History

Empathy & the Economy

The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began.

December 8, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

December 8, 2022 issue

Adam Hochschild

The Cruelties of Empire

Whether they were labeled internal revolts, police actions, or states of emergency, colonial wars were especially brutal.

November 24, 2022 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Becoming Amartya Sen

In his memoir Home in the World the pathbreaking economist and moral philosopher looks back on his much-traveled, multicultural childhood, education, and early academic career.

December 8, 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

Scott W. Stern

An AIDS Activist’s Archive

The obituaries saved by one social worker are, essentially, a list of names and the barest outlines of biography. But in their silences, they contain multitudes.

October 29, 2021

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Naming New York City

The words we use to refer to streets, buildings, and public places make maps of meaning across the city.

March 24, 2021

Mike Jay

The Melancholy of Anatomy

Frederick Ruysch’s exquisitely preserved human and animal body parts were marvels of both art and science in an era when the divide between the two was less clearly drawn than it is now.

December 8, 2022 issue

Great Lives

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

February 27, 2020 issue

The Latest

Vanessa Barbara

Brazil at the Crossroads

Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.

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

Larry Rohter

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

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

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

Linda Greenhouse

Victimhood and Vengeance

The contemporary rise of Christian nationalism in the US is a reactionary response to the country’s liberalization over the past half-century.

February 9, 2023 issue

Fred Kaplan

Putin’s Miscalculation

After two decades of reforming its armed forces, Russia expected a lightning victory in Ukraine, but the ill-starred invasion has revealed their deficiencies.

February 9, 2023 issue