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Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Gavin Francis

The Dream of Forgetfulness

Two recent books build on an insight of Borges—that to live, it is necessary to forget.

March 9, 2023 issue

Rachel Nolan

An Amazonian Exodus

The discovery of a Bible led a Peruvian man on a decades-long process of conversion, leading him and his disciples to a settlement in the West Bank, where they became caught up in a demographic contest with Palestinians for the future of Israel.

March 9, 2023 issue

Thomas Rogers

The Long Shadow of German Colonialism

The people of what was once German-occupied Africa are demanding reparations for the colonial violence that shapes the region to this day.

March 9, 2023 issue

Kathryn Hughes

A Complicated Reformer

Adherents to Maria Montessori’s radical methods have extended from progressive parents to Benito Mussolini.

March 9, 2023 issue

David S. Reynolds

The Remarkable Grimkes

A new multigenerational history of the abolitionist Grimke family is a sobering reminder of the complicated nature of race relations in America after the Civil War.

March 9, 2023 issue

Tim Flannery

Monotreme Dreams

Australia’s egg-laying monotremes and pouch-carrying marsupials may seem to be outliers, but they’re as well suited to their environment as any other mammal.

February 23, 2023 issue

Hermione Lee

The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

February 23, 2023 issue

Evan Kindley

Departments on the Defensive

A new book by John Guillory explores the history of literary studies and casts a despairing eye at the future of literary criticism.

March 9, 2023 issue

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

Anna Della Subin

A Body That’s Divine

A recent book catalogs the Old Testament’s physical descriptions of God, who ate, probably drank, got mistaken for an ordinary man, and was likely circumcised.

April 6, 2023 issue

Phillip Lopate

Drowned Worlds

In Nineteen Reservoirs, her study of New York City’s upstate water supply, Lucy Sante explores how a more or less effaced past continues to haunt the march of progress.

April 6, 2023 issue

Eric Foner

A Regional Reign of Terror

Most Americans now grasp that violence was essential to the functioning of slavery, but a new book excavates the lesser known brutality of everyday Black life in the Jim Crow South.

April 6, 2023 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

April 6, 2023 issue

Susan Neiman

Longing for Reconciliation

The philosopher Jacob Taubes was torn between the desire to heal the split between Judaism and Christianity— particularly between Germans and Jews—and his doubts that it was possible.

April 6, 2023 issue

Scott W. Stern

The Lost Promise of Environmental Rights

Fifty years ago, working-class activists tried to make courts and legislatures affirm rights to clean air and water. Today that strategy is on the verge of a comeback.

March 15, 2023

Jenny Uglow

Fascism’s Poster Girl

Edda Mussolini was once considered “the most dangerous woman in Europe,” but did she have real political power?

March 23, 2023 issue

Francisco Cantú

An American Story

Kelly Lytle Hernández’s latest book chronicles the tumultuous period leading up to the Mexican Revolution, casting the border as ground zero for continental change.

March 23, 2023 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Trees in Themselves

The oldest trees prompt us to think about how embedded we are in time and could help us recalibrate our perspective on the geologic past.

March 23, 2023 issue

Magda Teter

Reckoning with a Troubled Past

Two European museum exhibitions made good-faith efforts to bear witness to their towns’ early libels against Jews, while not always avoiding the pitfalls of historically loaded discourse.

March 23, 2023 issue