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
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
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
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
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
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
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