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Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Jacqueline Rose

The Analyst

Stuart Hall was passionately committed to understanding how social formations affected the deepest parts of the mind.

September 21, 2023 issue

James Oakes

Ships Going Out

In American Slavers, Sean M. Kelley surveys the relatively unknown history of Americans who traded in slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

September 21, 2023 issue

Ben Tarnoff

Better, Faster, Stronger

Two recent books illuminate the dark foundations of Silicon Valley.

September 21, 2023 issue

Erin Maglaque

An Overabundance of Virtue

The scholar James Hankins has argued that the revival of ancient virtues was a central concern of Renaissance humanists. But can those virtues also be revived in modern America?

September 21, 2023 issue

Elizabeth Kolbert

Spored to Death

Fungi have caused some of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks ever documented. Will they come for us?

September 21, 2023 issue

Fintan O’Toole

The Trouble with Ancestry

Two recent family histories authored by Americans connected to Europe’s terrible twentieth century by their fascist grandfathers seek to occupy the void between history and memory.

September 21, 2023 issue

Sam Fentress

Paradise on 13th Street

Hidden within the storied Greenwich Village hangout Spain were remnants of the neighborhood’s bohemian past.

August 22, 2023

Eric Foner

Seeing Was Not Believing

A new book identifies the 1968 Democratic convention as the moment when broad public regard for the news media gave way to widespread distrust, and American divisiveness took off.

September 21, 2023 issue

On AI

Jessica Riskin

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

June 25, 2023

Tim Parks

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

Sue Halpern

The Human Costs of AI

Artificial intelligence does not come to us as a deus ex machina but, rather, through a number of dehumanizing extractive practices, of which most of us are unaware.

October 21, 2021 issue

Bernard Williams

How Smart Are Computers?

“Artificial Intelligence has gone through a sober process of realizing that human beings are cleverer than it supposed. It has turned to a more cautious and diversified strategy of accumulating ‘know-how’ rather than mounting frontal assaults.”

November 15, 1973 issue

On Watching the Skies

Frederick C. Crews

The Mindsnatchers

Misleading optical effects, half-waking dreams, sleep paralysis, tricks of memory, paranoid delusions, temporal lobe lesions, intoxication, fraud, and faddism are abundantly familiar to us, whereas the UFO thesis flouts the known laws of nature at every turn.

June 25, 1998 issue

Gunther S. Stent

A Close Encounter

So we arrive at Francis Crick’s directed panspermia hypothesis: a few billion years ago, a technically advanced extraterrestrial civilization sent a rocket carrying a diversity of bacteria to Earth. The rocket discharged its cargo into the primeval soup, where the tiny creatures were fruitful and multiplied.

December 3, 1981 issue

Martin Gardner

The Third Coming

“For those who cannot believe in the Second Coming, or the Messianic hopes of orthodox Judaism, there are the UFOs! If the earth is being visited by extraterrestrials, surely the aliens must be friendly or by now we would have learned otherwise.”

January 26, 1978 issue

James R. Newman

Sharing the Universe

With the advent of radioastronomy, the scope of investigations of outer space has been enormously widened as the strange music of incredibly remote spheres keeps pouring into steerable dishes and saucers of all kinds and sizes.

February 1, 1963 issue

The Latest

E. Tammy Kim

Storyboards and Solidarity

The current Hollywood strikes have a precedent in Disney’s golden age, when the company was a hothouse of innovation and punishing expectation.

October 5, 2023 issue

Bill McKibben

Toward a Land of Buses and Bikes

There is more housing for each car in the United States than there is for each person.

October 5, 2023 issue

Lynn Hunt

The Orphan Among Revolutions

Christopher Clark’s history of the 1848 revolutions highlights the destinies of individuals and the legacy of the tumults.

October 5, 2023 issue

Daniel J. Kevles

Unreasonable Terms

In Owning the Sun, Alexander Zaitchik shows how American drug companies have exploited government contracts to pursue profit over public interest.

October 5, 2023 issue

Linda Greenhouse

Why Aren’t Cops Held to Account?

Decades of Supreme Court decisions have converted qualified immunity from a commonsense rule into a powerful doctrine that deprives people injured by police misconduct of recourse.

September 21, 2023 issue

James Gleick

Nothing to See Here

For centuries the study of optics and the use of invisibility in science fiction have developed side by side, each inspiring the other.

August 17, 2023 issue

Michelle Nijhuis

The Nature Trade

By extending the history of the continent to the distant time when humans were, at best, bit players in its marvelous ecosystems, Dan Flores’s Wild New World reminds us that modern North Americans still walk in the footsteps of our fellow animals.

August 17, 2023 issue

Gary Younge

Arriving Without Belonging

Colin Grant’s new memoir explores the unfulfilled promises made to his migrant parents, and the limits of understanding between generations.

August 17, 2023 issue

Adom Getachew

Africa, the Center of History

In Born in Blackness, Howard French works to counteract the “symphony of erasure” that has obscured and denied Africa’s contributions to the contemporary world.

August 17, 2023 issue

David Cole

The Supreme Court Picks Its Battles

June ended with far-reaching upsets for civil rights, but a closer look at the Supreme Court’s decisions across the 2022–2023 term suggests the justices are not immune to public scrutiny.

July 4, 2023