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Ideas

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Neal Ascherson

Hugging the Shores

Colin Thubron’s latest travelogue takes him down the Amur River and through the borderlands between Russia and China.

October 20, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

The Pope’s Many Silences

A new account of Pius XII’s actions during World War II gives the impression of a pope who lacked any clear moral or political vision and made every decision on the basis of the merest expediency.

October 20, 2022 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Symphilosophizing in Jena

The intellectual achievements of the early German Romantics were inseparable from their friendships and feuds.

October 20, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

Silences and Scars

Two new books on Berlin track the city through decades of growth, economic desperation, artistic innovation, Nazi terror, political division, and reunification.

October 20, 2022 issue

Sue Halpern

The Specter of Our Virtual Future

The metaverse opens up a new and seemingly infinite opportunity to extract data and sell ads.

October 20, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

Trouble in River City

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

October 20, 2022 issue

Malise Ruthven

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

Nawal Arjini

Democracy in Concrete

An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress.

June 26, 2022

Policing and Protest

Eugene Police officer Bo Rankin talking with CAHOOTS coordinator Ben Brubaker and emergency crisis worker Matt Eads, Eugene, Oregon, October 2019

Krithika Varagur

In Place of Police

Armed officers are called to address too many situations in which mental health or social workers would be more human and effective.

September 18, 2020

Jay Caspian Kang

Ball Don’t Lie

Robert Scoop Jackson’s ‘The Game Is Not a Game: The Power, Protest, and Politics of American Sports’

September 24, 2020 issue

White nationalist militia members drawn to the Gettysburg National Military Park by a hoax that an Antifa group would be burning of American flags there, Pennsylvania on July 4, 2020

Richard Kreitner and Rick Perlstein

A Brief History of Dangerous Others

The outside agitator trope has always been, at bottom, a way of putting dissidents in their place.

July 27, 2020

The Latest

Christopher Benfey

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

October 20, 2022 issue

Mary Wellesley

Lice and Licentiousness

Hair in the medieval period was a marker of identity, a symbol of power, and a focus of erotic interest, freighted with religious significance.

October 20, 2022 issue

Jerome Groopman

Understanding Diabetes—and Paying for It

Advances in our knowledge of the causes of diabetes, and in our ability to treat the disease, have long been hampered by racial prejudice and exorbitant drug prices.

October 6, 2022 issue

David S. Reynolds

Throngs of Unseen People

In the Houses of Their Despair, Terry Alford’s history of spiritualism during the Civil War era, suggests an unexpected link between the Lincoln family and that of John Wilkes Booth.

October 6, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

Rome Was His Laboratory

By the time of his death in 1729, the astronomer, historian, and archaeologist Francesco Bianchini had been an aide to three popes and confidant to one Polish princess and an exiled king.

October 6, 2022 issue

Tim Flannery

It’s Not Easy Being Green

George Monbiot argues that none of the most rapidly spreading alternative farming methods can help save our food system from impending crisis.

September 22, 2022 issue

Elaine Blair

Questioning Desire

Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex is rare in its ability to speak to a plural audience—queer and straight, multiracial and multigendered—with the assumption that we have some common interests in sex and dating even if we have varied experiences of them.

September 22, 2022 issue

Eric Foner

The Complicity of the Textbooks

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past.

September 22, 2022 issue

Anthony Grafton

How to Cast a Metal Lizard

The knowledge that underpins our world of things has been discovered over centuries, produced as the result of collaboration and generally unrecorded. How does a historian overcome these obstacles?

September 22, 2022 issue