Philosophy & Religion

Thinking Without Banisters

Hannah Arendt’s reflections on judgment, thinking, moral action, and political courage show that she was not a system builder and was not interested in offering axioms by which to rearrange the world. Yet in following her train of thought, we experience the illuminating force of her insights.

February 24, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

New England Ecstasies

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

March 10, 2022 issue

Lis Harris

Strangers in a Strange Land

Two recent books investigate the canny mastery of housing politics that has allowed the Hasidic Satmar sect to build thriving, isolated communities in Brooklyn and upstate New York.

February 24, 2022 issue

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Liberation Psychology

How Frantz Fanon came to view violence as therapy.

February 24, 2022 issue

Hermione Lee

Regarding the Solace of Others

Michael Ignatieff’s moving book explores how consolation has been configured in different eras and suggests what we might learn from individual examples of “the human experience.”

February 10, 2022 issue

Fara Dabhoiwala

Apotheosis Now

What does it mean when men are worshiped, willingly or not, as gods?

January 13, 2022 issue

Garry Wills

‘Don’t Call Me a Saint’

In her lifetime, Dorothy Day rejected canonization for herself. Now revived, this bad idea would only diminish the great founder of the Catholic Worker Movement.

January 26, 2022

Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Andrew S. Curran

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

The Latest

Sue Halpern

Before the Fall

As evangelicals came into the GOP tent, Republican voters and politicians traded women’s bodies for political power.

May 11, 2022

Walker Mimms

At Saul Steinberg’s Table

The artist known for his playful, philosophical drawings also had a rich practice in sculpture, fashioning everyday objects in wood and paint.

April 27, 2022

Christopher Benfey

The Hum of Humanity

The autobiographical turn in Stanley Cavell’s later work illuminates his extraordinarily varied philosophical interests.

May 12, 2022 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

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

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