

The Latest

William Dalrymple

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Becoming Amartya Sen

In his memoir Home in the World the pathbreaking economist and moral philosopher looks back on his much-traveled, multicultural childhood, education, and early academic career.

December 8, 2022 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

A Peopled Wilderness

We must find new ways to act toward animals in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity.

December 8, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

December 8, 2022 issue

Mike Jay

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Frederick Ruysch’s exquisitely preserved human and animal body parts were marvels of both art and science in an era when the divide between the two was less clearly drawn than it is now.

December 8, 2022 issue

David Cole

Originalism’s Charade

Two new books make a devastating case against claims that the Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of its purported “original meaning.”

November 24, 2022 issue

Sara Lipton

The Jewish Authenticity Trap

Dara Horn’s fierce, often insightful cri de coeur presents a strangely selective picture of Jewishness, cropping a rich, messy, diverse, and complex history to fit into a tightly focused frame.

November 24, 2022 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

Accounting for the Human Cost

Applying a cost-benefit analysis to people’s problems may seem “bloodless,” but it can be a corrective to interest group lobbying, ideology, and bias.

November 24, 2022 issue

Susan Barba

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

Saidiya Hartman

The Hold of Slavery

In the archive of slavery, I encountered a paradox: the recognition of the slave’s humanity and status as a subject extended and intensified servitude and dispossession.

October 24, 2022