Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Why Biology Is Not Destiny

In The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Harden disguises her radically subjective view of biological essentialism as an objective fact.

April 21, 2022 issue

David Cole

When Rights Went Right

Is the American conception of constitutional rights too absolute?

April 21, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.

April 21, 2022 issue

Jackson Lears

The Forgotten Crime of War Itself

In his new book, Samuel Moyn argues that efforts to humanize war with smarter weaponry or sanctify it with moral cant have obscured the task of making peace the first goal of foreign policy.

April 21, 2022 issue

Odd Arne Westad

The Long Shadow of Nuclear War

Putin has issued a stark reminder that the architecture of the atomic arms race was never dismantled. But his cold-war superpower gambit won’t win the war in Ukraine.

March 18, 2022

Ariel Dorfman

The Futility of Censorship

Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas focuses on heroes and heroines who refused to allow their freedom of expression to be extinguished.

April 7, 2022 issue

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

Nick Laird, interviewed by Matt Seaton

The Hidden Crime

“When murderers are rehabilitated without admissions of guilt, and history’s rewritten, a new and awful reality occurs.”

March 19, 2022

Among the Animals

Michelle Nijhuis

Buzz Buzz Buzz

Humans have spent decades trying to teach other animals our languages, but we’ve made little effort to learn theirs.

August 20, 2020 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

He Tried to Be a Badger

The more that’s learned about cognition in other species, the tougher it is to make the case that our intelligence is anything special.

June 23, 2016 issue

Liuty, a male tiger whose name, according to John Vaillant in The Tiger, is ‘an efficient word combining vicious, ferocious, cold-blooded, and bold,’ at a Siberian wildlife rehabilitation center run by the tiger catcher Vladimir Kruglov

Tim Flannery

Tigers, Humans, and Snails

Whether birdsong at dawn or just a weed in a sidewalk, nature is all around us. Yet all too frequently we only appreciate it when it’s out of reach.

February 10, 2011 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

Do jellyfish have minds?

April 24, 2014 issue

The Latest

Christine Henneberg

The Good Mother

Jazmina Barrera and Angela Garbes consider the emotional and political fallout of pregnancy and motherhood.

August 18, 2022 issue

Vivian Gornick

‘What We Want Is to Start a Revolution’

Formed in Greenwich Village in 1912 for “women who did things—and did them openly,” the Heterodoxy Club laid the groundwork for a century of American feminism.

August 18, 2022 issue

Gregory Hays

The Last Reversal

Two books consider the stories we’ve told ourselves over thousands of years about the way the world ends.

August 18, 2022 issue

Hari Kunzru

Socialists on the Knife-Edge

From early utopian communities to the leftist resurgence today, the history of American socialism is deeper than its meager successes.

August 18, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

Out of His Element

In a new selection of John James Audubon’s oceangoing writings, we sense his obsessive quest to draw every bird he saw, even though he disliked being on the water.

August 18, 2022 issue

Zephyr Teachout

The Boss Will See You Now

We are experiencing a major turning point in the surveillance of workers, driven by wearable tech, artificial intelligence, and Covid.

August 18, 2022 issue

David A. Bell

Paris Transformed

Although Esther da Costa Meyer deplores the human costs of urban renewal in Paris during the Second Empire, she cannot disguise her appreciation for what was accomplished.

August 18, 2022 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The Forest’s-Eye View

Two new books investigate the ways in which deforestation affects climate change, and climate change affects forests.

July 21, 2022 issue

James Romm

Kings of the Universe

Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs.

July 21, 2022 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

July 21, 2022 issue