Philosophy & Religion

The Symbolic Animal

The philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s most timely insight is that even in a scientific age, people are prone to magical, mystical thinking.

April 8, 2021 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

Magda Teter

When Poverty Became Profane

Two recent books, by Debra Kaplan and Natan Meir, examine poverty and charity in European Jewish communities, looking at how a marginalized minority dealt with the problems of destitution and social welfare during periods of rapid change.

April 29, 2021 issue

Ulrich Baer

Buber on Nietzsche

That cultural Zionism’s great thinker found inspiration in the German philosopher is testament to the heterodox value of his ideas.

March 15, 2021

Erica Armstrong Dunbar

A Praise House of Many Mansions

In a book and documentary series, Henry Louis Gates Jr. offers a wide-ranging tour of Black religion in America.

April 29, 2021 issue

Anne Enright

Spirited Away

What is the spark that makes a shared God not just real, but so present he talks back to you?

March 11, 2021 issue

Eamon Duffy

Why Was There a Reformation?

Though Steven Ozment’s The Age of Reform appeared amid a wave of critical thought about the Reformation, it rejected the new histories in favor of polemic.

February 25, 2021 issue

Jim Holt

The Power of Catastrophic Thinking

Should we value human lives in the distant future as much as present ones?

February 25, 2021 issue

The Latest

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Inventing the Science of Race

In 1741, Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences held an essay contest searching for the origin of “blackness.” The results help us see how Enlightenment thinkers justified chattel slavery.

December 16, 2021 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Digging for Utopia

In The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow search for historical examples of nonhierarchical societies to justify their anarchist vision of human freedom. But must we find our future in the past?

December 16, 2021 issue

Neal Ascherson

Grand Illusion

Armed with only a Ouija board, two British officers attempted an eccentric and devious escape from a Turkish prisoner of war camp.

December 2, 2021 issue

Natalie Angier

Claw & Order

What do we owe nature, and how might we do a better job of coexisting with species that do not exist for our pleasure and sustenance?

November 4, 2021 issue

Peter Brown

The Glories of Aksum

Recent studies of medieval Ethiopia are a timely reminder of a Christianity wider than Europe.

October 7, 2021 issue

Sara Lipton

Seven Centuries of Slander

Two recent books concerning the blood libel offer hope and a warning. The triumph of myth is not inevitable, but the well of gullibility is easily primed.

September 23, 2021 issue

R.H. Lossin

William Morris, Romantic Revolutionary

The utopia envisioned in his novel News from Nowhere harked back to precapitalist society, yet nothing could be more radically forward-looking than its dream of a world without exploitation.

July 31, 2021

Claudia Dreifus

Dismantling the ‘Citadels of Pride’

After long witness of the way sexual harassment creates an “atmosphere of indignity,” the feminist philosopher sees the solution in the law, strong rules, due process—and tenure.

June 30, 2021

Linda Greenhouse

Grievance Conservatives Are Here to Stay

What accounts for the paradox of religious ascendance over an ever more secular American society?

July 1, 2021 issue

Corey Robin

Arendt and Roth: An Uncanny Convergence

Despite very different lives, the two writers not only knew and liked each other, but also found common cause in the great concerns that animated their work.

May 12, 2021