Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

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

Marina Warner

Nothing More Wondrous

A recent comparative study of medieval Christian and Islamic culture suggests that marvels offer common ground; wonder is a shared delight, a shared motive.

February 23, 2023 issue

T.H. Breen

Commanders and Courtiers

The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.

February 23, 2023 issue

Timothy Garton Ash

Ukraine in Our Future

Ukraine faces extraordinary challenges, but it also presents a challenge for Europe—and a great opportunity.

February 23, 2023 issue

Sam Huber

Risk, Originality, Commitment

For Andrea Dworkin, literature and social change were always entwined.

January 26, 2023

Felicia Kornbluh

The Grassroots of ‘Roe’

My mother’s part in the 1970 repeal of New York’s abortion law is a lesson for today’s activists: all politics is local.

January 16, 2023

Spencer Lee-Lenfield

Mysterious Displays of Will

Nadine Hwang—a queer Chinese lawyer who joined the army, circulated in Paris salons, and survived Ravensbrück—never wrote a memoir, but her life itself became a work of art.

January 4, 2023

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

Gary Shteyngart

Beyond the Pale

After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man.

February 9, 2023 issue

Alec Wilkinson

Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’

A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ian Frazier

Grim Reapers

Mega-agriculture is destroying the Corn Belt and the Central Valley, which the country’s food system depends on. Can midsize farms survive to save it?

February 9, 2023 issue

Christine Smallwood

Misreading the Cues

The “balanced-literacy” method of teaching children to read has predominated in American schools since the 1990s. It has been a failure.

February 9, 2023 issue

Josephine Quinn

Alphabet Politics

What prompted the development of systems of writing?

January 19, 2023 issue

Colin Thubron

Remainders

Two recent books explore the complex pleasure we take in ruins and the rediscovery of long-forgotten objects.

January 19, 2023 issue

Aaron Timms

Flakes

A new book recounts the “psoriasis years” of figures from John Updike to Pablo Escobar.

January 19, 2023 issue

Cristina Florea

Ukraine’s Long Self-Determination

Ukrainians have declared their independence five times—each time, defining their nation anew.

December 7, 2022

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

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