Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

Mandala of Vajrabhairava, Ngor Monastery, Tibet, 1650–1750

David Shulman

Buddhist Baedekers

March 26, 2020 issue

Peter E. Gordon

Max the Fatalist

June 11, 2020 issue

An icon of Christ from the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity and St. Spyridon, Trieste, Italy, nineteenth century

Diarmaid MacCulloch

The Vitality of Orthodoxy

July 2, 2020 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

The Key to All Mythologies

February 13, 2020 issue

Elizabeth Bruenig

Jesus, Mary, and Mary

‘Virgin Whore’ by Emma Maggie Solberg and ‘The Magdalene in the Reformation’ by Margaret Arnold

November 21, 2019 issue

Cass R. Sunstein

The Siren of Selfishness

April 9, 2020 issue

Marilynne Robinson

What Are We Doing Here?

Why teach the humanities? Why study them?

November 9, 2017 issue

Malise Ruthven

The Islamic Road to the Modern World

Christopher de Bellaigue’s ‘The Islamic Enlightenment’ and Wael Abu-‘Uksa’s ‘Freedom in the Arab World’

June 22, 2017 issue

The Latest

Pamela Druckerman

The Consolations of Philosophy

My philosopher-therapist thought the ancient Greeks could lead me to the happy state of eudaimonia—literally, having good demons. But would mine play along?

December 31, 2020

James Romm

What Happened at Masada?

We know the Roman conquest of Masada only through the account of the enigmatic Jewish historian Josephus, whose shifting allegiances make his motives hard to discern.

January 14, 2021 issue

Sara Lipton

Life, Death, and the Levys

A new book traces the twentieth-century scattering of a Sephardic family through five continents.

December 3, 2020 issue

Pankaj Mishra

Grand Illusions of the West

It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism.

November 19, 2020 issue

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi

The Revival of Church Sanctuary

How a long-abandoned practice became a way for undocumented immigrants to seek protection.

November 19, 2020 issue

Tom Scocca

How the Awful Stuff Won

Andrew Marantz’s and Megan Phelps-Roper’s books explore the dark and far-reaching consequences of our dependence on the Internet.

November 5, 2020 issue

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, 1560s

Anthony Grafton

Pico della Mirandola’s Mystical Thinking

A new book cuts through generations of misguided commentary on the most famous speech of the Renaissance.

November 5, 2020 issue

The writer Marie de France, who lived in England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, pictured in a collection of poems in old French, from an illuminated manuscript copied in Paris circa 1285–1292

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

President Donald Trump and President of Liberty University Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty University's commencement ceremony in Lynchburg, Virginia, May 13, 2017

Elizabeth Spiers

The Fall of Jerry Falwell Jr.

Fortunately for Jerry Falwell Jr., evangelicalism has built-in insurance for reputational damage, should a wealthy white man make the mistake of public licentiousness widely shared on the Web.

August 20, 2020

The mesa at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, 1991

David Treuer

Magic Mountains

It’s hard not to feel that we are all caught up, like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, in forces outside our control, despite the fact that real change seems to be one of the results of our unrest.

July 6, 2020