Marilynne Robinson Agreeing to Our Harm We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters and threatens Biden’s chances this fall. July 18, 2024 issue
Adom Getachew Black Atlantics The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei does the urgent work of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas. June 20, 2024 issue
Ed Vulliamy and Pascal Vannier D-Day’s Forgotten Victims Speak Out Eighty years after D-Day, few know one of its darkest stories: the thousands of French civilians killed by a British and American carpet-bombing campaign of little military purpose. June 20, 2024 issue
Mark Lilla The Tower and the Sewer Catholic postliberal thinkers opposed to modern liberal individualism are less interested in transforming people’s unhappy lives through the power of the gospel than in jockeying for political power as the vanguard of a conservative revolution. June 20, 2024 issue
Linda Greenhouse The Constant Presence of Fear The anthropologist Laurence Ralph has long written about the search for meaning in lives beset by conflict and crisis. In Sito, his new book about the murder of a nineteen-year-old relative, one of the seekers turns out to be Ralph himself. June 20, 2024 issue
Gyan Prakash A ‘Life of Contradictions’ As Indian democracy comes under increasing threat from Hindu nationalists, the Dalit politician B.R. Ambedkar’s fight against caste inequality acquires a new significance. June 20, 2024 issue
Francisco Cantú A Legacy of Plunder In its reexamination of entrenched narratives about the expropriation of Native land, Michael Witgen’s work is changing how Native people are situated in the arc of North American history. June 20, 2024 issue
Marc Levinson What Is a Supermarket? If the FTC blocks the proposed merger of Kroger and Albertsons, will bigger giants of food retailing like Walmart come out as winners? June 14, 2024
Elke Schulze He Ridiculed the Nazis The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life. September 14, 2017
Anka Muhlstein The Genius in Exile “You lose one home after another, I say to myself. Here I am, sitting with my wanderer’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry.” November 6, 2014 issue
J.M. Coetzee The Man with Many Qualities “From the moment the Reichstag burned in 1933, Robert Musil foresaw how badly Germany was about to betray itself.” March 18, 1999 issue
John Willett Art of a Nasty Time Nazi art showed how certain already prevalent German traditions and characteristics could be harnessed to the Nazi cause. What is more, they recalled corresponding features in the art of other countries—the kind of tame classicism, flashy Italianate portraiture, sub-Barbizon rusticity, and lumpy earthiness that could be found also in London, Rome, Paris, and New York. June 26, 1980 issue
Verlyn Klinkenborg What Were Dinosaurs For? It has become impossible to think about extinction in the old ways, to regard the end-Cretaceous demise of some 80 percent of life on earth as a remote, alien fact. December 19, 2019 issue
Tim Flannery Dinosaur Crazy In Terrible Lizard, Deborah Cadbury sets herself the task of explaining how the curious Victorian image of dinosaurs—“Would it not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill?” mused Charles Dickens in Bleak House—came to be. January 17, 2002 issue
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas First Fine Careless Raptor “Mammals and dinosaurs diverged from a common ancestor about 260 million years ago. Dinosaurs subsequently evolved to fill every possible ecological niche, from which they ruled the earth for 160 million years and became the most successful vertebrates in the history of the planet. During all that time we mammals managed to evolve into nothing larger than a cat.” April 4, 1996 issue
Stephen Jay Gould Dinomania When dinosaurs get the Hollywood treatment, will museums follow suit? August 12, 1993 issue
Brenda Wineapple In Search of the Real Hannah Crafts The Bondwoman’s Narrative is thought to be the first novel by a Black woman to describe slavery from the inside, but only recently have scholars discovered her true identity. August 15, 2024 issue
David Cole The Supreme Court’s Power Grab In a series of disturbing decisions this term, the Supreme Court drastically weakened the power of the executive agencies that govern financial markets, agriculture, health care, energy, the airwaves, the environment, the workplace, and so much else. August 15, 2024 issue
Patricia J. Williams ‘This Head, These Limbs’ After encountering a mysterious painting of amputation, I found myself thinking about severed legs, personal freedom, contracts, and the law. June 25, 2024
Meghan O’Gieblyn Leaving the Fold The memoir of a former nun who left her convent after twelve years reveals the contradictions of the monastic life as well as the limits of memoir. June 20, 2024 issue
Tim Flannery No Place Like Home In the naturalist Jonathan Kingdon’s latest book, Origin Africa, the boundaries between humans and animals soften, then simply disappear. June 20, 2024 issue
Clair Wills Making Sense of the Missing “Some people were allowed to belong in families and others weren’t.” May 22, 2024
Susan Neiman Fanon the Universalist Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism. June 6, 2024 issue
Peter Brown The Workings of the Spirit A new history of Christianity traces its transformation over a thousand years from an enormous diversity of beliefs and practices to Catholic uniformity. June 6, 2024 issue
Peter Godfrey-Smith Visible and Invisible Worlds While our brains do not simply mirror our surroundings, animals—nonhuman and human—are exquisitely embedded, suspended, in nature’s energies. June 6, 2024 issue
Tiya Miles How Bondage Built the Church Rachel Swarns’s recent book about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance. May 23, 2024 issue