Ideas

History Economics Science & Technology Law Philosophy & Religion

Nitin K. Ahuja

Looking Behind the Veil

Can the tools of science be used to investigate the mysteries of death?

November 6, 2025 issue

Josephine Quinn

‘Insider and Outsider’

How did Saint Augustine’s African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology?

November 6, 2025 issue

Clare Bucknell

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

November 6, 2025 issue

Peter E. Gordon

Secular Priests

In its efforts to define religion, modern sociology has also sought to define itself.

November 6, 2025 issue

Verlyn Klinkenborg

‘Such Flexible Intensity of Life’

Their striking intelligence makes octopuses tempting subjects for wishful anthropomorphism and uncanny reminders of nature’s mysteries.

October 9, 2025 issue

Jacob Weisberg

Algorithm Nation

Fights about digital filtering tools have turned more and more bitter. That’s because of their extraordinary power to shape both political opinion and mass culture.

October 23, 2025 issue

Cora Currier

Pervasive Impunity

Richard Beck’s Homeland charts how four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.

November 6, 2025 issue

David A. Bell

A Baleful Legacy

Enlightenment writers who proposed ways of improving and even perfecting the human species laid the theoretical foundations of modern racism.

November 6, 2025 issue

John R. Searle (1932–2025)

Remembering John R. Searle

A selection of John R. Searle’s contributions to The New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

John R. Searle

Consciousness & the Philosophers

March 6, 1997 issue

John R. Searle

Consciousness: What We Still Don’t Know

January 13, 2005 issue

John R. Searle

End of the Revolution

February 28, 2002 issue

John R. Searle

What Your Computer Can’t Know

October 9, 2014 issue

John R. Searle

Why Should You Believe It?

September 24, 2009 issue

John R. Searle

The Storm Over the University

December 6, 1990 issue

It’s All in Your Head

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

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

John Gray

The Mind’s Body Problem

The belief that we’re different from other organisms may be an incurable human illusion.

December 2, 2021 issue

Gregory Hays

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 2021 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

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt

A selection of Hannah Arendt's contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her essays here.

Hannah Arendt

Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address

June 26, 1975 issue

Hannah Arendt

Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers

November 18, 1971 issue

Hannah Arendt

A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

February 27, 1969 issue

Hannah Arendt, translated from the German by Albert Hofstadter

Martin Heidegger at Eighty

October 21, 1971 issue

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt: An Interview

October 26, 1978 issue

Hannah Arendt

A Heroine of Revolution

October 6, 1966 issue

Oliver Sacks

A selection of Oliver Sacks’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of his pieces here.

Oliver Sacks

Speak, Memory

February 21, 2013 issue

Oliver Sacks

First Love

October 18, 2001 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Autist Artist

April 25, 1985 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Feeling of Disorder

April 23, 2015 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Mental Life of Plants and Worms

April 24, 2014 issue

Oliver Sacks

The Bull on the Mountain

June 28, 1984 issue

The Latest

Ben Lerner

Cardiography

After open-heart surgery

November 6, 2025 issue

Eric Foner

The Underground Railroad’s Stealth Sailors

The web of Atlantic trading routes and solidarity among maritime workers, many of them Black, meant fugitive slaves’ chances of reaching freedom were better below deck than over land.

October 23, 2025 issue

Elaine Blair

Equality Without Feminism?

The Soviet Union’s ambitious program of gender equality could never be separated from its abuses of power.

October 23, 2025 issue

Gavin Francis

Hope Management

Two recent books on the elusive work of psychiatric care explore the subject from both sides of the couch.

October 23, 2025 issue

Vicente L. Rafael

Massacre Under the Starry Flag

The history of a single photograph reveals how an atrocity in the Philippines was forgotten by its American perpetrators.

October 23, 2025 issue

Geoff Mann

The Price of Tomorrow

The current discount rate means that the government views the long-term future of humanity as not metaphorically but literally worthless.

October 23, 2025 issue

Ariel Dorfman

Pinochet and the Vans of Death

In 38 Londres Street Philippe Sands investigates a Nazi war criminal’s collaboration with the Chilean dictatorship’s system of repression, torture, and murder.

October 23, 2025 issue

Neal Ascherson

A Daring Escape

A painstaking investigation into twelve prisoners who tunneled to freedom from the Nazis in Lithuania reveals how much of their story remains unknowable.

October 9, 2025 issue

Brenda Wineapple

A Helluva Town

A new history of New York City during World War II captures the glory, tawdriness, poverty, narcissism, beauty, and grime of this “aggregation of villages.”

October 9, 2025 issue