Ideas

Philosophy & Religion

Peter Singer

Circling the Good

In his new book the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel asks whether humans are capable of redefining morality itself.

April 24, 2025 issue

Miri Rubin

Christian Hair

The historical claim that Christianity replaced Judaism as a superior faith resulted in laws and language that persecuted Jews—and laid a foundation for white supremacy, too, a new book argues.

April 10, 2025 issue

James Gleick

The Prophet Business

There have always been oracles, prophets, soothsayers, utopians, seers, or futurologists to make predictions about what will pass, and no matter how often they are wrong or discredited, humanity’s need remains.

February 27, 2025 issue

Sally Rooney

Angles of Approach

Ronnie O’Sullivan is the greatest snooker player in history—what he can do, no one has ever been able to do. And no one can even explain how he does it.

March 27, 2025 issue

Jessica Riskin

Turtles All the Way Up

The idea that living beings have no free will might sound scientific today, but it remains as dogmatic as it has always been.

February 13, 2025 issue

Caroline Fraser

Dispirited Away

The rise and fall of an evangelical church, founded with progressive intentions and undone by dissension and bad faith

January 16, 2025 issue

Erin Maglaque

Vexed by Sex

A new history of how Christianity has met the problem of desire argues for more flexibility in proclamations on gender and sexuality.

April 24, 2025 issue

Hari Kunzru

Doing Their Own Research

An electoral coalition of the conspiracy cultures of both the Christian right and the countercultural left helped bring Donald Trump back to power, and now pseudoscience and paranoia are in the ascendant.

May 29, 2025 issue

It’s All in Your Head

Gavin Francis

The Dream of Forgetfulness

Two recent books build on an insight of Borges—that to live, it is necessary to forget.

March 9, 2023 issue

Alec Wilkinson

Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’

A new biography considers the peculiar life of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, whose discovery that nerve cells are individual completely overthrew the existing theory of the brain.

February 9, 2023 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

Gregory Hays

A Mind in Pain

For Robert Burton, describing melancholy was a way of describing the world. Two recent books on depression suggest that today, virtually all we know about the subject is still open to debate.

October 21, 2021 issue

The Latest

Fintan O’Toole

Can the Church Evolve?

The big question for Pope Leo XIV is whether he will complete Pope Francis’s mission to make the Catholic Church less tyrannical.

June 12, 2025 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Forced Amnesia

The metamorphosis of J. D. Vance from economic realist to champion of Trump’s grievance-fueled politics reveals how little Democrats have done to connect with working-class Americans.

May 29, 2025 issue

Anna Louie Sussman

Waiting by the Phone

Have our intimate lives taken on the worst features of the free market?

February 27, 2025 issue

Robyn Creswell

Bewildered Rhapsodies

The difficult history of translating a miraculous text

February 13, 2025 issue

Gary Saul Morson

With Liberals Like These

Twice in modern Russian history—in 1905 and in 1985—liberal reformers have gained influence only to be succeeded by autocratic regimes.

February 13, 2025 issue

Martha C. Nussbaum

Reports from the Slaughterhouse

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed the inhumane and unhygienic conditions of Chicago’s stockyards, life for animals in America’s factory farms and slaughterhouses is still gruesome.

December 19, 2024 issue

Erin Maglaque

Soundscapes of the Silenced

In late Renaissance Florence one in five women lived behind institutional walls whose rule was sensory mortification. Historians are struggling to recover their inexpressible secrets.

December 5, 2024 issue

Adam Kirsch

In Search of Fullness

In his new book, the philosopher Charles Taylor looks at modern poetry as a unique record of spiritual experience in a secular age.

December 5, 2024 issue

Rozina Ali

God’s Directive

After the September 11 attacks, evangelical American missionaries followed military tanks into Afghanistan and Iraq to convert Muslims as part of a holy war.

November 21, 2024 issue

Jack Hanson

Last Rites

Executions prevent any possibility that the condemned might someday reconcile with the world, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that they are “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” So why do powerful American Catholics still support the practice?

October 20, 2024